Lots of Eggs, Lots of Baskets

Unless you’re creating a specific product for sale, or providing a specific service on a per-client basis, the odds are that you’re hoping to generate revenue from your web site as a content producer.

This is a solid way to generate income, and for people who can create a steady flow of original, informative and engaging content it can be a highly rewarding venture.

But how do you make money from producing and publishing content? There are actually numerous ways to monetize your content web site, from displaying contextual advertisements–such as Google AdSense or Yahoo! Publisher Network ads–to individual text link and affiliate products sales such as from those Amazon ads you see on every other web site.

Now, there are some who argue that it’s wrong to place advertising on your informational web site or blog, and dishonest to promote affiliate products there as well.

I respect their opinions of purity, but I have to disagree with them whole-heartedly. If I spend hours of my time researching a topic, and then formulating my research, knowledge and experience into a concise, informational posting or article; and then publish it absolutely free for all to access and read on my web site that I’ve paid out of pocket to own [the domain for], build [the actual site] and host online, isn’t it fair for me to place non-intrusive advertising on my pages that may generate a small financial return for my efforts? I believe it is.

I do agree that some advertising is over-the-top, such as heavy flash files and pop-ups/pop-unders, and I would never use those on my personal site. But, relevant, on-topic contextual ads and text links don’t interfere with the published content or degrade the visitor’s experience in any way. And, they can often provide visitors with exposure to resources of value that they otherwise wouldn’t have known about. As I see it, these types of revenue streams are a benefit to the advertiser, as well as for the content publisher and their readers.

I also think they’re about as honest an earned income as there is online. To earn a consistent income from these advertisements requires getting and maintaining lots of traffic. To get and sustain lots of traffic, the content publisher has to constantly produce high-quality content that’s of value to their visitors. In other words, your earnings are directly related to your efforts. The harder you work, the better your content will be. The better your content is, the more traffic you’ll generate. The more traffic you get, the more money you will earn. But slack off, or publish garbage and the bottom will fall out in no time.

I also feel the same is true of affiliate product endorsing too. No sincere content producer who strives to provide valuable information to their readers is going to diminish his or her site and reputation by endorsing garbage. But if he or she believes the product is a quality resource, then it seems fair to be compensated with a small commission for any sales that result from informing readers of it.

Using O`Bannon’s Leap as an example, I have endorsed a couple of products with affiliate links in postings, and in every instance it was something that I would recommend to my own Mother without hesitation–knowing it was a value for the price. I understand that even (maybe especially) online, we become known by the company we keep, and if I were to endorse crap products just for the affiliate commissions that would quickly turn around to bite me as readers began to associate my site with crap. No serious content producer is going to risk that for a couple dimes off of a few sales.

But I don’t see anything wrong with earning those small commissions when referring interested readers to quality products, and letting them decide for themselves if it’s worth the cost to buy or not. Again, I think it’s win-win for everyone. The readers who want the value and use of the products get them, the product supplier gets another sale and customer, and the content producer is rewarded for bringing the buyer and seller together.

So, now that I’ve gone on about what various ways there are to generate income from your content site–and there are others too, I’ve stuck to the most popular methods to keep this from becoming novel length–you may be curious as to which method(s) I suggest using?

The short answer is all of them. As the title of this post implies, I think it’s best to diversify yourself with as many streams of revenue as possible.

Not to squeeze advertising into every pixel of your pages, that’s not my intentions at all. But because no single source of income is ever guaranteed to last. If you use Google AdSense or Yahoo! Publisher Network to deliver contextual ads, there’s always a risk of having your account terminated, even for false allegations made to Google or Yahoo! about you I have heard. If that is your only stream of income, the well would be dry overnight.

The same goes for text link advertising. You never know if someone will want to have their links shown to your traffic from month to month. You could have a dozen advertisers this month, and zero next.

And while I’ve never had a problem with any suppliers of affiliate products I’ve promoted, I’d like to believe that’s partly because I am picky about who and what I’ll recommend, but the fact is you never know if a given company or supplier is going to suddenly go out of business.

So, I suggest wisely building as many different sources of revenue as you can, while always being careful not to overwhelm your readers and visitors with any of them. It’s a delicate balance, but not that difficult to find and maintain if you approach each decision on what to use and where to locate it on your pages with caution.

Ultimately, I’d rather have 10 different sources each paying me $300 per month than 1 source paying me $3,000 per month, that way if anything goes wrong along the way I’m only out a portion of my earnings rather than all of them. Get lots of eggs, and keep them in lots of baskets and you’ll never be without.

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This entry was posted on Wednesday, April 25th, 2007 at 3:00 am and is filed under AdSense, Business, Google. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.