Beyond Google Adsense: Monetizing Your Website

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By:Darren McLaughlin

Many new internet marketers end up running Google AdSense ads on their websites, and many are happy about their earnings. As time wears on the tendency is for the website revenue stream to stagnate, especially when it's the websites only one. If you plan on making the most money from your websites, you usually end up attempting to monetize as many revenue streams as possible. The reasons are relatively obvious. First, it takes an awful lot of trust for a website owner to put all of their faith completely in the hands of one entity, no matter how much they may respect or admire that corporation. Google is a company that's in the business of making a profit, so giving them exclusive rights to all of your website's traffic is naive and short-sighted. There are several ways you can squeeze more money out of the ad space on your website:

1) Sell ads directly to people who need your targeted traffic
2) Start a newsletter to keep in touch with your visitors and sell sponsorships of the newsletter to customers who need to speak directly to your visitors

Let's face it: eliminating the middle man is no secret as a way to increase your profits. Google takes a big cut of the money paid by advertisers and pays you the rest. Any deal you can negotiate that bypasses them could very well result in increased profits. At the very least, you owe it to yourself to find out. Never be afraid to experiment with your ad placements. Switch ad sizes, ad types, and even ad networks when it suits you. Any time you can squeeze more revenue out of existing page views, you are that much more profitable.

The most money you can make is by directly selling a product or service to the public. Affiliate marketing of all types and Adsense or YPN pay well, but generally the highest eCPM can be achieved by direct sales. This also means you'll have more expenses in most cases, and a bit more work, but the profit is great enough that you should take a look into it. Perhaps your site is well-suited to selling an E-Book? And product that you can personally produce will definitely pay well, but make sure it's a quality product that people like, or you'll waste a lot of time doing customer service for unhappy people.

That is not the type of activity you want to get into. But if you can produce a highly profitable product like an E-book, your CPM will soar. This also means you can make more money off the targeted traffic already on your website, without hurting your AdSense sales. Just replace one AdSense block with an Ad for your Own E-Book. If you convert 1% of your existing customers, you will almost assuredly have higher total revenue than with AdSense alone.

A nice balance of website revenue might look like this:

1) Google Adsense
2) Newsletter income from sponsors
3) One ad block sold to direct sponsors
4) One ad block that results in direct sale

If you're only doing number one, you're leaving money on the table. Think of the unserved customers who are visiting your websites every day and not buying an ad or product from you for the simple reason that you don't sell anything! This might just indicate a lack of interest on your part so far, but if you correct it now you'll open up doors to ever great revenue. Don't be blinded by the first answer, just because it's the simplest. Dig deep and build a diversified revenue stream that will have you rolling in the dough and living the type of lifestyle you plan on becoming accustomed to.

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Article keywords: internet marketing

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