The Three First Important Steps Towards Generating Advertising Revenue On Your Website.

It's a common dream to want to build a website, have an extensive amount of website traffic and rake in advertising revenue whilst relaxing on a beach - but an unrealistic one for most people and businesses.

If a startup wants to get the attention of investors, it needs to show large growth - we're talking like $50 million revenue in a five year period. Today, without highly specialised targetting, the rule-of-thumb expectation should be no more than $1 in advertising revenue per 1000 page views. 

To get to $50 million in revenue you would need 50 billion page views in a year, or just over 4 billion per month. To give you an idea in principal, Facebook now has over 1 trillion page views and has been profitable only in the last four years, and thats with hundreds of millions in funding!

Before I get into the ways in which to generate ad revenue, let me state the obvious:

• Higher priced products and larger organisations can afford to pay more for advertising than low-priced products and smaller organisations.
• Only targetted advertising will ever be clicked on. If you put a fast food banner onto a fitness website, you won't sell much excitement or interest.
• Advertising is priced on supply and demand. Right now there is an unlimited supply of web pages on the internet, but if your site does not have a valuable target audience then you will not be noticed by advertisers.

# Now lets look at the first three steps for generating advertising revenue..

A website owners most valuable asset is the websites audience. Remember, advertisers buy audiences, not adspace. 

# Provide High Quality Content

Advertisers will only pay you for advertising if it helps them make money. To make them money, your website needs regular visitors. To get regular visitors, you need to generate unique and relevant content to engage with consumers so they regularly come back to the website for more.

The best way to publish unique and relevant content is through a blog!

You can view my blog post about the best free blogging platforms by clicking here.

# Optimising Your Content With Keywords

Before posting and showing off all the unique content you've created, you need to optimise your content around high-priced keywords. You can use Google AdWords Keyword Planner to find out what keywords get the highest bids in your niche.

Keyword Optimisation needs to be completed in two primary ways:

1. Keyword Focus: Select 10-20 of the highest priced keywords for your industry, then write content about these topics. 
2. Keyword Placement: Where appropriate, put these high priced keywords into title tags, subheadings, photo tags, filenames for graphics and in the first and last paragraph.

Having great content is not enough, you want to focus your efforts on the most profitable topics that will attract greater traffic to your site.

Learn how to optimise your content here.

# Generating Traffic

It goes without saying that a lack of traffic to your website will not generate much advertising revenue. If you want to attract advertisers, you need to make yourself available. This includes using sound SEO principles to rank well on search engines.

You can read the beginners guide to SEO here.

Another key part of generating traffic is demonstrated through successful link building. Get links and recommendations to your website from other sites, blogs, social media sites and directories.

You can read the beginners guide to link building here.

The final option for generating traffic is paying for advertising to get people onto your website. If you were to try and sell directly to advertisers, the first question they would ask you would be about the number of monthly unique visitors and pageviews on your website. Unless you have healthy numbers that makes advertising on your site worth it, they wont bother. Google Adwords is a good place to start and options are available for startups, SME's and large organisations.

You can read my blog about why your small business should be using Google AdWords to increase profits here.

References

 
Heng, C. (2014). How to Make Money From Your Website through Affiliate Programs (thesitewizard.com). [online] Thesitewizard.com. Available at: http://www.thesitewizard.com/archive/makemoney.shtml [Accessed 7 May. 2014].

Wiebesick, C. (2014). A Startup’s Guide to Generating Online Ad Revenue - 'Net Features - Website Magazine. [online] Websitemagazine.com. Available at: http://www.websitemagazine.com/content/blogs/posts/pages/Startup-Guide-to-Generating-Online-Ad-Revenue.aspx [Accessed 7 May. 2014].

Wilson, D. (2014). 8 Steps to Developing Ad Revenue from Your Website. [online] Available at: http://webmarketingtoday.com/articles/wilson-ad-revenue-4/ [Accessed 7 May. 2014].

Zwilling, M. (2012). Startup Professionals Musings: Website Ads are Not a Revenue Stream for Startups. [online] Blog.startupprofessionals.com. Available at: http://blog.startupprofessionals.com/2012/03/website-ads-are-not-revenue-stream-for.html [Accessed 7 May. 2014].