Make Money Online | Making Money On The Internet

There is a lot of online money for grabs for astute internet marketers and webmasters.

I was recently browsing through some of the websites for sale on flippa.com looking for some bargains. I often do this on the weekend when I wind down from the regular day-to-day work I do online. In fact, I bought this site about 12 months ago. Buying a website that is already up and running is a great way to jump into the game if you’re new and a way to build your portfolio of site quickly when you know what you’re doing. There’s a lot of online money for grabs here.

You can often find sites with great traffic, but no income that can be bought cheaply and then optimize that traffic. I’m regularly amazed at how many webmasters know little about making money online. I know that’s not everyone’s priority, but heck, if you can make a few bucks while still getting off on writing about the subjects you love why not? It’s often just as easy as sticking up some Adsense ads or creating a newsletter and promoting affiliate products.

There are three niches I find these sites regularly: sports, parenting and gaming. The thing about sports fans, parents and gamers is they are very passionate about what they do and they write a lot of content and update regularly. This attracts the attention of the Search Engines and gets them good rankings and traffic. They also have a lot of other people linking to them naturally – again, because of the passion behind their sites. The thing is these niches aren’t that easy to monetize (and lets face it, most people are totally hopeless when it comes to optimized monetization on the internet).

Sometimes it’s as easy as moving the Adsense blocks around on the site to get more attention. Because of their passion for their niche the webmasters of these sites are often reluctant to put advertising in prominent places, not wanting to distract from the all important content. While I applaud this, I also note that when your content is good, people don’t mind having a few ads on a page. I’m not advocating turning a popular site into a mess of advertising. That’s not how you get online money for grabs. Far from it. In fact, usually the less ads of a page the better your Adsense click-through-rate is going to be and the more you’ll earn per click (if you’re doing Adsense, anyway). That’s why I’m using the word ‘optimization’.

Some of the simple techniques I’ve used to improve a website’s online income include:

1. adding Adsense when there has been none

2. moving existing advertising up from below the fold

3. adding a newsletter and selling backend products

4. doing related affiliate product reviews

5. selling links/banner/text advertising space.

There are also some more advanced methods that I’ll write another post about.

The main thing that makes a website appealing to me and make me think of buying it is the potential of the traffic it is receiving. It all comes back to traffic. If there is a good steady flow of both unique and repeat visitors I know I can almost always monetize it. I mean, I once heard of a guy who built up a site with the sole purpose of directing traffic to a particular businesses website for free. After a few months of sending heavy traffic to the site the guy rings up the business and asks him if he’s seen an increase in sales. The guy says ‘yeah, thanks!’ which is when the website owner says, right, pay me $x.00 a month and I’ll keep sending the traffic, otherwise I’ll make a deal with your competitors and send them the leads!

The lesson is that traffic almost always can be turned into online money for grabs if are willing to do a bit of work and get creative.

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