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How best to monetize my website?

What is the best way to monetize a small travel website with strong content but fewer than 100,000 monthly uniques?

  • Are fixed-priced products like listing upgrades better than CPM-based ad units if a publisher is inventory-strapped? What are the best business development solutions such as affiliate marketing?

  • Answer:

    I myself run a travel content site in India (though 1 million+ uniques) and have tried many of these: Adsense: Simplest and quickest. Can give you easy money. Affiliate network: Show ads from companies which do fulfillment (e.g. Expedia). They can pay you commission per booking done by your visitors. Best bet is to become affiliate of the bigger brand since your users are more likely to have more overlap with them. Most of the big travel companies have affiliate programs (via widgets, white label solution, API) that you should be able to integrate easily. You can also approach an performance based Ad network which might be serving ads from multiple such companies. In India, two such performance based networks are DGM and Shoogloo. Lead generation: You can generate leads for some travel related businesses (hotels, tour package operators) and charge per lead. Direct advertisement: You can seek out ads from bigger companies directly. You'll need to maintain a sales team (or do it yourself). However, most companies typically don't deal with websites having small no. of impressions (< few millions). So, you might find it incredibly hard to do this. In-text ads: For content sites, in-text ads also make sense. You might have seen them on some sites - links are with double underline, when you hover over them a small popup with the ad shows up. Most users frown upon such ads as it makes the text hard to read and as such aren't recommended. Check out http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/IntelliTXT for more. Booklets / Magazines: Since you are strong on content, you may want to publish your content as pamphlets / booklets, or run an offline magazine. All these can be supported by Ads. But then, it's offline thing and might be a big ask if you are short on resources. Content Syndication: You can let other sites use your content (say, via an API). Either you can charge them one time, or per usage charge. Another step in the same direction could be to power travel sections for big horizontal portals (e.g. newspaper sites) - give them fresh content. You can charge for it, or ask them to link to your site which can bring in traffic which you can monetize. Listings: You can charge various travel businesses (e.g. adventure sports organizers) for listing on relevant pages. SEO links: Travel is a rich sector. Many other websites can pay you for link to them in return for money. Unlikely to result in big money though. I've seen quite a few sites running purely on #1, #2 & #3. All of them can give big bucks. For a small website, #4 & #6 are hard to do. #5 is not recommended as it gives bad experience to users. You have to be really good to pull #7 off. #8 & #9 are not likely to give you big bucks.

Vikas Rana at Quora Visit the source

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Hey, this is a method called "working up the funnel".  Hope it helps... To start, anything CPM based will leave you disappointed.  Look at other blogs in the niche, the highest CPM I can find is $2.00 - with your 100k monthly uniques, you're barely making $6-$7 a day per ad network...if you're lucky. src:  http://buysellads.com/buy/travel Then there is Adsense.  Your ability to make money with Adsense will be proportionate to how willing you are to sacrifice user experience.  Putting ads above the fold, wrapped in content rather than in the sidebar, using ugly text ads vs display advertisements... How much money would you make?  Here is a rule of thumb.  Go to the google Adwords tool, use their keyword research tool, and type in your URL.  Use exact match data.  Export the top 100 results (as sorted by relevance)  to Excel.  Now take the average CPC for all of those keywords.  Divide that number by 5.  That is a great estimate you will earn per click. Now you can estimate how much Adsense $$$ you can make.  If you put two text advertisement boxes above the fold, you could probably guess that there would be around 2% CTR.  (Could be even higher). But with an estimated CPC amount of probably $0.20 - $0.40, multiplied by 100k, multiplied by 2%, you've got an earning potential of $400 to $800 a month (still not great) src: personal experience - in my younger days (okay, actually just a year ago) I was pulling in a decent amount from websites made exclusively to monetize through Adsense. Want to make more than that?  Then think about this...every single person who is advertising on your site is doing so because they are making money.  They are happily paying you 66% and google 33% of their SEM budget because your website visitor is worth it to them. So "work your way up the funnel" - find out who is paying for ads on your site and see what they are trying to sell.  Is it tickets?  Hotels?  Something else?  You can use tools like http://mixrank.com to see what ads are running on your own site and sites in your niche.  Then YOU go sign up for those affiliate programs.  Usually travel affiliate programs are done in house or through networks like http://Cj.com src: personal experience - same as above - I make a decent living from affiliate income. At this point, you can test different affiliate offers and optimize even further.  But then think about this, why are those companies willing to pay you that cut?  For the same reasons that people were paying to be in your Adsense - it is worth it. Now obviously you can't work your way up the funnel and become an airport, but you can create and sell your own products.  Look at what Ramit Sethi or http://copyblogger.com have done - they know and understand their typical web visitor and have created high margin products that their visitors love. src: I buy their crap and I love it.  Ooh, oh yeah, and the verticals (who am I kidding - it's vertical, I'm not that hardcore) where I've actually sold my own products, I've always made the most money. So if you want to maximize your $$$ , start with Adsense, work your way up the funnel to affiliate marketing, and then move to your own product. Hope that helps! sent from my iPhone, excuse typos

Tanner Jones

NOTE: I'm currently consulting with Survata. Have you considered a SurveyWall to gate your videos? Your visitors would fill out a short survey before accessing the videos. We pay between $0.20 and $0.50 per validated response to publishers in our http://survata.com/publisher-network. The entire experience happens on your site, no popups or new tabs, so the interruption to the user experience is minimal. Shoot a note to for more info.

Alec Wilson

This fully depends on  the directions of monetization you'd like to explore. If you are  strictly reliant on site-bound advertising, the answers given above/below are more than sufficient and provide you with viable options. However, there are two unexplored avenues that in my opinion would result in the largest revenue-generation: 1) Direct-to-consumer email. I am not certain what data you collect, what terms your users agree upon, and whether you have third-party marketing options as part of your portfolio, but this is WITHOUT A DOUBT the most proven, effective method of increasing revenue in the immediate/short-term. While many proprietors are initially fearful of 'spamming' users, keeping your ads relevant will actually result in both an immediate spike of income, but a more user-oriented experience that could enhance the overall value of your site. If you choose to go this path, many 2) affiliate networks provide branded, converting campaigns on a CPC, CPA (CPL) basis. Pretty straight-forward, but it works. Best of luck and again - more detail on the site would provide more input from the monetization perspective.

Evan Lovett

Vikas Rana has put together a great list of resources. You might also consider the following additional ways of monetizing: Digital/Information Products: Creating an eBook, Paid Report, or similar information/digital product is a way to create a product that you can sell to your users. Sell anonymous data: Your website can easily become a passive revenue stream, without annoying ads. Your visitors produce anonymous data that can be resold. http://www.fuse-data.com  can help make that happen. Premium (paid) content: Similar to a digital product, you can section off a part of your website that has "premium" content, which users need to pay and login to view. Digital/Information Products: Creating an eBook, Paid Report, or similar information/digital product is a way to create a product that you can sell to your users.

Ian Paterson

Your monetization strategy will depend on your resources. If you run a small operation with a small team, you'll likely need third parties (ad networks, site rep companies, affiliate programs, text links, etc.) to sell your ad space for you. In this case, you will need to test out multiple partners and ad units to determine the optimal mix to maximize your revenue. A couple of people have mentioned going out and selling your ad space directly to advertisers, but unless you have a dedicated sales rep, this is not going to work for you. It's quite difficult to get on the radar of these companies when you're a small site, especially if the media buying comes from an ad agency. While you're small, my recommendation is to go out and work with affiliates in the travel space, vertical ad networks, and run integrated text links (ie text links close to the content of your page). Mladen Raickovic Head of Partnerships & Product Development, Olive Media

Mladen Raickovic

I would also recommend seeking out advertisers directly. Take a look around at other similar sites in your niche and see who is buying ads on their websites directly and approach those advertisers. If they are larger, national brand advertisers, chances are it will be hard to get their attention. However, there are many times smaller niche advertisers that would consider your site a great fit if the content is targeted enough for who they are looking to reach.

Todd Garland

I'd start with Google Adsense since it is ubiquitous, and add targeted affiliate program banners from there. Also keep adding content and interlinking pages when possible. Post links back to your site on highly trafficked blogs as well if the context fits.

David Martinez

Assuming your content includes links to travel related businesses, you can try monetize your site without ads at all through http://publishedin.com (in Beta) Reward-Per-Clickâ„¢ program. After installing Publishedin code on your site, Publishedin reports referrals to businesses from all your content, old and new, on your website. You can connect with the businesses or invite them to connect with you. We suggest a reward amount for your referrals, and allow  businesses to reward you through Publishedin Reward-Per-Clickâ„¢ program. You can learn more on the benefits for publishers http://publishedin.com/learn/publisher Yossi Barazani Founder, Publishedin

Yossi Barazani

Set up your site using Doubleclick for Publishers - it is a free ad serving solution (no need to pay for ad serving when you're trying to monetize everything you have).  DFP then allows you integrate in direct sales efforts as well as working with Google AdSense.  Make sure you tie it into your Google Analytics program as well.  The other thing I recommend is also working with content ad providers like an Industry Brains or Vibrant media.  They'll offer complementary ads to just display - and you'll start to see which formats generate the most revenue for your site.

Michael Hubbard

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