The New Billboard

Let’s face it, websites are the new billboard.  Anywhere that people are, there is advertising.  Instead of driving to work, today’s tech-savvy, work-from-home generation surfs the web.  Thus each website consists of pages just waiting to be blazoned with branding.  The question is what makes YOUR site an optimum location for advertisers.  How do you make your site stand out?  And why would an advertiser choose your site over some other site in the same niche?  Here are a few tips:

• As The Bard said, “To thine own self be true.”  Writing about something that genuinely interests you and is written a personable, readable way will accrue traffic over time.  You’re talking about a long-term investment.  On two levels.
  • The older the domain, the more strength your site/blog has.
  • The more content you write that’s readable, the more users will be attracted to your site.  The more users visit your site, the more likely advertisers will want to place an ad on your site.
• Usability is key.  Make your site easy on the eyes and easy to navigate.  (This is very simple if your site is a blog.)  It will increase the amount of time that users spend on your site as well as your click-through rate.  Ultimately it will decrease your bounce rate, and although it has not been proven, there is some evidence that suggests a high bounce rate will eventually decrease rankings in the search engines.  Usability includes the following attributes:
  • Site structure
    • Make it easy for users to understand how they arrived at a specific page on their site.  Navigability is very important – over time, it will increase the amount of pages that users click through on your site.
  • Basic layout
    • Don’t make the pages on your site too busy – this is ESPECIALLY true of the homepage.  You don’t want visitors getting thrown off just because your site is visually over-stimulating.  For example, the homepage of a travel website should consist of a basic form (traveling dates, budget, number of people, etc.), some links, and a paragraph of content.  Maybe a couple of images.  But that’s it.

Those are the (very) basic tenets of monetizing your website.  Please keep in mind, these are long-term solutions.  If you want to try some shorter-term website monetization, give it a shot.  But be aware that it will probably just be a series of experiments in perfecting longer-term strategies.