Knowledge

Do You Need To Put Ads On Your Website As Early As You Can?

There are many ways you can monetize a website. For example, you can put ads and affiliate links to it, set up a Patreon or Donate Form, or sell your own merchandise like books, digital downloads, mugs, t-shirts and so on.

However, there are many digital product monetization coaches who advise against putting ads and other monetization materials on your website. They reason that monetization materials severely handicaps your website from building a following.

For example, there are digital monetization coaches who advise that you should only monetize your website after you have 10,000 to 30,000 unique visitors in your website. The problem with this advice is that most websites never achieve this number of unique visitors, or if they ever do, if would only be after a couple of few years.

This is because many website visitors these days are “blind” to the monetization content of websites. For example, a good number of websites have increased the number of ads in their website, and what’s the website’s visitor’s response? They just adjust their tolerance level for ads.

If they can, most website owners won’t put ads on their website. However, ads are still one of the best and simplest way of making money on websites. Even the biggest and most visited websites today are adding more and more ads on their websites.

As already said, there are plenty of digital product coaches who advise against monetizing a website until a certain number of unique website visitor number is achieved by a website. They reason that putting ads and other monetization content on your website would turn off visitors from your website.

However, a vast number of website visitors are not website followers but are just website visitors. A lot of people visit websites to get the information on a particular subject matter they want and they then move on to other websites to get more information for the same particular subject matter.

The truth is that many people are spoilt for choices when it comes to websites. There are just too many websites offering identical information for the same particular subject matter.

For example, If you ever get your news from the leading news websites, you’ll notice that the news articles from one news website to another is nearly identical. For example, if you’re American, you might visit CNN, NBC, CNBC, FOX and the likes. One thing you’ll notice is their identical news content.

The real measure of success for your website is not the number of followers you have on your website but its profitability. There are many websites with huge numbers of daily visitors but hardly earns any money. Contrast this with websites with smaller daily visitor numbers but are making good money.

There are many ways to monetize a website but I’m only going to talk about ad monetization because this is an area I’ve got a limited experience on. I would advise that you also research other forms of website monetization because websites can be profitable in one monetization method while not in another.

Let’s go back to ads now and discuss why it can be difficult to earn money by putting ads on your website. The reason why most people just ignore website ads is because people are used to ads already. People are bombarded by ads even at a very young age. People grow up seeing multitudes of them.

They’re in your television every couple of minutes, they’re on the walls of the roads you pass on, they’re on billboards, you hear about them on the radio, they’re on printed newspapers and magazines, they’re in social media and so on. In short, they’re everywhere.

However, even though people are used to them, advertisers and tech companies are making ads more effective, especially online ads. Today’s online ads now have the ability to target a digital content consumer with tailored ads based on their online search patterns.

For example if a person is visiting a finance or a money oriented website, or if they are reading a finance or money related online article, there is a high likelihood that they would also see an investing ad like a forex or stock trading platform ad.

If you are a website owner, choose an online ad network that has high CPM rate (cost per mile rate). This means that although your website visitors don’t click on your website ads, you at least earn a little money whenever your website visitor sees your ads.

Let me warn you that although you can earn money from the sheer fact that your website visitors see your website ads, your earnings via this monetization method is very, very low. This is the reason why there are many websites who are practically forcing a website visitor to click on their ads.

Yes, There are many website owners who completely rely only on ad monetization to make money from their websites. However, many of these website owners have already significant online content on their websites build over the years.

This is the reason why some very old but established websites make money: through the sheer volume of their online content. This is the reason why many blogging coaches for example, advise new bloggers to concentrate on quantity first before concentrating on quality later.

Affiliate Marketing is usually the second way website owners monetize their online digital content. But this monetization method requires more work from the website owner and is more complicated.

Other website owners have found success via Patreon. However, in most instance, having a Patreon account also requires that the website owner produce digital content that is not freely available on their website and is only available to their Patreon subscribers.

Other website owners also restrict website visitors access to all or parts of their website via a subscription based monetization method. For example, some of the leading US online magazines like Forbes and Fortune websites are already doing this.

A website owner can also harvest a website visitor’s e-mail address and even possibly some of their personal information. An e-mail address can be a valuable commodity. It allows advertisers to send advertising information to these e-mail addresses. This is the reason why e-mail lists are bought and sold.

A Donate Button can be added by a website owner to their website. For example, Wikipedia has been able to keep itself afloat by soliciting donations from its website’s visitors whenever it needs additional funding or is cash strapped.

There are many online calculators that estimate how much a website can earn by making earning estimates based on a website’s traffic: number of unique visitors, pageviews, duration of visitor stay and so on.

However, a website’s earnings would largely depend on the online ad network’s rates and how much your website visitor interacts with your website’s ads. No matter the number of website visitors or pageviews, a website doesn’t make money on their ads unless the website visitor interacts on the ads.

For example, I have tried several online ad networks with varying ad formats. I found out for example, that pop-under ads make money but are visually not appealing to website visitors. Banner ads in the meantime are less intrusive to the eye but are not good moneymakers.

It is also worth noting that if you plan to monetize your website via ads, you should also consider the requirements of the online ad networks you intend to apply to. For example, by default, almost everyone chooses Google’s AdSense ad network to monetize their website.

But AdSense is now well known for rejecting website owners. AdSense can reject your application while applying for ad monetization and after you’ve already been approved from ad monetization. This is how strict is the selection process for AdSense.

But AdSense is not alone, there are other online ad networks who would reject your application even though you’ve met their minimum number of unique website visitors and/or pageviews. So why wait a long time and put a lot of effort in improving your website only to be rejected later for monetization?

There are many online ad networks to choose from especially if your website attracts a lot of website visitors and has a high number of pageviews. But each ad network has its own ad specialty. For example, there would be ad networks that specialize on one or all of the following: gaming, finance, fashion, digital and so on.

Usually, you won’t know what ad an ad network specializes in until after their ads have been implemented on your website. There are even ad networks that “sneak in” ad content you might not approve of like pornography and gambling.

You might continually develop and add content to your website only to realize later on that it is not optimized for ad monetization. This is one reason why you should monetize your website with ads as early as you can.

You might come into a situation where you have waited a long time like years to monetize your website only to realize that your website is not ideal for ad monetization. You are then left with the costly choices of completely changing your website design or finding another monetization method.

You must also realize that most ad networks require you to add a code in your website code in order for their ads to appear on your website. The code is usually inserted in the HTML code of your website either between the HEAD or BODY.

If your website is not designed for ad code insertion, you might find yourself editing each and every one of your website’s pages which is a very tiring and irritating thing to do. So, it pays to put ads on your website while its code hasn’t grown to an unmanageable proportion yet.

Yes, there are ad networks that accept websites even though the website still has very little content. But you might have to do a fair bit of research to know which ad networks do. For example, I’ve been accepted by such ad networks as PopAds and AdCash although my website failed approval from AdSense.

According to many online content creation gurus, these previously mentioned ad networks don’t require minimum visitor traffic nor pageviews. But as you can see, they might have other requirements before they would accept your website for monetization like AdSense.

There are also ad networks who once you submit your application, never bother to reply back to your application or takes months before they approve your application if they ever do. But there are ad networks that approve your application in a matter of minutes.

You should also check online forums like Reddit to get background information regarding these ad networks. For example, there are complaints regarding some ad networks regarding compensation. Apparently, there are ad networks that suspend an account the minute the website owner attempts to withdraw their earnings.

Another complaint against some ad networks is that they “sneak in” ads which the website owner didn’t approve of under the terms and conditions of the ad network. For example, pornography and gambling ads appear on a website even though the website owner didn’t approve of them.

You should monetize or attempt to monetize your website with ads as early as you can. This is the only way you would know if your website content has a chance of making money or if even your website’s design is optimized for ads.

By knowing these two things, it prevents you from having to make costly and inconvenient overhauls in the long run. This also enables you to decide if you would concentrate on ad monetization or pivot to some other website monetization method.

Believe it or not, but appropriately placed ads on your website can actually improve the credibility of your website. When a website visitor sees ads on a website, they are likely to believe that the website and its content has value because advertisers are willing to partner with them.

This is especially true if the advertiser is a prominent company. For example, a fashion blog website might not be perceived as a quality fashion website, but if ads from big fashion brands appear on the website, the website’s visitors would likely think that the website is highly regarded by big name fashion brands and therefore has very credible online content.

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