Secret To Monetizing Your Site

So maybe you're thinking to yourself; Hey, I need to start making some money online. Maybe you're one of those that had that thought a while ago now... but aside from maybe the being online part… you're still pretty much at square one. Or, maybe you are actually making a little money online but wouldn't be averse to making a little (or a lot) more.

Like most of you, Jeremy Schoemaker has -at one time or another – fit squarely into each and every one of the above categories. Now, however, he's most widely known simply as 'Shoemoney' (for obvious reasons). We managed to catch up with Jeremy at the Blog World Expo last week and pick his brain about what he considers to be some of the most important factors to keep in mind if you're trying to make money online.

In his video interview with Abby Prince, Jeremy was talking specifically about blogs and how to monetize them. As it turns out, he thinks the real money in blogs is in affiliate networks. "If you're going to blog about something and link to it" Shoe says, "you might as well get credit for that link".

But here's the catch and why I think there's something to the interview for anybody doing business online – not just bloggers. In order to make money, you sometimes should basically put money making in the back seat. Jeremy said, again specifically addressing bloggers that the typical goal of bloggers is to get new readers and generate RSS subscribers.

If you are just writing posts or making blog entries about just whatever affiliate deal is paying the best rate that day, your readership is quickly going to be turned off and over time, your numbers will suffer. True for bloggers but also just as true for anybody with a website and any kind of ads – affiliate or otherwise.

Jeremy cited the goal of bloggers as being basically building a reader base (aka traffic) and cautioned against turning off your base with bs promotional posts (aka bad/excessive ads).

Most of us aren't just working online for the warm fuzzy feeling it gives us at the end of the day. At the same time, you have to remember that your subscribers, readers, end users and/or customers aren't just using the internet for the sheer joy of reading ad copy and clicking links that make you money.

So yes, advertise. Do create content that you are interested in. Create content your audience is interested in. And by all means use relevant affiliate links and/or sell your ad space to sponsors that make sense to be there with your content.

Your traffic is there for your content, not to make you money. If your user-centric content becomes too obscured or too diluted by your revenue-centric content… your users will go elsewhere.

If you wake up one morning and notice that your traffic is trending in the wrong direction… take a look at your site from the user's perspective. Does your site have more sponsored buttons and banners than a NASCAR? Might be a problem. Prioritize and eliminate. Do you have ads and links up for Secure Servers and Web Hosting on your outdoor furniture site? I don't care what their payout is… it's costing you credibility and in the long term… money. Go find a sponsor that makes more sense. Sure they may pay a little less, but they aren't going to turn off your userbase nearly as much – and they'll probably convert better over time.

So when Shoemoney says one of the biggest secrets to making money is putting money in the back seat... this is exactly what he's talking about. Your userbase is your greatest commodity. If you take care of your userbase, your userbase will take care of you. Building that userbase is a tough thing. Are you really willing to roll the dice on losing a chunk of them just to make a few extra buck this month?

What would you consider to be the most important factor for magnetizing a site (or blog)?

About the Author
Mike is a manager at iEntry. He has been with iEntry since 2000.

An Internet Company with No Server

I’m sure this isn’t the only one, after all, SmugMug’s CEO told me that they had moved pretty much everything over to Amazon’s S3 a while back.

But I always assumed that companies would have at least one server keeping things up, just in case Amazon went down. Or just because.

I was wrong.

Last night Mogulus’s CEO, Max Haot, was here at my house to film something fun for my show. Mogulus is the company that, yesterday, provided the live video for Om Malik’s NewTeeVee conference. It was so good I stayed home and watched almost the whole day on the NewTeeVee channel. But more on that when we get the video up.

At one point Max seemed like he was joking around with me when he told me “we don’t own a single server.”

I asked him FOUR more times to make sure I heard him right. I even got incredulous with him at one point saying something like “what the f*** do you mean you don’t own a server?” and “you mean not a single bit of your Web site comes from servers that aren’t owned by Amazon?”

He nicely and calmly explained that, yes, every server the company owns is actually running on Amazon’s S3 and EC2 services.

The world has changed. Now ANYONE can build an Internet company and get it up to scale. No more spending nights inside data centers trying to keep servers running.

Let’s go over to Mike Arrington’s CrunchBase and do some research. They pulled in $1.2 million in funding. Yet they don’t own a SINGLE server!

They have about 15,000 people already creating live video channels. They have one of the most innovative Web sites I’ve ever seen.

But they don’t own a server.

How else has the world changed? Where the hell is Microsoft in this whole business? How did Microsoft screw this up so badly? Let’s get this straight. Amazon used to be a book store. Now they are hosting virualized servers for Internet companies. So much for having billions of dollars in the bank like Microsoft does, some of the smartest people in the world working in your research arms and having “monopoly” market share in operating systems.

Heheh, maybe now Amazon can use some of the new money that they’ll be earning from these startups to buy some decent PR. According to Read/Write Web Amazon needs the help in that department.

Oh, back to Max. One tip he gave us is that when using Amazon’s services you have to design your systems with the assumption that they will never be up and running. What he means by that is services are “volatile” and can go up and down without notice. So, he’s designed his systems to survive that. He told me that it meant his engineering teams had to be quite disciplined in designing their architecture.

How many other Internet companies are out there that are “serverless?”

Robert Scoble is the founder of the Scobleizer blog. He works as PodTech.net's Vice President of Media Development.