Making Money On A Site That BombsBY: Halstatt Pires
You spend a lot of time and effort to build out and market a site. You are getting a lot of traffic, but the site isn’t profitable. What now? There is a nasty little secret related to Internet businesses that most people either do not want to know or simply ignore. The secret is that some businesses are just not going to be profitable on the web. There can be a variety of reasons, but the simple fact is all the traffic in the world may not make your site profitable. This brings up the issue that should be discussed at the beginning of the process, but rarely is. Should every business have a site? Yes. Should every business go hog wild trying to market their site on the web? No. A fundamental question that must be considered at the beginning of site planning is whether the site should be active or passive. Active sites are designed to be profitable in and of themselves. Passive sites are designed to simply create an online presence for the convenience of customers – a digital business card if you will with directions, phone numbers and so on. For example, the site for an artist is typically going to be a passive site. People usually do not search for random art. They search by an artist’s name. Paying for marketing, thus, makes little sense. Instead, the best option is typically to put up a site emphasizing the artist’s name and showing his or her work. If a proactive effort is desired, listing the art on EBay is probably the best option. Regardless of the path you take, nothing is worse than finding out your site is bombing. Despite your best efforts, there simply seems to be no way to make a profit. Perhaps Google has opened a similar service and you are getting stomped. Perhaps people simply do not buy online what you are selling. Alas, there are a couple of steps you can take to try to rescue something from the situation. The first step is to consider repositioning your site. Instead of trying to sell something, you can always become an information site. Essentially, you drop the sales pitches and just offer useful information. When you take this approach, people tend to start returning to your site when they need more information, to wit, you get the much cherished return visitors. If you become a credible resource, you may be able to save the day. If you convert to an information site, the second step is to make some money from it. If you have decent, free traffic coming to the site from search engine rankings, you should give some thought to Google Adsense. Adsense is a program whereby you put ads from Google Adwords advertisers on your site. When someone clicks the ads, Google gives you a share of the bid price. If you have a couple thousand visitors a day, you can make some decent money. In fact, many people are shocked at just how much they make. At the end of the day, you really haven’t lived until you have built a site that bombs. Instead of heading to the window ledge, take a deep breath and consider your options. Google Adsense is one way to pick up the scraps and recover some of your investment. Over time, you should be able to make back your money and more.
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