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].

The Top Five Free Blogging Platforms

Publishing content on a blog is like putting a human face on your brand, differentiating you from your competition and educating prospects and clients.

Many bloggers do not focus on themselves, instead, they focus on publishing long-form, brilliant articles that put their talent and knowledge on display. A blog with consistent, truthful and helpful content will allow you to bridge that gap between distrust and trust.

So What Are The Best Free Blogging Platforms Available On The Market? 

#5 - Svbtle

Pros - New, Writing is the centerpiece, custom domains, super responsive, fantastic Kudos system, great mobile layout.
Cons - Overcomplicated (Such as editorial subheadlines), magazine-like home page doesn’t filter content by category, image uploading doesn’t always work, needs tags/pagination

With the Svbtle platform now open to the public, its stripped-down take on layouts and post creation will be quite inspirational for anyone looking for a focused and responsive and clear-cut experience. Writing, in particular, feels tremendously inspiring despite the platform’s overly simplistic post editor, and page/post layouts do well with trimming off all unnecessary fluff and filler.

However, this soothing simplicity does come at a cost of disparity. With so few customization options available, creating a distinct look and feel for your blog is out of the question. And despite the platform’s custom domain support, your work — much like Medium — is still under the Svbtle banner instead of your own.

#4 - Wordpress

Pros - Elegance & Ease
Cons - Less Customisation & Fussy With Certain Features

This open-source platform is one of the most assiduous and capable blogging platforms ever constructed for popular use. The blog is saturated with a healthy dose of themes, plugins, and widgets that help pave the way for veterans and new users alike. Unlike the aforementioned Tumblr however, WordPress is a intuitive platform rooted in customization and a sprawling back end, allowing users to perform a diverse sundry of customization tasks and deep level of control regarding nearly all components of the suite. Initially creating a blog is simple and straightforward, whether you opt for an elaborate premium theme or choose one of the hundreds of freemium offerings


#3 - Blogger

Pros - Easy Setup, Simple Design & Layout, No Custom Coding Required, Huge Communities, Track Blog Statistics.
Cons - Does Not Support Custom Coding, Limited Opportunities To Monetise, Unprofessional Design Options.

Though incredibly easy to set up and use via a Google account, Blogger is enriched by a premiere host of customised utilities and design improvements carried out by Google over the course of the last couple years. Less tech-savvy users won’t find their lack of programming knowledge and HTML coding to be a hindrance due the platform’s drag-and-drop design and dynamic updating. Furthermore, It features all the traditional posting options we’ve come to expect on a dedicated platform — including text, video, images, etc — while additional options for geotagging location, incorporating RSS content and toggling between multiple languages are all readily available within the hassle-free backend. 

#2 - Tumblr

Pros - Simple & Easy To Use, Ability To Share Work, Integrates With Google Analytics, Ability To Use Custom Themes
Cons - Not Ideal For Conducting Business

Whereas many popular blogs boast a confounding number of features and customisation options, Tumblr revels in simplicity and ease of use. The platform remains ideal for publishing short-form ruminations and image posts, offering sleek layouts optimized for artwork and photos, while housing additional post options for text, links, music, video, and quotes. It’s not equipped with a particularly complex backend, making it ideal for first-time users and those looking to post within minutes of signing up, but the front end also tends to visually attractive enough to warrant the general lack of complex features. Still, customization and minor tweaks to the UI are available in the top-right corner when viewing your blog — such as theme and page changes — and the site won’t charge you a dime to use a separate domain name should you figure out how to register one elsewhere.


 #1 - Google+

Pros - Google Circles, Photography, 'Hangout' Feature, Multi-Language, Authorship, Rankings, Gmail Integration, Chat, Mobile Chat, Mobile Publishing.
Cons - Less Engagement Features Than Other Blogs Such As Wordpress

As is the case with Tumblr, people who discover your Google+ blog can follow or "circle" you. But follower growth happens faster on Google+ for several reasons. First, people share more actively -- by clicking two buttons, anyone can repost what you posted to all of their followers. If enough people do that, your post could make it to the Google+ "What's Hot" list, and a million people might read it. 

Second, your readers can share you as part of a circle. Good bloggers end up on circles that are shared and reshared -- circles with names like "Technology Women" or "Home Beer Brewers" or "Foodies." Once you start getting shared in these circles, it never stops, it only grows and grows, as more people add the circle and reshare it themselves. 

Blogging on Google+ sets you free. You can write entries of nearly unlimited length and post an unlimited number of pictures. Readers can click a button to discuss your post in a Hangout (a group video chat). You can edit, re-edit, share, reshare and link to anything (including Google+ Search or Google Search). You can narrow the readership of your post if you want by simply addressing it to circles rather than "Public." You can toggle commenting on and off, delete comments, mute or block users and much more. 

Further Reading:

Blogger. (2014). THE Best Places to Blog. Available: http://www.dearblogger.org/blogger-or-wordpress-better. Last accessed 16th April 2014.

Elgan, M. (2012). Why I Blog On Google+. Available: http://www.computerworld.com/s/article/9232329/Why_I_blog_on_Google_And_how_. Last accessed 16th April 2014.

Haines, B. (2013). The 10 Best Blogging Platforms. Available: http://onlinebusiness.about.com/od/blogging/a/The-10-Best-Blogging-Platforms.htm. Last accessed 16th April 2014. 

Patel, N. (2012). 7 Reasons Why Blogging Is Still Important in 2012. Available: http://www.searchenginejournal.com/7-reasons-why-blogging-is-still-important-in-2012/39225/. Last accessed 16th April 2014.

Strzeszynski, M. (2014). Best Blogging Platforms Of 2014. Available: https://medium.com/blogging-and-seo-tips/d62682d9b0aa. Last accessed 16th April 2014.

Widder, B. (2013). Best Free Blogging Sites. Available: http://www.digitaltrends.com/social-media/best-free-blogging-sites/#!Em5KD. Last accessed 16th April 2014.