When should I monetise my website?

I'm going to start by saying there's really two categories of website here .

So if your website is an e-commerce website , so you're selling goods that you're going to post to people online , or you are a lead generation website , so you're a service provider and you're , like , say , an accountant , you're trying to attract people to come and become a client of yours Then obviously , sites like that , where you're directly trying to sell from

yourself to a third party on your website , then you should be monetizing from the get-go , because that's what your website's designed to do , that's what it's meant to do and that's expected . The second category of website a website's where you are just trying to build an audience and you're not trying to sell to them directly .

You're trying to help them with questions they've got , but you're not directly trying to sell them a product . The kind of website I'm thinking of here are ones like travel bloggers , recipe bloggers , any kind of blogger really , where you're just talking about a topic that you're interested in or a topic that you think there is a market for .

An example would be our original website , broadbandcouk . You know we don't on that site we never actually sold anything directly to consumers , we would just try to help people answer their broadband questions .

So that kind of site where what you're trying to do is build an audience and then you're going to try and monetize them through advertising or affiliate marketing or something like that . I'll cover more on display advertising , affiliate marketing and that kind of thing in future episodes .

But if you're really just going to be in the business of producing content and trying to get eyeballs on that content , then in my opinion I would say that you're best off to start with not trying to monetize at all .

Just concentrate on building great content , on building the traffic to your website until you get to a certain point , because in the early days there's no point really putting display advertising on because you're not going to get enough traffic really to make any meaningful income and all you're going to do is degrade the user experience on your page and , like with

the recent Google helpful content update that's definitely had an impact on sites that have over-optimized their display ads and so you don't want to make your job harder and build credibility in the eyes of Google by plastering display adverts all over it . So I always say stay off those till you reach a certain amount of traffic .

With myself I wouldn't consider it till a site's really getting maybe 20,000 visitors a month . That's the point when I might consider put it on Might be different in your niche . Different niches are higher RPMs . Rpm is the amount of revenue per milli , which means how much you will be paid per thousand views of a ad .

So if it's a low revenue on , then it's not worth it , if it's just pence or a few dollars per milli . But some niches pay much more . So if it's a much higher paying niche , then it might be worth it earlier , but for me it's about 20,000 is the point . I will start to think about it .

The great thing about display advertising , when you do do it , or if you do do it , is that it's very much . You set it up on your site and then you just forget about it . The ads are just looked after by the ad networks .

So most of them , for example , like AdSense , you can literally just put a bit of JavaScript on your site and then they will just auto place the ads and look after it all for you . So it's dead , dead simple and very low maintenance . The other popular option for monetizing websites of this kind is affiliate marketing .

If you're not familiar with affiliate marketing , so that's essentially where you send traffic to a third party website which will actually sell them something . So , for example , with Broadbandcouk , we listed details of broadband deals available in people's area . If they clicked through a link from our website that sent them to Broadband Suppliers website .

If they then subsequently sign up for that supplier , we would receive an affiliate payment and a commission which could be somewhere anywhere between 20 pounds and 200 pounds . So that's sort of like sort of $30 to $250 .

So obviously , there you can see that if you drive a sale for a merchant , then you can tend to get a very good payback , much better than you would get from a display ad . However , not all affiliate programs are equal , so some it very much depends on the product you're pushing .

So things like Broadband , which have a very long lifetime value to the merchant , will pay much higher commissions than an e-commerce site that will only pay you a , say , two or 3% of the basket value of someone who purchases surfior or selling , say , vacuum cleaners , and you've got to say all about vacuum cleaners .

A hat tip to Jamie IF there , who talks about vacuum cleaners all the time when he's on podcasts . But if you're doing vacuum cleaner reviews and link people to places where they can buy a vacuum cleaner , say , you might only get 5% on a 100 pound sale , so it's only five pound per sale , so it's not as great value .

So with this one it very much depends on the value of the commissions as to what point you would start to monetize . I've got a site that targets electricity consumers in the UK and that doesn't get a huge amount of traffic only , say , 100 people a day .

But the commission that it gets on a sale is around about average of about 50 pounds , sort of 60 , 70 dollars . So that means that we've only got to drive one sale a day of 100 people , which is 1% conversion rate , which is easily doable and we make a good income off it relative to the amount of traffic .

If we just tried to put display ads on there and monetize it with display ads , we would never earn the same amount of money . But electricity providers , because when you buy an electricity contract , you're in the long haul . You've got a very long lifetime value . They will pay much more .

If we would just have a site with vacuum cleaners with 100 visitors a day and say 1% conversion rate , you would see a much less value on that . So again , you can start to maybe monetize early with affiliate marketing . So what are the downsides of affiliate marketing ? Well , obviously there's a lot more management than display ads .

You've obviously got to find merchants to promote .

You then got to insert links to those merchants in the right places on your website and then you've got to make sure that those links carry on working , because there's nothing worse than sending traffic to a link to a merchant for a product and they discontinue that product or that product goes up stock and they don't tell you .

So that's the downside the much more management . There are tools up there that can help you . I know there's one called Lassu which is , I think , especially dedicated to Amazon affiliates . They can kind of act like , in a way I think , like plug and play , like display ads do .

But in general for most merchants you know you're not going to be able to get that kind of functionality , so you've got to manage it yourself , and that's the big downside . It's a much bigger overhead , which again , is why , until you've got a certain amount of traffic , there's just no point putting it in .

You might want to think about what you might do in the future , but it's certainly not a day , one task . You know , your real core thing to start with is to get your site ranking , get traffic coming in and then , once you get to that certain level , that's when to think about doing it .

So , just to recap , if you are a site like e-commerce where you are going to transact with that person your customers on site , then yeah , you need to monetize straightaway . Obviously , that's the whole point of your website and Google will accept that and it won't cause you any issues .

If you are a content website where you are not going to transact with customers but you are going to , either , in the long run , you're going to either use display ads or affiliate marketing , then I strongly suggest that , in the first instance , you don't try and put those monetization strategies into play , because Google can potentially , on a brand new site , look

at that as a negative , and it's also even if they weren't doing that . It's also something that's not really worth spending your time on , because you've got to get traffic before you can even make any money from advertising like that .

I appreciate that I've not got into a huge depth on how to monetize with display and affiliate marketing here , because that's not what I wanted to do in this podcast .

I just wanted to give you an idea of when you should start thinking about doing these things , but in future episodes I will definitely cover in much more detail all the different types of monetization strategies that you can employ . Thanks for listening . I really appreciate it . Please subscribe and share . It really helps . Seo is not that hard .

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