Top ways to optimize your website’s advertising revenue potential
by Charles Frank
ContextWeb Publisher Advisor
Follow these easy steps to optimize your site’s potential to earn advertising revenue, even if you have very limited resources:
Choose the right advertising network
Make sure that you choose the advertising network that fits best with the content of your site. Test different ad networks to maximise revenue, but most importantly, choose an ad network that shows relevant ads for your target market. Remember to retest the “losing” networks every few months to ensure you are maximising your revenue.
Have high quality content
If you don’t have high quality content, you won’t have any repeat visitors. Generally, content in demand gets higher paying advertisers, but also remember that even if you serve a small niche market, you will get higher paying advertisers if you have the best content in the category. Choose a category or subject that you are knowledgeable in and make sure that you can generate enough content to keep the site updated frequently. This will also increase return visitors. Also, updating your site frequently with new content (or even rotating existing content) will ensure that search engine spiders come back to index your site more often.
Custom Article index pages
Bring visitors (and search engine spiders) back into your site by having custom 404 pages that link back into your site’s content. Ensuring that a visitor is always presented with some content, or a way to get back into content from a non-existing or outdated link to your site will not lead to a lost visitor (or lost search engine visit).
Pre-populated search queries
To associate your articles with important keywords, link them to pre-populated search pages on your site. Then place advertising around the search results.
Have high-paying ads in the right place on the article
Don’t put too many ads on a page. Visitors quickly lose confidence in your site if they feel it is too commercially driven. It is the content they want, after all, not the ads. Place unobtrusive ads (no pop-ups or pop-unders) in your site. Place relevant ads on your site that relates to the target audience. If you’re using an ad network and they don’t show relevant ads – switch to another ad network. Irrelevant, but high paying ads may be good for short term revenue, but it will ultimately be bad for your image and brand.
Keep visitors in your site with simple “article tools”
Have modules with “Related Articles”, “Most Read Articles” and/or “Most Emailed” articles on your home page and article page template pages to keep visitors in your site.
Use “social networking tools” to get visitors into your site
Add icons to community-based news websites, like digg.com and reddit.com to your article pages. This makes it easier for visitors and users of those sites to make a social bookmark in a community-based website to your page. Make sure to choose the right ones – some of those sites specialize in a particular category and you want to list those that are more relevant to you. Frequently visit those sites to see which of them have featured your articles in the past.
RSS
If you don’t have a RSS feed by now – get one! Something important to note with RSS feeds is the impact that a really good article title has on visitor numbers. The problem many sites have with RSS feeds is that articles titles are not catchy enough for users to click on them. Your articles should have short, to-the-point article titles. Obviously different target audiences will have different preferences, but “how-to” articles and “lists”, like “Top N of X” perform well across most audiences. Article titles don’t have to be the same in your site and in your RSS feed - almost the same way that article titles differ on the cover of a magazine from the inside. Test good titles by giving your RSS articles a slightly different URL (e.g. /rss/article_title instead of /article/article_title) than the articles shown on your site. You can then look in your logs which RSS titles have performed well with your audience. A good way to find out what works, is actually to look at magazines in your category’s covers.
Charles Frank is the COO at Sussex Publishers, a privately owned media and publishing company where he directs the SEO and SEM for an online directory of professionals and the distribution of online content. Previously, as a Business Development Manager for the largest retail company in Africa, he was responsible for the development of a new store concept and oversaw the development of the company’s E-Business strategy and B2B platform. He was also involved in implementing Business Intelligence systems. He started his career as an accountant at Invesco and JPMorgan. He has a MBA from University of Stellenbosch, South Africa.
-- From The ContextWeb Advisors
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