How do you monetise a website?

That is a good question, I am glad you asked.

No I dont have one that I prepared earlier, as I want to know the answer to this one too.

I have a menagerie of websites, none of them is properly monetised.

The issue isnt really that of getting enough traffic, really, it is all about finding the right advertisers. But to attract the right advertisers you have to have enough traffic.

What a vicious cycle.

So, you end up spending all your on SEO and trying to increase your visitors and pages numbers, but you have to be doing that while you get only loose change for revenue.

So, how do I attract advertisers?

Basically the advertisers arent the issue, it is the Ad Reps that you have to attract, then it is their job to find the advertisers. I have a sneaking suspicion that the advertisers is the easy bit though.

Ad Reps wont touch your site until you get at least 100,000 UB’s ( or Unique Visitors in the old measurement ) a month. They want that PER SITE too, so if you run a network of sites you are going to have to be generating that traffic on at least one of your sites, not the aggregate.

Now realistically, if you have that much traffic, call it 300,000 - 400,000 page impressions, you can, even at crap CPM rates, get a bit of pocket money out of your standard google adsense.

ie at a $0.10 CPM rate, which might be the bottom of the scale, you would earn $40 a month or if you can up the CPM rate by actively targetting and removing the cheap advertisers, you could be looking at $1 CPM rate which would get you $400 a month.

Now $400 a month isnt too bad as a bit of pocket money, until you think of it this way.

If you could sell al your inventory, 400,000 pages, at a cheap run of site rate of $6 CPM then you would be earning $2,400 a month for only one banner position.

If you have 4 positions on each page which isnt unreasonably, then you could be earning up to  $9,600 a month.

Imagine that!!

In this example, the difference between  $160-$1,600 a month for Adsense to $9,600 for cheap run of sites is a big difference. ( note, you are reasonably unlikely to get the $1 CPM on that many impressions using Adsense )

Use targetted CPM rates of $25 though and you are talking REAL money of about  $40,000 a month.

Anyway, enough schwartzing as I call it ( that is another story for another time - but basically schwartzing referrs to the “you can make this much money from a website just by multiplying out the figures and not actually working ont he website ).

There is an answer that might just work for you in the interim, although it hasnt given me any luck to date.

The Rubicon Project (http://www.rubiconproject.com) looks promising in that they agregate all sorts of publishers and display the banners with a single tag on your site. They take 10% or gross to optimise the campaigns for you, which is actually a bargain as they seem to do a wonterful job of weeding out the cheap CPM campaigns.

You do have to have accounts at all their advertisers to make it all work but that is pretty simple.

I have been running it for a while and have had a mixed bag of results.

So is there a Magic Bullet for monetisation?

SHort answer, No, not that I have found but you can be sure of one thing, I am not going to stop looking.