Many clients have this question, either because they don’t see the potential, or they don’t see the value in their site. I have said before, and I will say it again – the most basic formula for dollars is content = traffic = money. So, lets walk through this using 2 business models.
First there is the brick-and-mortar store that has a web site. They want local traffic so that they can have buying customers walking through their doors or calling them on the phone. Or perhaps regional or national traffic buying from their shopping cart. I always tell my brick-and-mortar customers to attempt to get the answer to “How did you hear about us?” and track it from their walk-in or phone-in customers. The answer to these questions is vital to any advertising, but it really helps you develop your sales copy for the web site. The content on your site is vital for 2 things – the organic traffic, which we have discussed in other posts, and also the compelling copy that gets the person to visit your brick-and-mortar shop or pick up the telephone.
The second type of monetization is a content site – attract the traffic with general information about a subject, and put advertising on your site. This works well if you don’t have a brick-and-mortar store or ecommerce. You are capitalizing on the traffic because you want them to click on the ads in your site. You can get people to pay by the impression(usually expressed in $/1000 views of the ads), by the click(google adsense or, I prefer bidvertiser to publish on my sites) or by the month (say $10 per month for a text link – how much someone is willing to pay is ultimately determined by your traffic volume as well)
So, these are the 2 basic methods of monetization once you get visitors to your site.