Monetization.

That’s the commonly used term in the internet marketing industry where you create opportunities to earn money from your websites, be it blogs or any other personal or commercial sites.

In John Chow’s free e-book under recommended money-makers, there are several advertising or affiliate networks that allow you to create this monetizing opportunity. However, I feel that not all should be applied right away unless you have met certain criteria to even make money from it.

Text Link Ads and other similar advertising networks, should be approached only after the site or blog have matured with strong enough traffic. This is because such networks act as middle-men between you, a publisher, and advertisers. It is common sense that if your blog is new, with measly traffic, no sane advertiser would pay good money to advertise on your blog. With this in mind, the advertising network wouldn’t even want to approve adding your site to their network of publishers, as it will undermine their reputation of providing quality publishers to their paying advertisers.

CPC networks would make the ideal choice for newly created sites to monetize. Such networks include Google Adsense, Kontera Content Link and Adbrite. There are many others too if you were to browse through John Chow’s 130 money making networks. Although the returns would be small or even negligible in the beginning, at least it can get you started and motivated to put in more effort.

You would notice that my blog is running these CPC Advertising Networks to get the site started with advertising.

If you are using Wordpress like I am, there are many plug-ins that would help you organize the placement of these ads. I like Kontera very much as I don’t have to worry about placement. It actually makes use of the words in the content and creates clickable adverts from it.

One other way is affiliate marketing. See the 125×125 ads on the right sidebar. Those are affiliate products featured on my blog. This is also known as CPA (cost per action) Ads, where the action is to purchase the product. The affiliate earns a commission when the purchaser clicks on the advertisement and buy the product.

When your site has strong followers and traffic, you can even sell this 125×125 ad button space for a flat fee. John Chow sells his for $500 per month per spot. He opens up 8 spots for sale; $4000 per month!

If you look at John Chow’s Advertise page, you’d notice that there is an “Ad Age” shield that shows that his blog is ranked #10 in the marketing blog industry. ProBlogger is there too in the top 50! That’s where the leverage is to set the advertising space prices. You can also look at the list and learn from the best.

That’s what I’m going to do. Learn from the best!

Until next time…