You’ve probably heard this by now, but making money from a website is no easy task.
Most people are going to fail multiple times before they finally succeed and when you do succeed, it’s likely that you’ll be a little surprised by what can actually happen.
In a nutshell, that’s exactly what’s happened to me and now because I have a website that’s actually making a decent amount of money each month I’m exploring the different ways that I can increase the website earnings.
Today’s blog post will talk about the following:
- How I’ve Made Money Online
- What to Consider When Trying to Increase Website Earnings
- What I’m Doing to Increase my Website Earnings
How I’ve Made Money Online
First off, let me be honest and tell you that I’ve failed a handful of times before I finally created a successful website. There are number of things that I tried to do to make money online, but none of them seemed to work. I want to start this off by saying that if you are just starting to try to make money online, realize that you’re going to have many failures before your first success. This is true for what I’ve done, and if you research, it’s true with almost every successful online entrepreneur.
With that being said, let’s summarize my successful website.
For those who don’t know, or have just started following me, the success that I’ve had is with my other website, www.JobsForFelonsHub.com. This website is focused on helping felons get out of the criminal justice system have successful reentry into society. This is no easy task and quite frankly, when I created the website, I did to more of a passion project. Sure, i thought it would be cool to make a few bucks on the side, but my real purpose was to help people who needed it.
My monthly income goal was $500 from Google Adsense. But at this point, the website brings in around $2000 per month. The website primarily makes money through Google AdSense and secondarily makes it through Indeed.com’s affiliate program.
NOTE: When I created this website I documented everything I did and created a course out of it. If you’re interested, sign up here for the free mini course to help you come up with a topic and monetization strategy of your own.
Obviously I’m thrilled with $2000/month as it was becoming pretty tiresome to continually work on new projects, fail, and move on to the next. But lucky for me, this particular website became a true authority in the prison reform niche and now I have a business that should continue to support me as I explore other endeavors for a long time.
What to Consider When Trying to Increase Website Earnings
Since I started making money on the website from Google Adsense, I was immediately trying to figure out how I could make more. You see, as nice as it is to get Google Adsense to pay you, you’re only making a fraction of what Google makes every time someone clicks an ad.
While exploring, I’ve realized that there are quite a few questions that you need to ask yourself before you decide on any new monetization strategies you use to increase your website earnings.
Below are some of the questions that I asked myself.
Q: How do I know what my audience wants?
A: One of the key things that you have to ask yourself when you finally have a website that is making money is, what does my audience want? Many times, when someone asks this question it’s to themselves, but that’s the completely wrong way to go about it. If you want to know your audience wants, ask them.
Send an email with a survey monkey link or post something in a Facebook group or Facebook page to ask people exactly what they want. Make sure that you give them five or more options and always leave a “other” option available too so that they can type in their own responses.
You need to ask your audience what they want so that you can find the right solution for them. At this point, you already have a successful website on your hand and with that comes an audience. Use that audience to gain knowledge and present them with the best solutions.
Q: Are my website pages designed to take full advantage of Google Adsense click earnings?
A: Almost every time this question is asked, the answer is going to be no. For me, I redesigned multiple pages on the site using Thrive Themes and questioned my own ad placement and how many ad units were on each page over and over again.
Q: Is my website navigation helping me make money?
A: I redesigned my website navigation multiple times since it was created and I’ve done this because in the beginning, the whole point of the website was to present my audience with helpful information. Now the point of the website is still to give that information but to also optimize for earnings. Now, every single page in my navigation goes to another page that could either make me money from Google Adsense or an Affiliate product, but I’m presenting these as solutions, not just a random affiliate product that they don’t need.
Q: Do I have an Email list?
A: If you don’t have an email list created, stop everything you’re doing and focus on creating one right now. Really, go your website and create an email opt in and start collecting those emails as quickly as possible. There’s a lot of reasons why email marketing is so great, but the reality is that it’s going to keep people coming back your website and allow your biggest fans to connect with you on a regular basis. Aside from that, it allows you to have multiple one to one touch points with people in an automated fashion, there isn’t much better than that.
Q: What products/services will my audience buy?
A: This is a question that I’ve had to ask myself multiple times with my website and it’s proven to be very difficult to answer. The reason why it’s so difficult for me is because my demographic doesn’t have disposable income, so there’s really not much of a hope of me being able to get them to purchase a product or service from me. However, that doesn’t mean that I’ve got no chance of selling them anything because I rely on affiliate marketing.
Q: Assuming you have an email list, are you sending them to your “money pages”?
A: “Money Pages” are the pages on your website that are going to generate the most income for you. Sometimes a money page can be a page filled with ads, and sometimes that page can be a offer to a affiliate product, but at the end of the day you need to make sure that the email autoresponder you use is sending people to your “money pages” on a regular basis. Now remember, you should always mix and money pages into your autoresponder and you shouldn’t simply push products and services all the time.
What I’m doing to Increase my Website Earnings
There are so many different things that I’ve tried since my website was created to make as much money as possible. When my website first started I was only making a couple hundred dollars a month, but then it exploded in popularity due to it going viral on Facebook.
Ever since it went viral on Facebook, it’s now brought in somewhere between 1,500 to 2,000 people every single day. Because I know that I can rely on my traffic, I’ve spent quite a bit of time trying to optimize my website for income and here’s some things that you should know.
- I used my analytics to understand what the most popular pages are and redesign them to make sure that I have optimal revenue generation from my Google AdSense ads. In particular, this page generates the majority of my Google AdSense earnings and it’s undergone three redesigns.
Pro Tip: Open your Google analytics and go to the behavior tab. From there, go to site content and click on all pages. Now review each those top 10 pages (which probably account for 50% of more of your traffic) and optimize them to make the most money possible.
- I reviewed my website navigation to ensure that those pages could make me money through Google AdSense or affiliate products.
Pro Tip: When reviewing your navigation, consider the content and figure out if there is your own product or service (or an affiliate) that would fit for what the content is about. If there isn’t, make sure that you include a really specific opt in so that you can collect emails. All of your navigation pages MUST either create revenue or an opt-in opportunity.
- I found the perfect affiliates for my audience.
Pro Tip: When you first start off with your website, you’re going to think that you have the best idea about what your audience wants (I did too, it’s a common mistake!). However, over time you are going to discover that your audience could probably use products or services that you didn’t even think of. For instance, I recently became an affiliate of a company that sells virtual calling cards to prison inmates. I never would have thought of that!
- I’m very diligent about communicating with my audience and I don’t think many people do this enough. What I’ve found is that the majority of my audience are very nice and just made a mistake in the past. They are simply trying to get their lives together now and are very grateful for all the help that I’m offering.
Pro Tip: In your email autoresponder make sure that you include an email that asks people what they need help with. It’s usually best to ask this in email number five or six in your autoresponder series. When people respond to you, it gives you a chance to really connect with them and let them know that there is an actual person behind the website. Once they know there’s an actual person, they’re more inclined to trust you. Just make sure that you respond to their emails in a timely manner, no one likes to wait a week for a response.
- I have been revising my autoresponder to provide awesome solutions, which also make me more income.
Pro Tip: Remember, when you have an autoresponder it isn’t just your goal just to make money. The goal is to serve your audience with value and if there’s a way to make money at the same time, by all means, do it. For me, I’m sending people to my Jobs for Felons page (Adsense Income) as well as to multiple affiliate pages that are resources that they could definitely use. By doing it this way, I’m providing them with solutions for their problems, but also making a small commission if they become a qualified lead.
At the end of the day, every single website is different and in order to increase your own website earnings, you’re going to have to take a long hard look at what it is that you do and the audience that you serve.
I found a really good balance in my earnings with Google AdSense, Indeed.com, I’m working on more affiliate income. But every website is different and if you use the ideas in this post, you’ll be able to find the right combination for your own website too.
What do you think in the advice of this blog post? Did I leave anything out? Let me know in the comments below!
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