Do You Make Money Online

DIY Website – Part 5

When you incorporate advertising into your website, some care must be taken to avoid sending the relevant visitors that would buy from you away. It is possible to adopt a  simple strategy that not only helps to avoid this, but also helps to monetise the efforts of  writing articles.

Using Cosy kitchens as an example, we could create a section on our website devoted to  tips. A number of pages could be created giving tips and information, for those who might want to fit there own kitchen. This has two advantages in that people who are visiting the website but thinking of fitting a new kitchen, may value that information and approach the company, regarding supply. Also it gives us pages to link back to from our articles.

By incorporating relevant affiliate advertising into these pages, it is possible to earn additional, passive income, from the website. This is a common practice within the  internet marketing community. Many people have built websites specifically around high traffic keywords to develop huge passive incomes this way.

Monetising your website should not be the main focus of your efforts. The small business website has been structured for a different purpose. Earning an additional income from your website should be seen only as a way to get a return on the time invested in writing your articles, other than the benefit of strong incoming links. If the prospect of earning passive income online excites you, then you should consider adding another domain to your website specifically for this purpose. Building a website of this nature will require training outside of that, which is available in this guide.

Pay per click advertising can easily be added to your website and this alone can often cover the cost of hosting fees. Google Adsense is the most common form of PPC advertising. These adverts can be created online, once you have set up a free account. Setting up Google Adsense is a simple case of choosing your advert type and designing it using a number of options. Once you have made your choice a piece of code is created which can be copied into your web pages. The amount you get paid per click, varies  considerably and will depend on the subject of your web page.

Below is a snap shot taken from a website showing how Google Adsense can be incorporated. As you can see, in this case the links are green, rather than the more commonly seen blue. This is because the website owner has set the colour scheme to match the theme of the website.

Google provides a handy free tool that can be used for keyword research. The Google Adwords keyword tool can be used to gather information such as the highest cost per click being paid for a particular search term and the average number of people searching for that term.

Below is a snap shot taken from researching the keyword kitchen. Across the top of the picture in blue text is a description of each column for the data returned. As you can see in the left hand column, ( keyword ), the tool has returned a large number of keyword phrases that contain the word kitchen. This is useful when carrying out keyword research from planning the website and also throughout building and development.

The next column “estimated Avg CPC”, is the estimated cost per click being paid for each of those keywords and phrases. This can vary from just a few pennies to several pounds. There is no set amount that you will be paid for each click but a reasonable estimation would be around 25% of the average CPC. The next two columns, local and global, speak for themselves and simply show the number of searches, monthly, that are being carried out for each term.

As with affiliate advertising, using cost per click advertising should be given some thought. Google does however, allow you the option to block websites of your choice from advertising on your website. If your business is localised competitive advertising appearing on your website is unlikely to be a problem. If you have doubts as to whether it may take business away from you it is best placed only on the help or tips section of the site where it can do little harm. The website will most likely generate more irrelevant visitors than relevant as it grows in strength. After all there are only going to be so many people in a locality searching terms that are relevant to our niche. Ultimately as the website grows the number of visitors can be substantial. It is not unusual for a website to receive several thousand hits a month and a strong site in a competitive market can receive tens or even hundreds of thousands.

When these levels of traffic are coming through your website, affiliate and pay per click advertising can be very lucrative. This income is also pretty much pure profit and is earned almost passively. It is easy to see why so many people are attracted to internet marketing and how many have made large fortunes this way.

Promoting the website.

My personal opinion is that you should promote your small business website everywhere that you can. A small business website is a very low cost collection of powerful adverts for every aspect of your business. People who see the company literature, advertising, sign writing and anything else you can paste your web address on may well use it as a soft way to make their first assessment of your business. This statement is not to be taken lightly. People can often be cautious in there initial approach to making a purchase for many  different reasons. They may fear embarrassing themselves, they may not be ready to deal with salesmen, they may just be testing the water. What ever their reason for not wanting to approach you in person, your website allows the opportunity to sing the company’s praises and entice that person to make a step forward. If we can make him feel comfortable about asking us the answers to his problems we have a chance to take things further or to close a sale.

A website is itself advertising and it might seem a little odd to advertise your advertising but this is not the case at all. Traditional forms of advertising like newspaper advertising and such have a considerable restriction. Newspaper advertising for example has limitations in that the more you say about the company, the more you pay. You pay for space in the newspaper and a large advert will have a large price tag. If you already run a cost effective marketing campaign it can be seriously enhanced with a good website.

A website helps to give a business professional credibility. How often do you see a newspaper advert and tucked down at the bottom you will find the company web address. Clever stuff? No not really. A newspaper advert should have the website address right at the top in big bold letters and you should tell readers to visit it now. You have a lot to tell them about your products and services and a place where you can. Do not allow them to flick past your advert and call the next guy give them a reason to contact you even if they do it indirectly.

Put your web address on every business card, estimate, letter, flyer, company vehicle and every other way that you can get it under peoples noses. Remember that if your site is monetised all traffic has the potential to bring revenue. Generally it is best to keep to forms of advertising that are already working for the company and add the website to them. Anyone who has a business website will tell you that they get their fair share of sales calls offering website promotion.

It is not my intention to put these services down but some research should be done before paying for additional advertising. Companies like Yell.com are still widely used and can generate good leads but there are hundreds of would be directories that offer similar paid services. By doing our research and creating our site with a solid strategy there is a good chance that within a few short months our site will beat these directories in the search results anyway.

Pay per click advertising works both ways and can be very cost effective. The problem is that if done without thought it can be costly and ineffective. Creating a successful pay per click campaign is a subject on its own and cannot be covered in full here. Once again it needs some thought because if you are scoring high on your chosen terms, you may end up paying to compete against yourself. If you do use pay per click advertising you should be prepared to do a lot of split testing an analysis to refine your campaigns.