How best to monetize my website?

How would you monetize a #1 ranking website for the phrase "cheap flights"?

• It could be [cheap flights] or an equivalent phrase in any other language. The site has a steady #1 position in Google for the phrase. Imagine the site is nothing more than a WordPress blog, with articles related to cheap flights (e.g. no ads/affiliate programs yet). How would you proceed in order to maximize revenue? You can spend up to $20.000.

• Answer:

  I've written a bunch of SEO copy with just this anchor text! The honest answer is "paid links," although doing so violates Google's rules, and I can't advocate it as a long term strategy. You take risks with your page rank in return for money. Many ticket-selling and travel-package websites will pay you for links from a well-ranked blog to improve their rankings. If you want to do this without risking your page rank, you can sell ads, run sponsored posts, and otherwise follow the standard pattern for building an online media property. Black hat will maximize your revenue in the short run. You may extract thousands or tens of thousands of dollars (or perhaps more) from the page before Google hammers you. White hat will maximize your revenue in the long run. It's really hard to say whether or not the long term revenue will outweigh the possible short term money you could earn by going to the dark side, as the entire sector is still so young.