Money, Money, Moneeeey! When do we begin to monetize?
The question I’ve been asking myself for quite sometime is “when does one make an attempt to monetize his business?” Of course there are a lot of factors which will come into play, particularly the type of business model you are employing. Currently I still remain in the category of a web entrepreneur and my business model to be employed would be advertising. Advertising profitability of course relies heavily on traffic and conversion of that traffic to click on ads (in most cases).
So I’ve decided to make an attempt at monetizing at least one of my websites. I am currently waiting patiently for approval of my website by Google into the Adsense program. I should know by this weekend if I am eligible and I will let you guys know as soon as that happens.
What made me think it was time to monetize? Well besides feeling a little eager I had set a few personal milestones that I wished to accomplish before even considering any type of monetization.
Steady Traffic
I wanted to wait until I had a steady stream of traffic coming in before I attempted to place any ads on my sites. Some experts feel that bombarding your visitors with ads when your site is relatively new discourages persons from giving your service a chance. I see the point but at the same time any surfer should be accustomed to seeing ads on a site so much so we have the term banner blindness where persons hardly acknowledge the presence of banner ads as if they were not even there.
My personal milestone was to reach 1000 visitors in a month, a meagre 33 visitors daily on average. For the month of March this new blog received a total 1041 visitors thanks to my traffic attempts. My other site is a little below but the SEO is kicking in and I’m seeing some very promising results from search engine traffic which I expect to get better as I add content and market more.
Projections
I really mean two things from this, content projection and traffic projection. I use the tool Adsense Preview for firefox to get an idea of the types of ads that would show on my sites given the amount of topic that is presently available. When I first started out the tool could only give me ads that are related to the domain name, since there was very little content on the site itself. For example this blog would have been showing ads about eyes and eye specialists and nothing about entrepreneurs or business or marketing, i.e nothing relevant to the users. This is why it’s very important to have domain name that has keywords in it as well, but that’s another post.
I now see very relevant ads using the adsense preview tool, so I know now my content has reached a point where it can generate something useful.
When I say traffic projections I not only mean how much my traffic will grow but also the potential for the money earned to grow with it. This is something I just did on my own, no specific tools. For example, John Chow’s income report for the month of March was approximately $31,000 from roughly 152, 000 visitors. Being the ultimate optimist I am, if I take the traffic I have now and consider myself lucky to have as good a conversion rate, my 1041visitors for March had a possibility of bringing in roughly $214 for me from this blog. I’m not a greedy guy; I think this is a fairly good starting point. But that’s just me and my optimism.
I’ll make sure to keep you updated as to how everything goes from here on in. I’ll see if I get accepted to the Adsense program and how the ads are performing on the sites I run them on.
That’s all there is today, hope you enjoyed the post, Thanks for reading!
