How to Monetize Your Content Rich Website

Do you have a content rich, themed website that attracts a decent amount of traffic on a monthly basis? If so, congratulations because you have already overcome the greatest obstacle in generating a steady flow of income – getting traffic to your website. The next step should be achieved more easily and involves incorporating Google AdSense into your website.

Google AdSense was launched in 2003 as an advertising program to liaise between potential online advertisers and vast number of website owners. AdSense offers online advertisers the opportunity to create text or image ads that are displayed on their search engine results pages and on websites enlisted into the AdSense program. Advertisers pay Google an agreed amount of money each time their ad is clicked. Google pays a percentage of this to the website owner where ads have appeared and keeps the remaining portion of the income. Commissions are only paid when an ad is clicked so the number of times the ad is viewed is irrelevant.

Google Advertiser Options

Google AdSense offers a variety of advertising options to cater for a wide variety of websites:

1. Google AdSense for Content - a variety of text and / or image ads of a variety of sizes and shaped.
2. Google AdSense for Search – implements a Google search bar on your website that produces a results page containing pay-per-click ads.
3. Google AdSense for Feeds – ads that appear in your feeds.
4. Google AdSense for Domains – ads for a parked domain.
5. Google AdSense AdSense for Mobile Content – ads for mobile websites.

Google issues payments once an account has exceeded $100 in value. However, to successfully receive payment you must ensure to comply with all Google Webmaster and Google AdSense Terms and Conditions. Be advised that you will not get the better of Google by clicking your own ads or promoting others to do so – while you may get away with this for some time, a more thorough check will be implemented once you have exceeded the $100 withdrawal limit and you will be found out. Read Google Advertiser Guidelines for a complete understanding of the terms and conditions.

Formatting your Google AdSense Ads

Your choice of format and colour for your AdSense advertisement will have a significant impact on the potential earnings. Choose a ad size that will pace the ads prominently on your website without dominating the other content. Similarly blending your ads into the theme and layout of your website is an extremely worthwhile exercise. This is achieved by setting the ad title, text and URL attributes to the same values as other content on your website so as to ensure the site is visually appealing and the content is not dominated by the Google ads.

However you should not try to blend your ads with the intention of misleading the user or try to hide the fact that the ads are in fact ads and a part of the Google AdSense network.

Getting Started

In general it takes as little as 15 minutes before an or search box is implemented from scratch through Google AdSense. To get started all you need is:

• A Google AdSense account.
• A website with a constant volume of traffic.

Google AdSense is an extremely user friendly and flexible tool so I would recommend experimenting with different ads. Once you stay with the Google guidelines you will come up with a strategy that best suits your websites needs.

5 Other Website  Options

1. Affiliate Marketing – sell someone else’s product for a sales based commission.
2. eBay Partners Network – provide links on your website to eBay products that you receive a commission on when bought.
3. Direct Advertising – Define areas on your website where you display ads from non Google sources.
4. Donations - If your website is purely informational your users may be prepared to donate for helpful information.
5. Amazon Partner -  provide links on your website to Amazon products that you receive a commission on when bought.

Quick Indexing, High PR Backlinks And Traffic

There’s actually a quick and easy way to get your new blog / websites indexed into search engines with high PR backlinks which will generate you an abundance of free web traffic.
I’m not talking about “social bookmarking” or “Tag and Ping” (although they are also effective). This method is simple and if you’re not already doing it, you should be.

Writing articles is a free method of generating hundreds of backlinks to your site which will get your new site indexed into all search engines super-fast. All you need to do is write a good quality article and then put a link to your site in the author’s resource box.

After you submit your articles to article directories, publishers will begin picking up your article and start publishing them on their site (with your link). Their visitors will see your link and go to your site. You’ll get a ton of free traffic and make some money in the process (adsense and affiliate products?).

I’ve been writing and submitting articles for new sites and the results have been great. My sites get indexed quickly and I get some good traffic which allows to dominate low competition niches 

Here are my tips for article writing:

1. Write quality content related to your site
2. Make sure your article has a good headline and include keyword in headline
3. Include 2 links to your site in the author’s resource box
4. The first link should be linked with anchor text that you are trying to rank for in search engines. For example, You have a flower arranging site, so you’re first anchor link text should be “flower arranging” because this is what people will type into search engines to find your site.
5. Your second link should be your website address. The reason for this is because anchor text variation is good for SEO as it makes your links look more natural.

Your author’s resource box could look something like:

“To learn more about Adsense (link this text), visit site: http://www.adsenseguide-4all.blogspot.com/

The only disadvantage of submitting articles is that after you’ve written them, you have to go to article directories and submit them all individually. Some people would rather avoid this monotonous task (me too).

The way I submit articles is by using an article distribution service. Article Marketer is an article distribution service that will distribute your articles automatically to over 42,087 people in 528 article announcement directories and forums. All I do is write and submit my article once!

Understanding How Search Engines Work

All the major search engine operate in a similar manner so to master search engine optimisation it is good to understand how the search engines work and how they determine the order of websites in SERPs.  Search engines have a short list of critical operations that allows them to provide relevant web results when searchers use their system to find information;

1. Crawling the Web
   Search engines run automated programs, called “spiders” that use the link structure of the web to crawl the web pages and documents that make up the World Wide Web.
2. Indexing Documents
   Once a page has been crawled, it’s contents can be “indexed” – this means they are stored in a huge database where they can be analysed in a minute fraction of a second.
3. Processing Queries
   When a user enter a search term into a search engine (performed hundreds of millions of times each day), the search engine retrieves all documents from its index that match the search term.
4. Ranking Results
   Once the search engine has determined which results are a match for the search term, the engine’s algorithm (a complex mathematical equation commonly used for sorting) runs calculations on each of the results to determine which is most relevant to the given query. They sort these on the results pages in order from most relevant to least so that users can make a choice about which to select.

Although a search engine’s operations are not particularly lengthy, systems like Google, Yahoo, Bing and MSN are among the most complex, processing-intensive computers in the world, managing millions of calculations each second and funneling demands for information to an enormous group of users.