Should You Monetise Your Business Website?
October 9, 2007
Do you have a business website which targets a local area market? If so, you may have considered finding other ways to monetise it.
I did this with our Kwik Fix site. We’re happy with the results the site has brought us in the first few months. But, we noticed we had a lot of “wasted traffic”. That is, we had many people arriving at our site that weren’t within our target market, because they didn’t live in our area of the country. So we decided to add some affiliate products to the site.
We’ve only just began adding other money making channels to the site over the last month, so it’s still early days. But here’s what we discovered so far, and I hope our findings may help you, when you’re deciding on additional profit centres for your business website:
Some products don’t sell well online: These are usually the higher cost purchases that people prefer to see in real life before buying. For us, bathrooms come into this category. We should have realised this, as most of our customers call us first then visit our suppliers showroom before making a decision. So, when you’re deciding what additional products to sell, consider whether they’re the type of thing people will buy online.
Target customers who are searching for specific items: We decided that if we were going to add more profit centres to our site, it would be worthwhile advertising them. We ran a test on Google Adwords for our bathroom accessories section and uploaded about a thousand keywords to Adwords using Wordtracker.
Although we made some sales we didn’t break even. This is because we were sending everyone to the same landing page. We’re now amending this so that if someone is looking for something like “black and white shower curtains” we send them straight to the product they are looking for. Obviously these type of campaigns take a while to set up properly, but targeting specific keywords definitely pays off.
Don’t Go Overboard: Don’t overwhelm yourself by joining heaps of different affiliate programs to begin with. Google the type of products you are looking for and find out which affiliate management program the supplier belongs to. Or join one of the following large management programs such as Commission Junction, Trade Doubler, Share a Sale, or Link Share.
Compare Commissions Carefully: The commission rates that some merchants offer are just not worth it. And I’m not suggesting you refer people to rubbish, but if you have to choose between an excellent product with lousy commission rates and a good product with excellent commission rates, recommend the good product. If you’re forking out for advertising, you need to make a profit.
Run Small Low Cost Tests: If you’re running a pay per click campaign such as Adwords, run small low cost tests first. It takes a lot of patience, but it saves you wasting a heap of cash.
Check Your Links: Before you begin your pay per click campaign, check all your affiliate links carefully to ensure they work. I forgot to do this once, and lost £75 on Adwords in a couple of hours. Also, check that the merchant’s site isn’t down, and also that their pages are loading fast enough.
Check How Quickly You’ll Get Paid: Check when you will be paid, and also what the minimum payout is. And be aware that some items, such as hotel stays don’t pay out until the customer takes their trip. Obviously, this is incase they cancel. But, you could have a long wait to get paid if they’ve booked well ahead.
If you’ve never tried affiliate marketing before, the Super Affiliate Handbook is a great resource.
Comments
7 Responses to “Should You Monetise Your Business Website?”
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Successful And Outstanding Blogger
Another great piece of advice. This is something I’ll definitely do once I’ve cracked AdWords and achieved some success with the core business.
Thanks again!
I used to run a city-specific blog and the CTR for contextual ads was more than depressing, hehe. Indeed, selling local businesses on ad space is much more effective for a local site.
Would be interesting to see how well it went. If you got ads for complimentary or different products then it would be great. As long as people can clearly see that you are a business first and foremost and what your products are
Hi Ian – Thanks. I knew you were starting an Adwords campaign so I wrote this with you in mind.
Modern Worker that is a good idea. I could try to sell ad space to related local businesses – maybe electricians, joiners etc. Thank you.
Steve M – .Thank you for commenting. I’m still experimenting so far. I think we’ve probably done best with bathroom accessories so far. But, I’ll definitely post an update when we’ve tried with more specific items.
Very well said Cath. As in every business we need to know more about what we are doing. I haven’t yet worked with PPC campaigns such as AdWords, and this article would be definitively of help.
For what I have read about AdWords campaigns it takes much more work and monitoring which than helps in saving money on campaigns (things like blocking sites that don’t deliver quality traffic i.e. traffic that does not convert).
Thanks Astrit – it is definitely a nightmare to monitor – especially now that I’m learning more about it and adding more ad groups.
The trouble is, some of the keywords are highly competitive and I’m wondering if I should drop the ones I’m listed on the top of Google for organically – and just bid on the others!
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