5 Ways to Maximize Content Monetization

Content monetization is getting money from your site’s content. Everybody knows how to monetize their site’s dedicated advertising space, but how do you monetize the rest of your site?

After years of experience in the industry, I’ve found some tips that will help you increase content monetization by squeezing every drop of revenue out of your site’s content.

1)      Lead generation

 When somebody signs up for your site, you usually get their name, email, gender, age, and possibly even their phone number. Companies pay big money for this information, which they use as sales leads to contact potential customers.

2)      Mailing lists

 These same lists can be further monetized in a mailing list or newsletter. Targeted ads can then be placed in the newsletter. It’s good to not send newsletters out too frequently since most of the readers will start treating them as spam.

3)      Monthly banner ads

 Monthly banner ads are one of the oldest methods of making money online. Essentially, a company pays your site a monthly fee to rent a banner space, much like an offline billboard ad. It can be hard to find companies that will still rent banner space for a set amount of time, but if you do it can be more lucrative than a PPC or PPA ad for a site with very few visitors.

4)      Free stuff

 Offer free e-books, free samples, and free trials to acquire leads. You can then monetize these leads just like how you would monetize the registration information of somebody who registers for your site.

5)      In-Text Monetization

 Put affiliate links on existing and new text so that you get paid each time someone clicks the link. It’s pretty inconvenient to go to potential sites one-by-one and place the links manually, so most site owners go through companies like INTENTclick (which works with sites about making money online and saving money) to automatically place the links for them. Plus, this enables targeted ads: A link on the word “movies” might take  someone who   plays Left 4 Dead to a coupon for tickets to a local showing of the latest  zombie apocalypse horror, while somebody who likes vampires might be taken to a  coupon for tickets to Twilight.

Some of these tips only work well for certain sites, but others are more or less universal. For example, while sites with lots of visitors shouldn’t really sell banner space by the month, pretty much any coupon blog can sign up with an in-text monetization company and monetize their site’s text content. Think over each tip and figure out which ones work best for you and think about how you should go about implementing them.

Disclaimer: I work for the company INTENTclick. You can learn more about in-text monetization and other Internet advertising techniques in the free e-book “INTENTclick: In-Text Advertising Secrets”.