I recently wrote an article about 101 Ways To Make Money Using The Internet. The post detailed all of the ways that you can make money via entrepreneurial ventures. I received quite a few emails from blog owners asking how they could increase the traffic to their website. Your ability to monetize your website depends heavily on the popularity of your website. You can receive more money from direct ad sales, ad networks, and affiliates based upon your website’s reach. I have learned a lot about increasing your website’s advertising potential from Aaron Wall of SEOTools, Maki from Dosh Dosh, and Sam from the Yakezie Network. Each of them has taught me something different about what it takes to monetize a website.
Here are a 3 easy ways to increase your blog’s earnings potential.
1. Increase Your Alexa Ranking.
Your Alexa ranking matters because many advertisers use this ranking to determine the cost of placing ads on your site. The higher your Alexa ranking, the more that you can potentially charge for ad space. The number 1 way to increase your Alexa ranking is by downloading the Alexa Toolbar. Alexa is a subsidiary of Amazon.com and measures the Internet ranking of websites around the world. Your Alexa ranking will tell you the number of sites in the world that are more popular than your site. The lower that you site is ranked, the more accurate your site’s metrics. For example a site ranked 2 million will have statistics that are less accurate than a site that is ranked 100,000.
Alexa relies on the toolbar to track the metrics of a site. These metrics include pageviews per user, time on site, bounce rate, search traffic, demographics, and etc. All of these are useful tools to advertisers because it helps them to judge the value of placing an ad on your site.
2. Increase your Google PageRank.
Let me start by saying that I have read a million articles (maybe not 1 million exactly) on the components of Google Page Rank. I have come across many different formulas that have tried to figure out the algorithms that Google uses. The truth is that no one knows all of the metrics that comprise Google’s ranking system. The one component that all SEO aficionados agree on is that backlinks matter in determining page rank. If you want to increase your website’s page rank then you need more backlinks. Backlinks are simply when another website links to your site. You can gett backlinks in a variety of ways (leaving comments on DoFollow websites, writing guest posts with attribution links, having another site add you to their blogroll).
The most valuable backlinks are when a higher ranked site links to your site. This doesn’t mean pestering sites with higher page ranks for links but cultivating relationships with other sites that may link to yours over time. Increasing your page rank takes patience and dedication. While Alexa rankings are updated on a daily basis, Google page rankings are only updated a few times a year.
3. Increase your Feedburner subscribers.
Visitors to your website may visit once and never return. For example, every visitor that clicks an ad is a potentially lost reader. That’s why it’s important to get the maximum ad dollars for your site. You don’t want to lose a site reader for a 10 cent gain. Really Simple Syndication (RSS) is a family of web feed formats used to publish updates of your blog. RSS subscribers are loyal readers that view your content on a regular basis. The more subscribers that you have to your RSS feed, the greater your potential marketing reach. You can build a buzz about your blog and other sites can link in to your blog’s content. This will ultimately lead to increased traffic for your website. Subscribe to my blog!
The advantage of these 3 tools is that they give you 3 easily verifiable measurements that you can show to potential advertisers. As each of these numbers increase so should the dollars flowing in for your site.
What do you consider the most important valuation tool when selling ad space on you site?
You forgot the most important criterion of them all – quality content!
Excellent point Moneycone! I just assumed that quality content was a given.
I hope most people just focus on blogging and networking for 6 good months first. The money will come, and so will all the stats eventually!
Very true Sam.
Good tips!
Some great tips but I think eventually Alexa will fall by the way side. The traffic statistics they produce are heavily flawed and advertisers understand that.
Tim, I think Alexa is here to stay because of its ability to make stats readily available. I think that is Alexa’s advantage over Page Rank. Google Pagerank is incredible accurate but it takes so long to update that an advertiser cannot tell if a site’s page rank is the same or has changed dramatically over the past few months.
The theme of your blog is likely even more important to valuation – and finance is a valuable one. Also I think those 3 measures are outcomes that indicate the success of what you have done to provide something users like. Creating good content is the most important thing you can do I think. Then you need to market. And blogs provide a nice way to find like minded individuals that can help you gain readers and links. Reading and commenting on blogs can help. Compete is similar to Alexa but probably more accurate (but they basically don’t provide data for sites unless they are pretty popular top 100,000? because compete doesn’t want to provide misleading info without reasonable data). Getting comments on your blog can also be a good measure of the engagement you have with readers.
Great points John!
Thanks for the research into this. Your work has saved me a considerable amount of research. I have Alexa, and one back link. A few RSS subscribers now too. We’ll keep working at it!
@MoneyCome, @FinancialSamuari and @JH – thanks for the additional info!
Thank you for your comments, but I remain confussed by it all. I have opened a web store, and need people to come to it. Does it mean I have to try and find sites with a higher page rank and write something on all of them.
Robert, how do you currently advertise your store?
A few people recommended alexage.They brought my site to Alexa’s top 50K in less than 90 days