Content Based Site: What are your thoughts on this monetization strategy?

[Richard]

Hurricane Irma is barreling towards my home- South Florida. A lot of people are in a frenzy, and I see opportunity here to do even more of my work.

Grateful this place exists. Cheers.

I'm working on an information/content based website, with the long term goal in my mind to expand. I'm going to set up a site targeting an ideal market using Word Press. Yet, I noticed something very important.

I usually write to clear my mind when something doesn't make sense to me, or when I encounter an obstacle. This is what I came up with; once my site it set up I have to populate it with content, which will be a driving force for monetization strategies like getting advertisers.

Getting advertisers, or high volume of traffic can take a while. Unless I'm completely wrong and misunderstand the concept, getting more traffic will take time. However, I need income to be generated to have something to show to others; peers, family members overwhelming me etc.

I want to say "look my project is actually making me something for now." I want to have something to show.

Thus, I'm thinking I'll broadcast a service I'm offering on my site. For instance, lets say I'm working on a fitness content site. What if I create a tab on the navigation menu offering a videography service? Maybe I'll get clients that way, and I can show others while my main monetization strategy (advertising etc) hasn't kicked into full gear yet, I'm making money.

What do you think? Does it make sense to you, or do you need further elaboration? Maybe an online store would fare better?

 

[Sutra]

You didn't say how you plan to get instant traffic. If you're gonna do SEO you will be waiting a long time.

DO create content that is intended to pull in organic. But ALSO promote your content on forums, social media, etc. That way you'll get traffic quickly from forums and such, while also positioning yourself long term with the SEO content.

Peeps here call it traffic leaking. Look it up.

 

[Richard]

You didn't say how you plan to get instant traffic. If you're gonna do SEO you will be waiting a long time.

DO create content that is intended to pull in organic. But ALSO promote your content on forums, social media, etc. That way you'll get traffic quickly from forums and such, while also positioning yourself long term with the SEO content.

Peeps here call it traffic leaking. Look it up.

I get what you're saying. Thanks, man.

You're right about the need to promote content on all platforms to generate traffic.

Didn't think about how I intended to get instant traffic. I was focused on what content I was going to create exactly, and how to make money.

I'd like to stress I don't know what the best monetization method is for my site yet. I'm thinking deeply about it. That's why I came up with the idea of making some money by linking to a service I can offer I.E. videography.

 

[CCarter]

I'd like to stress I don't know what the best monetization method is for my site yet.

Day 9 - Monetization - shows you different monetization methods for different types of websites.

 

[turbin3]

Getting advertisers, or high volume of traffic can take a while. Unless I'm completely wrong and misunderstand the concept, getting more traffic will take time. However, I need income to be generated to have something to show to others; peers, family members overwhelming me etc.

In most cases, that's the truth. The way I look at it, organic traffic is "drive by" traffic. For many sites, it can take forever to build. Considering time is a finite resource, most of us can't afford to wait. Best to take care of the fundamentals of on-site optimization, to the degree that is efficient, as well as best practices for writing good content, and then move on to off-site or other more productive efforts.

The real meat and potatoes is all of the off-site efforts to connect that content with thought leaders and influencers that will help amplify your visibility, communities where your user base are often found, among other things. A few wins there can drive far more traffic than the organic you might be waiting 6-12 months for.

Of course, there's always ballers out there, like Hearst, who can spin up yet another site, drop a few sitewide internal links from other properties, seed some content, and drive massive traffic within days or weeks. That's not 99% of us.

 

[Richard]

@turbin3 I get what you're saying.

How realistic is it to generate income within a month with info/entertainment content? I know it's more realistic for something like an ecommerce site. Results may vary, but shit if I have a solid plan, within a month shouldn't be too crazy.

I'm eager, cause I got laid off and I see this as an opportunity to go balls deep in my new venture.

 

[Ryuzaki]

How realistic is it to generate income within a month with info/entertainment content?

This is my main shtick, not because it's the best option, but it's a goal I set for myself a long time ago and I'm stubborn. It works, it's just a lot harder than a lot of other scalable ways to make cash.

Here's a brain dump to give you some context to your question...

Here's a pic I pulled out of my "year end round-up" post at the end of 2016:

This is the organic traffic ONLY. You can't even tell, but the entire 1st year (the orange line) is nearly non-existent. Then the blue line starts the same way and we're off to the races. It takes a LONG time to get organic going, and in that first year I got an unbelievable amount of links from some powerful domains, lots of mid-tier, and even more low-tier. Even if you do everything right, it takes forever. But he who makes it to that point gets the additional passive income, so def stick it out if you're serious about this.

In the meantime, look at my traffic from ALL sources:

Those blue spikes are giant influxes of traffic from actively marketing in places like Reddit and Facebook. Admittedly there should be a lot more but I had the cash reserves to focus on SEO, which I chose to do. But my point is... where is that growing organic traffic curve on that picture? It's nowhere to be seen. It's in there, but it's dwarfed by the active promotion. And I'm telling you, it's the easiest thing in the world to run around the net, pretend to not be yourself, and promote your content around.

The caveat is you want big numbers, you're not going to get high-buying-intent traffic. You're going to get people playing around on their phones and tablets for the most part. That's not bad if you know how to handle it.

Which comes down to the question of monetization. The answer is... what type of content are you promoting while you wait on SEO to kick in? If it's review content then you need to be promoting on forums where people are researching and learning about items to purchase. If it's hit-and-run Reddit traffic, then slap CPM ads on the page so you get paid regardless what they do.

The three questions are:

1. Where am I getting the traffic from?
2. What mind-state are the visitors in?
3. What content is most appropriate for their current mind-state?

You have to ask those questions all at the same time, and then choose your target page, the target place online you're marketing to, and understand their motivations at the time. Then and only then can you choose the appropriate monetization.

This is why, when you see viral sites all over the net, they're slammed with CPM ads. They remove all other considerations so all they have to do is focus on promoting their sites. They make a ton of money on scale but they leave so much on the table too.

Typically, if I have no "active promotion" traffic rolling in, I'm sitting around 20 live visitors at all times, 24/7. But they're high-buying-intent traffic that make me a ton of cash. But here's an example of front-paging Reddit:

Being ill-equipped, I turned that into about $800 bucks through lucky Adsense clicks and getting them cookied on Amazon. Had I had a solid CPM waterfall or header-bidding setup going, I could have tripled or quadrupled that amount. And while you won't always hit the motherload of traffic, there's really no reason you can't be pulling down $300-$500 in earnings a day once you get set-up with all of your monetization in the right place. Of course that assumes you have a huge cache of content published that has the potential to gain that kind of traffic. Because once you're going hard on promotion there's little time to create the content.

The other thing is, there's no better way to get off-page SEO done than to be planting links on high traffic sites and letting them spread out to low traffic forums and groups by those who see it and like it.

So then, how do you mix and match these "intent" types of content on your site? You can have a "blog" that's nothing but viral stuff and set that category up with CPC and CPM ads. They'll gather links and social signals too, so you'll want to interlink them to the content you want to rank. And those you can tuck off somewhere else, in another parent category like "articles," which feature informational / educational / product review content. My point is, it's easy to isolate these in the infrastructure so you can apply your monetization with simple if-loops based on category. There's a million other ways of doing it too.

With a big ass content site, you're not stuck doing one thing or another. There are a lot of TYPES of content sites and you can be all of those at once. With the main benefit being that you widen your ability to actively market your site and recoup cash as you do it, even from shitty social traffic.

What you don't want to do is start mixing different types of sites. There's no reason for a content site to roll out an e-commerce section. You can have products, of course, but a full blown 30,000 item drop shipping section, it's silly. A boat can only have one captain and can only aim in one direction.

TL;DR: Yes, it can be done.

 

[Richard]

Awesome, thanks. I learned a shit ton from your post.

Of course that assumes you have a huge cache of content published that has the potential to gain that kind of traffic.

I'm still determining my monetization method, which you helped me with, but I don't have any content yet. I want to provide high-quality content, because it's exciting.

It'll take a lot of work to get populate my new site. I'm going to think deeply about an effective content strategy, but I can use some advice on the subject.

With everything I've got to do, I'm already considering hiring extra help. What do you recommend considering I want some income generated within a month? I have no content yet.

Also

The caveat is you want big numbers, you're not going to get high-buying-intent traffic.

What do you use to measure buyer intent?

 

[CCarter]

What do you use to measure buyer intent?

It's based on the Keywords. Day 6 - Keyword Research tells you how to understand buyer's intent when choosing the right keywords to go after in the funnel process:

A – attention (awareness) (Informational): attracts the attention of the customer.
I – interest (Navigational): of the customer.
D – desire (Commercial): convince customers that they want and desire the product or service and that it will satisfy their needs.
A – action (Transactional): lead customers towards taking action and/or purchasing.
​

Transactional are the keywords that have the highest buyer intent - they will have the highest CPC since more Advertisers are bidding on those terms versus Informational terms where people are just getting to know what a subject matter even is. Concentrating on Commercial and Transactional (Affiliate or direct selling is best monetization) will get you bigger bang per visitor, but the amount of people at that level is going to be considerable lower than users at the Informational part of the funnel (CPM and Adsense CPC monetization would be best for them).

The funnel also shows you what type of content and pillar categories to create and navigate people towards as you interlink to lower and lower funnel stages until you convince them to do an "Action".

 

[Richard]

@CCarter Yeah I need to hit up the Crash Course again. Thanks for the reference.

I'm now understanding better it'll be best to create content for each of stages in the funnel.