Sunday, August 28, 2011

Domain Monetization: Which is the best way to monetize your Domains and Content

African Domain Names: Domain Monetization

I will give some tips to those African domainers out there still figuring out how to monetize  their domains. I have been battling this question ever since my new site started picking up traffic from Google. What is the best way to monetize your development work? Maybe you have invested a month or three months building the foundations of your e-real estates: you have done the link building, SEO optimized content, you have submitted your URL to multiple search engines and directories, you have emailed 50 webmasters informing them about your content ad exchanging links. In short, you have done your part, so where is the money?

There are several ways to monetize your domains after the development work is finished. I will just list some of them and explain my experience(or lack of it) on each of the domain monetization strategies:

Domain monetization strategies:
-Adsense Contextual Ads
-Sell Products
-Affiliate Programs
-Ad Sales
-Conditional Advertising
-Lead generation

If you are going to make some gold off your sweat after months of domain development and content optinization, then you must at least employ one of these strategies.

Adsense: I will begin with the good old Adsense, it's the simplest and also the lowest paying of these methods. If you have no clue about the rest, I suggest you begin with Adsense as you figure out the rest. My website has been generating an average 1EUR daily or 30EUR per month. Which is quite substantial given that parking the domain generated $0 for one month! Adsense will not make you rich but at least you don't have to dig into your pockets to finance you domain business.

Ad Sales: Sell ads directly to advertisers. Just build a simple brochure with your websites unique visitors per month and number of page views and email to advertisers and companies in your niche. You might just scoop a nice ads deal!

Affiliate Programs: get paid a commission when your readers perform an action or buy something from another site.  This is amongst the best paying and the hardest as the user has to perform an action, buying products for you to earn. This performs well in the US ad Europe but as you know, most users in Africa still do not convert well in terms of making their purchases online on seeing a banner. So this is is tough.

Sell Your Products and Services: This is the hardest of all but also the most rewarding. Your site will act as a shop where users come to window shop for products and make their purchases. But if you know what you are doing, you can quickly make money. If you are an insurance salesman, you can build a regularly updated website targetted at African clientele and write about insurance products, explaining the intricacies, interest rates etc and leave your contacts for readers interested in acquiring insurance to contact you and then you earn your commission from the insurance company. You can also display products from third websites and earn profits from the sales. In the US, e-commerce websites deploy a model called drop-shipping whereby the online retailer does not keep goods in stock, but instead transfers customer orders and shipment details to either the manufacturer or a wholesaler, who then ships the goods directly to the customer. Not the best way to cultivate customer loyalty but if  you sell what people want then you can make a good profit with this.

Lead Generation: Lead generation is the process of converting every visitor to your website into a useful and potential business lead. You can partner with a company(s) in a  particular niche say insurance companies in Johannesburg, then create a SignUp form on your home page where visitors can sign up and enter info about their insurance requirements. You can then sell this info to insurance companies at even $5 per lead. If you can get 5 daily inquiries, then that's $25 per day for you!!! For doing "nothing". The insurance companies pays you after verifying the lead is authentic.  If the insurance companies can pitch well to this potential customer, the insurance companies gets added business at a very small cost. Read more and learn about the various techniques of lead generation.

For now, am using Adsense and Affiliate marketing; Adsense is bringing some earnings but I will give  the Affiliate ads some time to convert. Any more ideas on website monetization? Drop them below and let us know.

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