Nathan Hangen

Turning Traffic Into Profit

Everyone wants traffic. Traffic is the number by which all websites measure themselves and it is reasonable to assume that with traffic comes revenue. However, the problem with that assumption is that there is a missing piece between the Traffic —-> Revenue Stream.

Good Traffic

There is a myth that permeates the blogging world that simply says high traffic = high profit. What people don’t realize is that you cannot simply just throw up an Adsense banner and expect money to come flowing in. The first error in this statement is that there is a difference between regular traffic and good traffic. For instance, StumbleUpon is great for bringing in spurts of traffic, but terrible for revenue. SU users simply are not going to fall for ads or affiliate products. Most traffic from social networks tends to be the same: You get a quick burst of traffic, pretty high bounce rates, and the readers never come back.

On the other hand, organic traffic from search engines is a great form of targeted traffic. These searchers are using keywords to find you and when they come to your page they are generally interested. The same goes for blog communities. If you frequently comment on other blogs in your niche or topic, then you are likely to see hits coming in as a result of those comments. It is more than often the case that these people are choosing to visit your site based on your comments. This is good traffic.

Monetization

This topic is near and dear to my heart because it is such a tricky issue, yet when you perfect it you will see the results immediately. As I said before, you simply cannot stick a banner on your site and expect the money to start pouring in. Good marketers know that placement and style of advertisements are crucial to making them work. If you take a look at the most successful blogs in any industry, you will see that these bloggers are masters of getting good traffic AND of monetization. You may be a master at getting thousands of uniques to your blog every day, but if you don’t know what to do with that traffic then your hard work is of no use. You’ve got to have a plan on how to capitalize off of your traffic so that you can hang around long enough to join the professional ranks. Don’t just bring in traffic, use it to your advantage.

If you are going to use Adsense, don’t just put it at the beginning of a post. Throw it in mid-stream where the user has to move their eyes over the ad to get to the rest of the content. This may not always look professional, but people are so used to Adsense these days that it isn’t necessarily viewed as a bad thing anymore.

125×125 ads are all the rage in the blogging world these days. You can put a group of them together without degrading the professionalism of your blog and still have more than one form of advertising. Don’t hesitate to throw up an “advertise here” box that links to a page where you give some reasons to advertise on your blog, including traffic stats and other traffic rankings. Don’t just copy and paste your analytics data, give some analysis with the data to make it mean something to the advertiser. Rather than saying “My blog gets 1,000 pageviews per week,” say “advertising here will give you access to over 1,000 pages of highly targeted user friendly content per week.” See how different that sounds?

Don’t be afraid to spread the love with your advertising campaigns. Don’t rely solely on one method for making money. I highly recommend including a mix of ppc, cpm, affiliate, and any other form of advertising you can manage on your blog. Although I don’t advertise heavily on this blog for personal reasons, on many of my other sites (most are not listed here) you will see a subdued mix of several forms of advertising. If you do a review of someone’s product, use the amazon code to link the product. If you review an ebook, throw in the clickbank code. There is no limit to what you can do with advertising and still keep a tasteful website.

The Lowdown

What I am trying to say here is that I want you to succeed as a blogger, developer, internet marketer…whatever you choose to call yourself. However, I learned the hard way that monetizing properly will either make or break your efforts. If you spend hours grinding away with no reward, then you are not likely to persist against the difficulties you will encounter. That’s just the way it is. However, if you spend time learning how to monetize your content properly then you will be much more likely to hang around through the lows you will encounter. Blogging is like a business and although it is difficult being a one man/woman show, it is also highly rewarding when you get it right. There are people making it every day in this business, what’s keeping you from becoming the next?

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