Why Making Money Online with Advertising is not My Focus

So many people have questions about how to monetize their website! I talk with a lot of business owners, real estate professionals and others who really want to ramp up their social networking and blogging efforts and really start to get results. This is very smart, and I applaud your interest in this hugely powerful technology. Internet marketing is the place to be if you run a small business, because it allows you to be very targeted, to connect with your buyers in a very personal way, and it’s more cost effective than any other form of marketing out there! That said, most people seem to have a very limited view of how to make money using these tools.

How Much Does Advertising Pay?

This is the main reason I want to focus on selling things as opposed to advertising…advertising just doesn’t pay very well! So many people want to make money online with advertising, and the thing I think these people don’t understand is that the average ad will pay out something in the neighborhood of $3 cpm. That’s $3 per thousand visitors. So to put that in a real world example, if you have a pretty successful site that’s getting 30k visitors a month, you will get $300 from an ad. It’s very possible to make a lot less than this, but it’s not very likely you’ll make much more.

$300 is nothing to scoff at. If you run 10 ads on your site, you’re looking at something like $3k a month.

This is why I’m not against advertising, it’s just the reason I don’t focus on it. If you have a site that is getting tens of thousands of visitors a month or more, and you want to get some ads up and running, use these:

• Google Adsense
• Text Link Ads
• Kontera

With these three well-known and proven solutions, you’ll be able to get ad revenue coming in from your site. Google Adsense can be put up anytime, but the other two will require that you have adequate traffic to your site before you can get approved to use their  ad network.

If you want to make money online with ads, I recommend visiting John Chow and downloading his ebook. It’s free, and it has some good tutorials on how to set these things up in detail.

Again, setting up ads is fairly simple. It’s a no-brainer. If you have some good traffic, you can put up some ads and get a few thousand a month. Not bad. And since I get questions about it often enough, I wanted to have this post up to direct you to the right resources.

Why I Focus on Other Ways to Make Money Online

I honestly think there are way better ways to make money online than with advertising. Like I said, I’m not against it, and I’m not saying I’ll never put ads up on Next Level Blogger, but if I do they will be minimal and non-intrusive. It’s not the point, and it’s not the focus of Next Level Blogger.

You can sell a product or a service and do so much better. It takes more work, but it’s a vastly better return on your time, and it has the added benefit of creating a better, more targeted experience for your readers.

To use a very basic example, let’s say you put out an ebook in your area of expertise. Let’s say it’s a 100 pages long, and you decide to sell it for $47. You can put up a landing page and sell the ebook through that page. I’ve written before about how some of my sites get far above average conversion rates, but even if you get an average 2% coversion, that means you’ll sell 20 out of a 1000 visitors. Are you following me? That’s $940 of revenue, vesus $3 that you would have made with Adsense. See why I focus on selling as opposed to advertising? The difference is massive. Yes, it takes more work. Yes, you need to take extra measures to make sure you’re traffic is targeted. Yes, you’ll need to set up a way to take orders and process credit card payments. Yes, you’ll have to field questions and the occasional person demanding a return, etc. Money ain’t free! But I’ll take $940 over $3 any day. How about you?