This is a guest post by Shaun Connell.
Very few bloggers have reached their income goals. Unfortunately, most seem to think that the way to achieve their income goals is by just crushing as much traffic as they can through their blog, somehow expecting the traffic to convert into more traffic, popularity and links until the money starts to flow.
But that’s not usually the case. In this post we’ll cover the other side of increasing your revenue: focusing on making your blog’s monetization more efficient. Doing this will allow you to up your income without having to actually increase your traffic.
Traffic is Often Overrated
I have several websites that pull anywhere from a few hundred visitors per day to a few thousand. Oddly enough to some, my most trafficked blog isn’t my biggest income blog.
I can’t stress this enough: Lot’s of traffic does not equal lots of money.
Traffic is just a fuel. It doesn’t matter how much or what kind of fuel you put into your riding lawnmower, it will never beat a racecar. When you’re trying to go as fast as you can, you need to focus on your engine.
Of course, the engine of making money online is how you actually monetize your website. Increasing the efficiency of your “engine” will let you go much faster than just tinkering with the fuel. If you efficiently monetize your website, you can literally double your income without seeing a change in traffic at all.
If you’ve read any of my articles before, you know I’m a huge fan of systematic business. An online business is a business just the same. Every internet business needs a business plan, as I explained in The 1-2-3 Plan: How to Make Money With SEO.
But enough theory. Let’s look at actual ways to you can increase you monetization’s efficiency without needing to increase traffic.
How to Convert Traffic Better
Re-Research Your Niche. Research your niche to find out which keywords are the highest paying. No guess work. If you have to, get a pen and paper out and use Google’s keyword tool. Now reorganize your post titles and keywords to make sure you’re targeting the highest paying keywords. I’ve seen this increase my AdSense earnings nearly 50%
Place Advertisements Better. Where you place your ads are critical to their success. For AdSense, the ads most likely to be clicked should be at the top of the page. Don’t forget about Google’s link units. These are surprisingly good at nudging your CTR up a few notches, and are grossly underused by bloggers in general.
Diversify Your Income. Most blogs are undermonetized. Use AdSense, Chitika, Infolinks, private ad sales and affiliate programs can all be used on the same blog — without making it look spammy. The combined income from all of these should be a full time income in most niches after just a few thousand impressions. It certainly is in all of my niches. I doubled my income in 36 hours after adding Infolinks and Chitika. They work together perfectly.
Check Out Kontera or Infolinks. Kontera and Infolinks ad “contextual” advertisements posed as links throughout your content. My EPM with Infolinks is around $3, which means it’s rivaling my adsense income. It’s a professional yet high-earning way to monetize your content.
Create a Newsletter Funnel. Newsletters aren’t just for gurus. Every blog should have one. Create a valuable and profitable newsletter by sending a sales pitch, then a tip, then a sales pitch, then a tip, and so on. By “sandwhiching” your pitches and tips, you can increase your trust, and the likelyhood that your emails actually get read. This can earn you an income from a visitor who might never return to your site.
Conclusion and Last Words
The whole point of making money online is monetization. Get your monetization right, and you can shorten the time it’s taking to quit your job and make money online full-time.
Experiment all you want, but always remember: the point of your content is making money. When your content starts to function independently of earning an income, you’re wasting traffic, and are that much further from achieving your goals. Good luck!
Shaun Connell is a full-time blogger and internet marketer. He runs he aptly named blog “Make Money Online“, and spends his time testing new and off-the-wall ways to make money with his dozen or so websites and blogs.
