Website monetization is one of the primary aims of many digital businesses and bloggers. However, successful monetization of the website is a complex goal that needs a well-defined approach, data-driven strategies, continuous work, and a strong emphasis on niche-specific traffic. In this blog, let us explore how to monetize the website through a step-by-step guide. You will learn a detailed plan to achieve a good rank for your website and make it monetization-ready within a 6-month timeframe.
What Is Website Monetization?
It refers to the process of earning income from a specific website by leveraging its traffic through numerous methods, such as selling services or products directly on the website, displaying ads, offering memberships for exclusive content, guest posts, affiliate marketing, etc. It is a great way to create channels for passive or active income and make the website sustainable for further investments and upgrades.
Using the revenue generated through website monetization, you can easily cover the expenses for content creation and hosting. Thus, you can further enhance the user experience and expand the reach of your website.
The succeeding sections will further expound on how to monetize the website.
Website Monetization Metrics: What You Really Need?
As per the metrics, in order to be eligible for monetization, your website must achieve the following indicators after 6 months:
- Domain Rating (DR) = 40+
- Domain Authority (DA) = 30+
- 5,000+ niche-specific website traffic.
Note: The factors that can determine success include traffic quality, unique value proposition, focus on micro-niches, multiple revenue streams, etc.
What is the Level of Competition?
If you are starting out with your website, you must have a clear picture in your mind that the journey is not going to be easy. The following statistics would make it clear on the level of competition you can expect if you are starting out:
- There are approximately 1.16 billion websites all around the world, among which 0.194 are active.
- The number will only grow as 252,000 websites are created on a daily basis. As many as 10,500 websites are created every hour and 175 websites are created every second.
- If you are into e-commerce, then your competition is 14% of the total number of websites.
- As much as 82% of brands have a dedicated SEO team that manages the online presence and monetization of the website.
- Millions of websites are already monetized, with popular methods being Google Adsense, affiliate marketing, e-commerce functionality, and membership model. However, roughly speaking, only 2% of the monetized websites manage to exceed their income above $5,000/month.
- High competition areas include blogging, e-commerce, drop-shipping stores, affiliate marketing, etc. Moderate competition areas include B2B solutions specific to an industry, websites offering local services, specialized services, etc. Low-competition areas include portals offering specialized or highly technical blogs, websites targeting underserved markets, software tools catering to particular industries, etc.
- The level of competition can vary depending on the niche and target market. However, following the right strategies and guidelines can help you overcome any competition and emerge as a strong player in the online marketplace.
Given the so many vying competitors and evolving Google guidelines, you must be wondering how you can monetize the website. In the next section, let us go through some key guidelines and performance metrics you must be mindful of. Then, we can proceed with a detailed 6-month plan that can be a game-changer for your website monetization goals.
Before You Begin: Important Guidelines (Prerequisites)
Making your fundamentals strong is highly critical for online success. Follow the below-mentioned guidelines before you proceed with your SEO strategies-
Stay Focused on Your Niche:
While starting, you might be tempted to explore a variety of niches to get traffic from different demographics. However, it is important to remain focused on one particular niche to establish brand authority, attract a particular audience, and deliver the best experience to the audience.
Maintain relevancy of the content present on the website by sticking to your niche. Avoid publishing out-of-niche content that can confuse both SERP algorithms and audiences, hurting your website rankings. Choose a strong niche you have expertise in and stay focused on that throughout your SEO journey.
Stay Away from Grey Areas in SEO:
Keep away from risky niches and controversial topics that can not only damage your website rankings but also your reputation. These may include gaming, CBD, adult content, casinos, etc. Such niches often fall under the scrutiny of Google’s algorithm and deal with more strict regulations, limiting your options in monetization.
Verify Crypto-specific Content:
If you have chosen a cryptocurrency like Bitcoin as your target niche, then you must be careful with the authenticity and accuracy of your content.
Any kind of misinformation can be damaging to your target audience and lead to a loss of credibility or hefty penalties.
Ensure Anchor Tags:
- Optimization of Website Footer: Your website footer should include all the relevant information that allows your audience to know more about you. Essentially, it must include links to the Contact Us page, About Us page, social media links, privacy policy, etc. A well-structured website footer improves the reputation of your website in search engines and contributes to the user experience.
- Select a tool for SEO: If you want to compete effectively in the market and achieve your goals of website performance and monetization, you must rely on credible tools. Tools such as Ahrefs, Ubersuggest, SEMrush, etc. can give you end-to-end SEO solutions such as competitor analysis, keyword research, performance tracking, etc.
Integrate Search Console and Google Analytics:
In SEO, staying consistent and being up to date with the latest data is key. Configuring your website with Google Analytics, Google Console, etc. can enable you to keep track of performance, traffic, indexing, and any technical issues. Using data from these platforms can help you take proactive steps to improve the user experience and resolve issues when they emerge.
Google Search Console:
Google Search Console provides you with needed reports and tools that can help you track your website’s overall search traffic and performance, resolve issues, and improve rankings in search results. With Google Search Console, you can leverage search analytics to ensure content optimization, submit URLs and sitemaps for crawling, review index coverage, enable alerts for issues, and utilize URL inspection tools to check the index, crawl, and serving details.
Google Analytics:
With Google Analytics, you can get comprehensive knowledge about your customers across diverse platforms and devices. Through its free tools, you can get a bird's-eye view of the customer’s journey and derive insights to enhance marketing return on investment. You can seamlessly integrate with other Google tools to check your performance across different channels. With Analytics, you get reliable data, in-built automation, smart and flexible reporting, cross-platform compatibility, and so much more.
URL Structure:
While choosing a structure for the URL, website owners must prioritize user-friendliness, optimization, and clarity. They can utilize descriptive keywords, reducing redundant parameters, and making sure that the structure resonates with the website’s hierarchy. This empowers both users and search engines to interpret the content of the website with the help of the URL alone. It is recommended to choose a URL structure that is SEO-friendly, concise, and browser-compatible. Primarily, you can choose among the following URL structures:
- https://www.domain.com (Recommended: SEO-friendly, browser-compatible)
- https://domain.com (Modern alternative)
- http://domain.com (Not recommended)
- http://www.domain.com (Not recommended)
Adding a New Website to the Webmaster Tool for Crawling and Indexing:
It is a vital process as it enables you to inform prominent search engines such as Bing or Google about the presence of your website. Once your website has been added to webmaster tools, search engines can then start indexing your web pages, improving your chances of appearing in SERP results. It is a significant process in enhancing the ranking and visibility of your website. Make sure that your website is added to the webmaster tools of all prominent search engines-
- Google (91.62% marketshare)
- Bing (3.31% marketshare)
- Yandex (1.08% marketshare)
- Yahoo (1.82% marketshare)
- Baidu (0.77% marketshare)
- DuckDuckGo (0.53% marketshare)
Page Redirection:
Page redirection allows website owners to direct users toward a new page whenever they click on an old URL. This is done to make sure users or even crawlers arrive at a more updated version of the webpage, or a better version of the content with the same intent, or any other webpage. This helps in retaining the user’s experience as users no longer see an error message whenever it is moved or updated. For crawlers as well, redirection is more effective than leaving a 404 or error page to maintain SEO performance.
It is helpful to implement these redirects:
HTTP to HTTPS
Non-www to www
404s to homepage/relevant pages
Performance Optimization Through Minification Tools:
Minification tools are basically programs that make website code more shortened and compressed. The website code could be in HTML, JavaScript, or CSS, and these minification tools help in removing any redundant comments, characters, or spaces. Key advantages include faster loading times, which results from a reduction in file sizes. This allows webpages to be loaded sooner, which positively impacts engagement metrics, bounce rate, and Google PageSpeed Insights.
Well-known minification tools you can integrate include:
- WP-Rocket
- Cloudflare
- Imagify for JS/CSS/image compression
- Uglify JS
- YUI Compressor
Caching:
When it comes to SEO performance, cached web pages play a crucial role. Caching refers to the process of storing the static contents of a webpage at a temporary location known as a cache. Web browsers, servers, and search engines all contribute to storing cache. This is done so that the page’s content can be accessed and delivered in quick time, increasing the overall loading speed. Here, the cached content is either locally stored in the device of the user or at the external server.
It is an efficient way of improving the operational efficiency of the website or an application. CDN substantially improves caching by storing all the static content of your website on geographically distributed servers. This allows users to retrieve the content from a server in proximity, greatly increasing the loading speed and overall experience of the user. Other advantages of implementing CDN include cache invalidation control, reduced server load, enhanced global reach, and caching of a variety of content like JavaScript, images, CSS files, etc.
Monitoring:
Consistent monitoring is a pivotal aspect of your website's growth because it enables you to assess the website's progress and the usefulness of SEO strategies. Regular monitoring also helps you track issues, recognize improvement areas, and maximize the impact of your website. For monitoring, you can leverage tools like Ahrefs, Google Search Console, SpyFu, UberSuggest, etc.
Website owners can also deploy specialized tools to ensure website down detection. It helps in automatic tracking of the website and continuously monitors its availability. Website owners can also receive an alert whenever the website faces any downtime or becomes inaccessible due to errors. Additionally, setting up backups and automatic restoration tools is also important for minimizing downtime.
Tag Management:
Tag management refers to the process of monitoring numerous analytics and tracking tools via Domain Name System records of your website. You can imagine it as installing sensors all around your home but ensuring that they are installed in a proper manner and cannot be removed accidentally. You must create permanent records in DNS to link your website to numerous tracking platforms like Ahrefs, Google Search Console, Google Tag Manager, Google Analytics, SEMrush, etc.
Failing to manage your tags properly leads to loss of historical data during accidental removal, inaccurate reporting and analytics, and the need to verify ownership of the website consistently. Tag management is critical for improving the stability, security, and reliability of the website.
Backup Strategy:
In the digital world where cybersecurity issues are rampant, an efficient backup strategy acts like life insurance for website owners. A good backup strategy safeguards your websites from accidents, cybersecurity attacks, server failures, and web hosting errors like crashes, hacking, data corruption, etc. For a backup strategy, you can implement the following tips:
- Enable notifications to be up to date with backups.
- Continuously monitor the size of the backups.
- Ensure a simple process for restoration.
- Set up automation of daily backups.
Growth Strategy:
A growth strategy is not just limited to customer interactions and collecting emails. It is about creating an efficient system that allows you to develop and maintain relationships with your audience even as your traffic improves substantially. Explore the following tips to deploy a successful growth strategy:
- Start Early: It is significant to hit the ground early and not wait for your traffic to reach higher ranges. Create subscription systems and audience segmentation strategies as soon as possible.
- Leverage the Right Platforms: Here you can focus on analytics tools to assess the behavior of the audience, incorporate email marketing platforms such as ConvertKit or Mailchimp, or implement effective lead magnet systems.
- Rely on Value Exchange: Provide something valuable in return for subscriptions. This can be anything from exclusive content, free trials, early access to new content, special downloads or resources, industry reports, insights, etc.
- Create an Effective Plan for Scaling: Make sure that your systems can manage growth well, ensure that the workflows are automated and ready, generate templates for distinct audience segments, etc.
- Building Target Lists: Divide your audience depending on interest levels. Create email lists based on engagement levels, topics, or other categories. Develop personalized content creation strategies for distinct audience groups.
- Subscription Pages: In simple words, you can imagine it as a net for collecting audiences. These are basically pages where the audience can go and sign up to interact further with the website. Subscription pages can be membership portals, push notifications, email newsletters, free resource libraries, etc.
Hosting:
You can select the infrastructure for hosting based on the needs, goals, and growth stage of your website. When you are starting out, you can leverage shared hosting environments in the first few months. Then, as your website grows, you can switch to a dedicated hosting infrastructure. For dedicated hosting, you have several options like Ubuntu, MySQL 8, and PHP 8. If you have enterprise-level requirements, then cloud hosting infrastructure is preferable like Google Cloud, AWS, and Azure.
Among all cloud hosting services, Azure differentiates itself because of restoration points, automated daily backups, etc. If your traffic volume reaches higher ranges, then you can execute load balancing and auto-scaling to deal with high traffic. Take care of CPU capacity, disk space, and resource usage utilization, as well as ensure continuous upgradation to infrastructure to prevent performance issues.
Build Safe Content:
Creating safe content is important for SEO because it negatively affects the digital presence of a website, its accessibility, and the brand’s reputation in the market. Search engine algorithms can scrutinize a website with dangerous or explicit content, resulting in decreased performance and downranking. It will result in lower organic traffic and fewer revenue opportunities. In any way, your content must not look as if it is manipulating the search engine algorithms or violating SERP policies.
Screen Your Content:
Now, since we know we should only publish safe content on our website to make it credible and ready for monetization, how can we ensure that it is safe? You can pass the content through the below-mentioned layers to assess its readiness for website publication:
- Duplicate Detection: Ensure that the content is not copied from another website and contains minimum to no plagiarism.
- Content Quality: Ascertain that the content is factually correct and has a logical flow.
- AI Detection: Though search engines such as Google allow the use of AI, it is important to humanize the content. Fully relying on AI tools increases the spam score of the website especially if the content is low-quality and repetitive.
- Grammar Issues: The content must be grammatically correct as it indicates professionalism and improves readability.
- End-user expectations: Analyze your target audience and their preferences to gain insights and personalize the content for specifi
demographics. You can use various analytics tools and CRM to detect the areas that appeal to the audience and use them in your content.
Month-wise Metrics for Performance
To devise a clear six-month strategy, you must know the main metrics you should focus on each month. It is important to start strategically with a clear roadmap and divide the goal into clear milestones. Moreover, avoid taking shortcuts or employing blackhat SEO techniques to reach your goals. Your aim must be to monetize your website for lasting success. Here are the month-wise metrics to keep an eye on:
First Month:
- DR or DA: They are one of the foremost metrics that determine your website's quality, relevance, authoritativeness, and monetization. In the first month, focus on creating the base and target DR or DA between 1-10.
- Traffic: Instead of focusing on the number of traffic, aim to attract niche-based traffic. Essentially, it must be between 100-1000.
- Engagement: Focus on indicators like bounce rate and time-on-page to assess whether your content is appealing to the audience or not.
Second Month:
- DR or DA: In the second month, your aim must be to increase DR or DA to 10-15.
- Traffic: The traffic also must also see some considerable growth and must be between 1,000 and 2,000. Only focus on getting quality traffic relevant to your niche.
Third Month:
- DR or DA: In the third month, set a target to achieve DR or DA between 15 and 20.
- Traffic: In the third month, the aim should be to get consistent niche-specific traffic of 2,000-3,000.
Fourth Month:
- DR or DA: Set a target between 15-20.
- Traffic: In the fourth month, your niche-specific audience must increase to 3,000-4,000.
Fifth Month:
- DA or DR: Put great focus on this metric and strive to make it 25-30.
- Traffic: By this time, your monthly target audience must be 4,000-5,000 for your website.
Sixth Month:
- Fine-tune all lacking areas and make sure that your website metrics are reaching the criteria for monetization: DR 40+, DA 30+, and monthly traffic of at least 5,000.
Month-wise Strategy for Website Monetization:
In the previous section, you got an overview of the key metric to focus on and the month-wise target for each metric. Now, here, you get a detailed strategy you can employ to systematically achieve your goals and make your website monetization-ready in six months.
First Month:
In the first month, you will be starting out, so your entire focus must be on creating a strong foundation. Start working on creating targeted content, establishing a presence on social media platforms, and achieving some initial traffic.
Key Actions-
Targeted Content Creation
- Focus on developing and publishing 20-25 articles in the first month.
- In the keyword research, first prioritize low-difficulty keywords or long-tail keywords. Select the keywords with high search volume so that you can achieve your traffic goals for the month.
- For keyword research, you can leverage prominent tools like Ubersuggest, Ahrefs, SEMrush, etc. to recognize the right keywords.
- Create long and in-depth blogs and articles approximately 2000 words long that can deliver good value to your audience and engage them better.
- Focus on creating at least 100 backlink profiles not only in the first month but also in the subsequent months.
Promotions on Social Media
- Create quality pages on all major social media platforms like Instagram, Facebook, Twitter, LinkedIn, etc. to create your presence on social media.
- Continuously post on social media, share your content, and interact with the audience to get impressions and maximize your reach through relevant hashtags.
Join Relevant Groups
- Find all the communities, discussion forums, and social media groups.
- Join in the discussions within these groups, share your content, and get feedback to establish authority in your niche.
Second-month:
If you have followed the right strategies in the first month, you will start to see some progress in the second month. Now, this is the right time to increase your efforts, improve your creativity, and introduce variety in your content.
Top Actions-
Targeted Content Creation
- In the second month as well, focus on writing quality 20-25 articles.
- Continue creating well-researched long content (approximately 2500 words).
- In this month, you can try working on slightly more difficult keywords relevant to your industry and niche.
- Don’t forget to create top-quality 100 backlinks to improve your backlinks profile.
Introduce YouBlogging (Shorts)
- Bring variety to your content delivery and introduce short-form content such as listicles, FAQs, quick tips, etc.
- Such types of content are quite easily shareable and can easily drive high traffic volume.
Improve Engagement on Social Media:
- Ensure consistent collaboration with influencers or bloggers in your domain to benefit from social media exchanges.
- Form close-knit connections with followers by directly responding to their messages and comments and collecting their feedback. This not only makes your audience feel valued but also makes them feel like a part of the community.
Join Niche-Specific Social Media Groups:
- You can find plenty of forums and groups in social media related to your niche. Join these groups, actively participate in discussions, and share insights.
- Once you see that you have convinced group members with your expertise, you can subtly share your content to boost your traffic.
Third-Month:
In the third month, you can observe your website taking shape and gaining momentum. This is the right opportunity to diversify the content strategy and enhance your promotional campaigns. Avoid making mistakes from the third month onwards as it can derail your entire six-month strategy.
Main Actions-
Targeted Content Creation:
- In the third month, you can scale up your content creation efforts and methods and create even longer articles (around 2500-3000 words long) based on medium-difficulty keywords.
- Achieve the target of 20-25 blogs this month as well.
- Focus on creating content that can not only act as a great resource for your target audience but also work as a pillar for your traffic goals.
YouBlogging (Video Creation):
- Begin creating video-based content related to the topics you have covered in your blogs.
- Publish these videos on YouTube to create a YouTube presence. Also, share these videos on your social media handles and link them to your blogs to comprehensively engage the audience and create traffic from all corners.
Social Media:
- Continue your work from previous months. Increase your posting frequency and network with other bloggers to create cross-promotions.
Daily Tech Digest:
- Share news updates on a daily basis with your audience via social media, videos, podcasts, etc.
- This will not only improve your knowledge of the industry but also position your website as an authoritative brand in the industry. It is an effective way of capturing the audience’s attention daily.
Fourth-month Strategy
If you have followed all strategies and SEO guidelines well in the last three months, you can see a consistent traffic stream in the fourth month. In the fourth month, scale your existing blogs and start your outreach activities.
Important Actions-
- Targeted Content Creation
- Achieve your monthly target of creating 20-25 articles/blogs.
- Focus only on medium-difficulty keywords in the fourth month as well and use tools like Ahrefs and SEMrush to find the best keywords with high search volume.
- You can update your present blogs by adding more sections, increasing their depth and relevance.
- Reach the target of quality 100 backlinks.
Social Media Promotions
- Continue your promotions on social media: post regularly, analyze impressions, and improve the quality of posts and captions.
- To further increase visibility on social media, you can try live streams and Q&A sessions.
Outreach Activities
- Network with top websites and bloggers in your niche to create marketing or guest posting opportunities.
- Create strong relationships with top influencers and brands to create possibilities for future collaborations.
Fifth-month Strategy:
Considering that you have diligently followed all SEO guidelines and strategies, you must be well on your way toward website monetization goals by the fifth month. Now, it’s time to take your SEO optimization strategy to the next level, focus on more difficult keywords, and improve your backlink profile.
Key Actions
Targeted Content Creation:
- Aim for the same 20-25 articles in the same month, but considerably improve the quality and creativity of the article.
- Leverage analytics tools to make your content development strategies more data-driven.
- Ensure comprehensive research on each and every content as factual errors can substantially hurt your brand reputation.
- Improve the size of your blogs by updating sections, which can also improve their rankings.
Promotions and Engagement on Social Media:
- Retain your presence on social media through creative posts. Incorporate visuals, short videos, and reels to engage the audience on social media.
- Employ paid promotions to enhance the reach of your posts whenever necessary.
Outreach Approach: Link Exchanges
- You can create top-quality backlinks through diverse methods such as guest posts, collaborations, and link exchanges.
- Before conducting link exchanges, make sure that you are dealing with genuine and authoritative websites in your niche.
- Sixth Month: Achieving Monetization Goals
- By the start of the sixth month, assess your website metrics and see how close your website is with monetization criteria: DR- 40+, DA-30+, and monthly website traffic of 5,000. If your website meets the criteria, you can apply for monetization.
Key Actions-
- Monitor Progress:
- Leverage all the key tools like Moz, Ahrefs, and Google Analytics to monitor the performance of the website.
- Make sure that your traffic is specific to your niche, which is one of the requirements of monetization.
- Continue to create at least 100 quality backlinks.
Proceed with Monetization Programs:
- You can start by applying for numerous advertisement networks like Mediavine, Google Adsense, and Ezoic.
- Incorporate affiliate marketing techniques by partnering with platforms like ShareASale, CJ Affiliate, and Amazon Associates.
Revenue Optimization:
- It is important to place ads smartly so that you can maximize profitability without hampering user experience.
- You can explore distinct ad placement strategies and affiliate products to determine what is right for your audience.
Continue Your Website Growth
- When it comes to digital marketing, consistency can make or break success. Thus, carry on your work on your website and continue to develop highly-researched and optimized content, create top-quality backlinks, and drive more traffic to the website.
- Diversify your monetization methods and explore other options like digital products, sponsored posts, or online courses.
Conclusion
Anyone can create a website but to make it a source of income requires rigorous discipline, creativity, and knowledge. Achieving high SERP results for your website and monetizing it within the 6-months time frame is an ambitious and complex goal. However, it is achievable with the right strategies, the right implementation, and consistent monitoring.
The above-mentioned strategies help you achieve desired niche-centric traffic and monetization goals seamlessly within the given time frame.
