Savvy Affiliate

Day 26 of The 100 Days To Building A Great Website Guide

Since one of the primary reasons many people begin to blog is to make money, they are naturally concerned with how soon they can begin to monetize their site.  And although the answers are as varied as the people asking the questions, there are some general rules of thumb that will let you know if it is worth it to begin to monetize, or if you should wait.

1. Is your site a mini-site, or a long term site

You have to decide what kind of site you are making.  Is this a page you intend to work on once and be done?  Or is it something you intend to grow and organically build traffic with over time?

If you are creating a mini site, then go ahead an monetize it right away.  Once you have posted all of your content, there is no reason not to try and make some money off of it.  Try hooking up your site with Adsense, or various affiliate programs to hopefully generate a sustained income

 If you are creating a longer term site however, you may want to hold off on some of the advertising so that you don’t drive people away.  Your goal with a blog or similar site is to build up a returning dedicated user base.  After you have lots of people coming in it can be worth it to monetize, otherwise you may just risk alienating your readers for little financial gain.

2) How many people read your site?

Traffic is the second driver on when to monetize.   In all honesty, there is very little point on putting ads on a page that isn’t getting hits.   Put too much Adsense on a site without traffic, and you’ll drive yourself crazy checking your stats and trying to optimize your adsense when all you really need to do is get more people to come to your site.

How much is enough?  If you estimate a 1% click through rate on your ads, you might want to get around 200 unique visitors, or 500 page views daily before it is worth monetizing.  That amount will help ensure that you are getting at least some income from your ads, and it is a large enough number that alienating a few of your readers isn’t a tragedy.    Alternatively, given that search engine visitors are generally the most profitable, if you are getting at least 50 hits a day from search, then it might be worth putting up some ads.

3) How long can you stay motivated?

Although you may at first think that you can stick with your blog for months, and that you are with it for the long term, you may find your motivation failing if you are working and working and not seeing any financial gain.  In that case, even a little income can be nice to show that you are making at least some money online, and to give yourself a nice metric to compare against month after month.

If you find your interest waning in your site, but sure to try to monetize it.  There is nothing like a profit, even a small one, to restore enthusiasm.

4) How are you going to monetize?

The whole purpose for delaying monetizing your site is to avoid annoying readers.  The less obtrusive you make your ads, the less annoying they will be and the earlier you can monetize.

Clearly banner ads are a bad idea for a new and growing site.  Too many flashy things, anything popping up, or anything playing music are all huge turn offs.   If your ads are less obtrusive, like Adsense, ReviewMe, or Text Link Ads, you can monetize earlier.