Residual Income Web Blog

This is the fourth article in my Make Money with a Website series. The earlier posts were:

How to Make Money with a Website:  Niche Topics

How to Make Money with a Website: Building a Site

How to Make Money with a Website: Writing Content

Now comes the fun part — adding revenue streams to your niche content site.

There is some debate as to the best time to monetize a site — before or after you build backlinks, aka those links from other blogs and websites to your niche site. Site Build It! recommends waiting until you’ve established a steady stream of traffic to your site to add advertisements and affiliate links.

The theory, I believe, is that the search engines will give more credibility to a content site that is not covered in advertisements — and there may be some merit to that conclusion. But it could also be outdated at this point; it’s hard to tell.

Personally, I followed that advice for my SBI! site, but have monetized from the beginning on my other sites. The only difference I’ve noticed is that my other sites, monetized from the get-go, started earning money sooner (well … of course, they had ads). I don’t think having Google adwords on the page  negatively affected the niche sites being indexed or ranked.

The main reason I monetized my niche html and Wordpress-powered niche sites right away was to make sure the format and page set ups worked and looked attractive as I began laying out the site. And then I noticed that I was earning Adsense revenue (even if it was just pennies) for sites I had not even promoted yet. I wonder if Google favors sites with their ads? Just a musing thought — they would never admit it even if it is buried in their algorithm somewhere.

Typical revenue streams for a content site include:

• Keyword-based ads, such as Google AdSense
• Affiliate links
• Paid advertisements
• Information product sales

Keyword Ads

Google AdSense is one of the easiest ways to monetize a niche site. If for some reason you don’t have access to the program (some publishers are not approved or are banned for violations) two of the top alternatives are AdBrite and the Yahoo Publisher Network. I can’t speak from experience about either one, but I would start with those if I couldn’t use Google adwords on my site.

These types of contextual ads have been highly successful both for advertisers and publishers (webmasters) because they are matched specifically to the content on your site. Visitors are more likely to click the ads and more likely to buy the products or browse the sites linked to in the ads because of their relevance to the visitor’s search and interests.

Some niche site owners make a lot of money from Google adsense — fellow writer (and my inspiration) Lindsay at Writing for Your Wealth earns over $100,000 a year from Google AdSense on her niche websites. She’s been doing niche sites for years and has about ten of them, with her top site bringing in a large percentage of the earnings.

I’m at the very beginning stages of building residual income through my own sites, as I focused on revenue-sharing sites and my ebook for the first 18 months or so of my passive income adventure.  But already, with a minimum of effort, I’ve gone from earning a few dollars a month to a few dollars a day in Google earnings. I’ll post a more in-depth update on that shortly.

Affiliate Links

In case you’re not familiar with affiliate marketing, here’s a brief overview. Online merchants, selling everything from ebooks to tractors to freeze dried foods, want to increase their sales and market reach, so they offer commissions (ranging from about 5% to 50% of the sales price) to people who market and sell their products.

Some merchants have their own affiliate program setups, but most use places like Commission Junction (cj.com), ClickBank, and Amazon Affiliates to run their affiliate programs and pay publishers who complete sales. I work primarily with Commission Junction and Amazon. Last month I earned $350 from cj.com, which is higher than my average there. With Amazon, I average about $75 to $150 a month; most of my links originate from eHow articles. Amazon earnings jump during the holiday season, in m experience.

It’s important to make sure the products you recommend through affiliate links are both truly relevant to your content and are likely to be appreciated by your readers. Never undermine the quality of your site by promoting inferior products or having an excess of affiliate links in a post or on a page. When building a page, ask yourself what someone searching for your information or reading your article would likely be interested in buying — on an article about making homemade soy candles, for example, links to soy candle wax, candle making supplies or a candle making book would obviously be appropriate.

Paid Advertisements

While I have not yet dabbled in paid blog or site sponsors, they can be a good way to add to your online revenue from a niche site. Pat from the Smart Passive Income Blog wrote that adding paid advertisements to his LEED website was like making extra money for doing almost nothing. His two-part article goes into detail about pricing ad space and finding advertisers.

Info Product Sales

Selling your own information or digital products — ebooks, software, lesson plans, study guides, craft designs, woodworking designs, audio courses and the like — is another potentially profitable way to monetize your niche site. I’ve produced and sold one such product — my eHow ebook — and have been very pleased with the results. If you have information others can use, create a product and offer it for sale on your related niche site.

In fact, some online infopreneurs successfully build entire sites around one information product or one group of products, such as homeschooling lesson plans. You build a niche site and write the content articles just like I’ve described in this series of articles, but instead of monetizing with ads and affiliate links, you promote your downloadable products.

That’s an overview of the different ways to monetize a niche site. In time, I’ll give more detailed information, such as placement of Google ads and how to produce an information product. To complete this series, next post will discuss promoting your niche site.

I’d love to hear about your experiences in monetizing your niches sites. What avenues have produced the best revenue for you?