Are you lost on where to start or what to prioritize in regards to optimizing your website to earn revenue? Let this be a guide for all things dedicated to helping you with earnings on your site.
While every single step in this model may not be applicable to your site, or you may have already checked some of these items off your list, be sure to read through and see if there’s room for you to improve on any ongoing efforts. In addition, we have a new feature rolling out to all publishers in the coming weeks – Scores, detailed in this blog – was designed to give publishers a personalized checklist to improve their site for revenue, traffic, and more.
In short, all of the tips and tricks below are more effective for some audiences, sites, and pages than other forms of monetization. You know best how your visitors would respond to various forms of communications.
You will notice, various models are involving you directly selling, while others are designed to grow your traffic and increase the stickiness for your site and in turn, earn you money in the long haul.
Let’s begin.
Supplement with video
One of the best things to do for your site and your brand as a whole is to start making video content to add to your website.
While it is difficult to know where to start, there are many approaches you can take to getting this content produced. For instance, it may be your first instinct to dismiss yourself as an on-camera personality. But you, like many others, could use a different video model.
You could also employ anything from slideshows to compilations, or history, as a way to showcase your knowledge in the space and expand your presence. Videos do not need to include you on screen for them to include valuable information that will rank in search.
Ezoic has exciting features that will be added to the video platform so be on the lookout! For more info, read up on our recent blog talking about a publisher’s success using video.
Make a store
A clear and obvious strategy is to create an eCommerce portion of your website.
Whether you’re selling physical or digital goods, try testing the waters with your audience.
Plugins like WooCommerce and Shopify have made it incredibly easy even for a one-person team to get an eCommerce site up and running, especially for those on WordPress.
Develop a course
Along the lines of eCommerce, making a course to market yourself is a strong model to earning revenue.
If you have a special skill, why not help teach others? Test this idea with friends or family to see if your skillset is something valuable enough to put together into a course.
Platforms like MasterClass are the gold standard in terms of online learning.
Open up donations
A straightforward approach. If it fits your business, a smart thing you could do would be having a donation section on your site.
This is as simple as putting a Paypal button on a certain page. Staying in the WordPress platform, WPForms also has a great donation option you can insert on a page also.
Affiliate marketing
An option most people think of when talking about earning revenue on a website is affiliate marketing. This involves placing links on your site promoting products. You will receive a fixed amount or percentage of the sale for every order placed via your link so this is all dependent on your visitors.
Pages that typically get the most traffic like your home and other landing pages are the best places to insert your links.
Run a giveaway
Another way to get a larger audience and earn more through your website would be doing a giveaway.
Every website has the opportunity to do something like this. If you’re in a particular niche – home and garden, photography, sports, camping, food & beverage, or anything at all, you could do a contest to give away a product or service related to the industry you’re in.
Better yet, if you have your own store, offer a gift card to your audience after participating in your contest.
Publish Sponsored Posts
Having either sponsored or guest posts on your page is a fantastic way to diversify your site as well as earn money.
This is a way for others to improve their brand awareness, while you get paid for it.
Email marketing
In line with the other methodologies, once you’ve collected a sufficient list of emails from things like contests, donations, or any other subscriptions – it’s time to send out communications for your audience to keep up with your content.
In your emails try running a variety of campaigns and calls to action back to your site.
Set up paywall for premium articles or content
Becoming more and more popular in today’s mediascape is content creators putting a portion of their work behind a paywall.
Having subscribers pay for certain blogs, videos, guides or anything else is a great way to earn from your website and create a loyal following.
Add a members forum
The best and most engaging communities have a locked members area, usually like a forum. This can be directly on your site, or externally like a Discord channel. This way you can charge a price for your visitors to become a member.
Again, this is a wonderful opportunity to build your brand more and offer something to your audience that they might not get elsewhere.
Make a hire me or online resume page
This is why some folks start a website in the first place. If you’re a freelancer, this is a must. Your end game is getting hired to do more work and expanding your rolodex.
Making a portfolio or web page that’s acts as your resume is the perfect way to pick up clients rather than a basic PDF. Some visitors may not even know they need your service until they come across your work!
Create an app
This may seem far-fetched for some but it’s yet again another chance to add stickiness. The thought would be to create a place where people can go to further access the resources you provide.
Take ‘The Dyrt’ for example. It’s one of my favorite new apps that gives info about places to camp near you. It started as a website with ways to book campsites, forums, reviews, blogs, and more. Since then, they built an app so you can quickly see what spots around you from your phone.
It all starts with a good idea.
Offer trainings
Similar to the coursework you may be interested in, think of training as a more informal version of this. Perhaps you could think of it more like online tutoring services.
Live webinars over Zoom have been a popular route of recent. You can try doing recurring sessions with a theme. A bonus for doing them live is you can take live Q&A and help your audience further.
Do product reviews
What are consumers constantly looking for? Validation.
Reviews are critical, everyone knows. If you have the opportunity to review products or services cohesively on your site, you should give it a try. Pair this with affiliate links for the best result.
Sell your website
Maybe this was on the top of everyone’s mind. When selling a website, it’s important to build up your following with visitors and gain an idea of how much your site could continue growing.
Monetizing with Ezoic will show historical trends in your data to give the best estimate on how much your website is worth.
To learn more, here’s a tremendous guest post we featured about buying and selling websites.
Bonus Ezoic Strategies
This segment talks about ways to earn more, specifically within the Ezoic ecosystem. All of these features can be accessed within your Ezoic Levels dashboard in the Scores section.
Scores are new, so be sure to study up on all that this feature offers when you receive access – and see how it’ll help optimize your site with ease.
Below are the five additional ways to optimize your Ezoic account.
Create placeholders
Naturally, one of the first things you’ll do in Ezoic is create placeholders. A placeholder is a potential ad location.
To get the best results, we recommend adding 10+ placeholders per page. This does not mean that 10+ ads will show – oftentimes only a handful are selected to show ads – but it does give the system the ability to test hundreds of thousands of different ad combinations to find what works best.
The two ways to add placeholders are through Ezoic’s Chrome extension or manually through the ‘Monetization’ tab under ‘Ad Tester’ settings.
Anchor Ads
Anchor ads are a “sticky” type of ad unit that remain in a fixed location as the user scrolls on the page. They are available for both mobile and desktop.
Anchor ads are important for monetization because they are typically high earners due to the high viewability and engagement of these units.
Toggle these ‘ON’. Also located in the ‘Ad Tester Settings’
Ads.txt
Using an Ads.txt file is an industry-standard way to reduce ad fraud on your website. It’s a small text which is accessible from the root of your domain (for example mydomain.com/ad.txt) that contains a list of all the ad networks you’ll allow to show ads on your site.
First, click ‘TURN ON’ in the Ads.text box in the ‘Monetization’ tab.
Next, set up your Adstxtmanager account.
Ezoic uses a free web service called Adstxtmanager to help you easily manage your ads.txt file. It’s easy to use and lets you update your file via the web.
Sellers.JSON
Sellers.JSON is similar to Ads.txt, but it’s SSP’s (Supply Side Platform) version of the publisher’s ads.txt file.
In the file, SSPs and exchanges are required to list all their authorized reseller partners along with their seller ID and any detail on the legal entity that owns that company.
Sellers.JSON gives ad buyers information on every reseller involved in serving ads on your side, and can result in more confidence and likelihood to increase ad spend.
You can verify that your Sellers.JSON settings are filled in by going to the ‘Monetization’ tab of your Ezoic dashboard.
AI Placeholders
AI Placeholders are potential ad locations that are automatically and intelligently added to your site’s mobile pages by Ezoic’s AI technology.
Having more placeholders for Ezoic’s system to test is directly correlated to increased revenue and improved user experience.
By including AI placeholders alongside the ones added manually or through Ezoic’s Chrome extension, you can easily increase revenue on your site.
To activate AI placeholders, follow the steps below:
- Click the ‘Monetization’ tab in your Ezoic Dashboard
- Scroll to the Ad Tester app and click ‘On/Off Settings’
- Toggle AI placeholders to ‘On’
Conclusion
With everything said, try new approaches and see what works best for you. As aforementioned, taking all these steps and putting them together may not create the best outcome.
For example, if subscriptions are a big focus on a page and convert to good revenue, it’s likely that a donation section on the same page would be negatively affected in terms of its production.
What’s more, the effectiveness of one will always come at the price of another so finding that perfect balance for your audience is key.
The good thing is, with data you’ll be able to see what’s working well and what’s not.
In Big Data Analytics, it’s easy to see your changes in revenue and traffic. Just like when you’re testing or making changes to your site, the best way to do so is to make them incrementally and study what happens to your metrics.
Our CMO Tyler said it himself best – whatever you choose to do, just know the most successful publishers are good at writing unique content and usually either passionate about a subject, an expert in a subject, or do the hard work to create different content than what exists today.
