As a website owner, tips and tricks to help you earn money from your site will be at the top of your list. So, if you are looking for advice on how to monetise your website or other blog monetisation techniques, you’ve reached the right place.

There are a variety of methods you can use to generate incremental revenue from your website, such as partnering with a publisher or blog site. The publisher landscape is continuously shifting, with fewer publishers choosing display advertising as a sole way of monetising their audiences. For many of them, it can this be tricky to know where to start when it comes to monetising a website traffic.

In this guide, we will cover different approaches to help you to earn money from advertising on your website.

You will need to consider a variety of different alternatives to boost your bottom line and secure a regular revenue stream from your site. A critical aspect is linked to your audience size. This is perhaps the most challenging area, as developing quality content can be either very costly or very time consuming. Once you have secured your audience, you will need to understand how to get ads on your website and get paid to boost your revenue.  Clumsy display ads risk jeopardising your audience loyalty, sending visitors away instead of encouraging site engagement. Many advertising opportunities exist here, and we will help you to identify those best adapted for your website and visitors.

If you are looking to cash in, read on to uncover a few of these monetisation tips for digital publishers. In this guide, we will share techniques and advice on how to make money from your website.

3 top tips to monetise your website traffic

Why you should drive qualified and targeted traffic to your website?

To optimise the revenue potential you can generate with your website, you not only need to drive incremental traffic, but you also need to build a targeted audience via a specific topic. Of course, generating increased traffic, even if inconsistent and diverse, will enable you to earn money from advertising on your website. However, you risk receiving low quality advertising and limited monetisation options, which do not guarantee significant and sustainable revenue for your site.

Displaying low quality advertising risks damaging your site’s image. If you generate poor quality and inconsistent traffic, you will fail to access relevant advertising and serious advertisers as you won’t deliver optimal performances via ads. This will therefore lower your revenue potential as your remuneration will be calculated on the volume of clicks and/or conversions realised on the ads you are hosting.

However, through building a targeted audience and positioning yourself as an expert and a fresh news provider on a specific topic, you will drive loyal visitors to your site. Consider using newsletters to capture high value subscribers, this will enable you to access additional monetisation opportunities.

This type targeted audience is of much greater value to an advertiser, providing relevant content for your audience, creating a virtuous circle that will boost your revenue.

Remember to consider the overall user experience when you are looking to host ads on your website as irrelevant and annoying ads are likely to have a negative impact on audience and revenue generation. It is key for Publishers to establish a connection with the consumer to ensure that their target audience trusts the advertising surrounding any content. This is the most valuable currency that publishers can use as it will deliver optimal advertising performances and success with various monetisation models.

How to make money from website?

There are many business models you can employ to earn money from advertising on your website, the principal models being; CPM (Cost Per Thousand), CPC (Cost Per Click) and CPA (Cost Per Acquisition).

When it comes to how to monetise your website, you can find various solutions that would offer one of the 3 models above. Below you can find a brief description of these remuneration models, their purpose from both the Publisher and Advertiser perspective and which business areas they are best suited for:

The CPM model (Cost Per Thousand)

For Publishers: The CPM model is adapted to website that drives a lot of traffic, that is poorly targeted with a lower level of ad-interaction. CPM will trigger a remuneration every thousand impressions. No clicks will need to be done on the ad to earn money. However, the CPM rates are usually lower than CPC and CPA.

For Advertisers: This is a model that would fit for advertisers interested in brand awareness. They are looking for impressions, boosting brand visibility through visitor interaction. However, this model has become less popular over the years, with most advertisers focusing on lead generation or even direct purchase.

The CPC model (Cost Per Click)

For Publishers: The CPC model is adapted for websites with large audiences, but with a more targeted traffic enabling the display of relevant ads to their audience.  The content of the ad should be popular enough to generate an interaction. Via this model, one click is sufficient to trigger remuneration, that is why the quality of the interaction, that is to say the potential conversion that would happen after the click, isn’t critical to the Publisher. It is worth considering that the more targeted audience and ads you are displaying the better, enabling to value your CPC at a higher rate and attract advertisers.

For Advertisers: This model is adapted for advertisers willing to drive traffic to their website and increase their audience. Their primary objective is to boost their website visits and have new prospects interact with their website. Of course, they expect conversion from these visits, but they are looking for some volume of traffic when hosting ads on your website. It is probably the most popular model currently, as it is a good combination of visibility and acquisition, and it can be implemented for almost any business scenario. Kelkoo Group offers this model under its Performance solution, which delivers qualified clicks to online shops, developing their visibility, lead generation and sales.

The CPA model (Cost Per Acquisition)

For Publishers: The CPA model is adapted for websites with a smaller audience, that needs  to be targeted and specialized. The remuneration is triggered here through post click actions, be it sales, form completion, a registration to a service, or any other action that is of value to the advertiser. This model not only needs to give visibility to the brand (impression), or interest in the ad content (click), but also requires the visitor to fully complete their action on the site (conversion). This model offers the highest rates of remuneration, especially when it represents a percentage of the sale that has been generated. CPA can be a very effective way to make money from your website.

For Advertisers: This model is adapted for advertisers looking to increase their number of customers and overall revenue. They will be very critical of the quality of the traffic when hosting ads on your website as, even if it is a low risk investment, they don’t want to schedule and set up campaigns that fail to deliver results. The specificity of the CPA model means that the conversion (sale or registration) doesn’t necessarily need to be performed on the advertiser’s website. It could redirect to a homepage hosted in the Publisher website. CPA is often used in online marketplaces like Amazon. The purchase is completed on Amazon, while the customer receives a product from an online shop that is advertising its products on Amazon. One inconvenience in these types of cases being that the advertiser doesn’t obtain any brand visibility. Instead, they receive a sale from a buyer who is developing loyalty to the publisher (Amazon), rather than to the advertiser (the online shop).

How to get ads on your website and get paid?

When it comes to exploring how to make money from your website, there are a variety of options that you can trial. Read on to find out several of the ways you can connect with advertisers and integrate ads on your website.

The display ad banner

It is the most common way to host ads on your website is by using a display ad banner on your available ad spaces. You don’t have to be a technical expert, simply generate an ad banner and copy the code where you would like it to be displayed. Kelkoo Group’s Dynamic Ads solution gives access to a turnkey solution that allows you to select ad formats, easily select the retail products to be displayed (filtering by category, keywords or merchants), and generate the associated code, ready to be used and copied on your website. This is also the ideal blog monetisation technique for use on your site.

Of course, as mentioned earlier in this guide the performances of your ads will depend on how you are able to adapt the content of the ad to meet with your audience’s interests. According to the advertisers and different monetisation solutions, you will have the ability to select the content and customise your ads. At Kelkoo Group, we offer 3 different ways to select the products you want to display on your ads:

• A turnkey platform that provides you easy access to our database and selection filters on category, keywords or merchants. This solution does not require advanced technical skills and it is available with our Dynamic Ads solution.

• The API solution provides you a more comprehensive and flexible access to our database, using Kelkoo Group’s own search technology to sort, filter and categorise results from the millions of offers in our catalogue. It requires more technical expertise and it is available with our Custom Ads solution. This solution enables you to produce much more than “standard” ad banners.

• The Feed Service which is available in several formats such as XML, CSV, JSON and delivers categorised feeds at regular intervals throughout the day. It is accessible with our Custom Ads solution and requires deeper technical expertise than the Dynamic Ads solution.

Product Listing Ads

Product Listing Ads is an ad format adapted to e-commerce. These ads are visually appealing by showing images and product information dynamically. They can be linked to one or several shopping feeds, enabling them to display updated information from different sources. Examples of this are Yahoo, Bing and Google Shopping Ads.

With this option, you can offer a product selection tool on you website. It is adapted to e-commerce content and provides the Publisher the opportunity to display a large number of different products, in addition to filtering options for visitors. This solution can be integrated so that advertising is “hidden” under a product selection or research tool on the Publisher website, increasing the likelihood of clicks. This solution requires  significant technical expertise and can be implemented with our Product Ads solution.

You may also want to consider integrating a Price Comparison engine on your website. This enables you to offer a new service to your visitors and monetise its use by earning on every click made on the products in the search results. Kelkoo Group can help you create your own branded Price Comparison Site with our White Label solution. This is a powerful tool to monetise your website traffic.

Monetisation through affiliate links

Not all monetisation techniques require the display of pictures, photos or banners. As long as you redirect a qualified visitor to the advertiser website, this will be remunerated.

An affiliate link relates to an offer that an advertiser wants to promote. It is provided to the Publisher for integration on their website, exposing it to their audience and providing revenue generation opportunities. In e-commerce, these links redirect to a specific product page of an online shop. The URL contains the information needed to track the performance, so remuneration is applied, and paid by the advertiser to the Publisher.

This approach is well integrated in the website. If any of your website content redirects to an advertiser page, this link can be monetised. In the e-commerce sector it is one of the top blog monetisation techniques.  For example, a blog offering product reviews to its visitors is most likely to redirect to the related product page. In this case, without a specific agreement with the website or merchant, the link wouldn’t generate any money for the author. This is where link monetisation solutions are required.

Kelkoo Group’s Links solution, provides the publisher access to our entire comprehensive merchants and products database from which they can select the specific merchant or product they would like to redirect his visitors to, and generate the corresponding monetised link that will result in them earning from this.

When it comes to exploring how to monetise your website traffic, there are a range of options that you can try out and test to ensure that you continue to turn clicks into revenue. At Kelkoo Group our solutions allow you to generate traffic in a wide variety of ways. If you are a website owner looking into alternatives as for how to monetise your website, or are on the lookout for an alternative to Google AdSense, then an off-the-shelf solution from a trusted e-commerce partner could give your site the boost it needs.

Following our above advice will help you grow your business through increasing your traffic, improving your audience and ensuring that you generate incremental revenue. Going further as a Publisher, relying on your content to become a strong e-commerce player, will help to provide you with monetization opportunities as you continue on your journey towards site maturity.

About Kelkoo Group’s simple and flexible solutions

Our monetisation solutions for publishers are designed to make earning revenue from e-commerce offers as simple and flexible as possible. It is a simple, comprehensive and trusted service when you’re wondering how to get ads on your website and get paid. Our millions of offers extend across thousands of leading online retailers in 26 countries. Partner with us and choose from either CPC or Rev-Share agreements, from a variety of well-known retailers, that will see your revenue and lead generation increase as soon as you make the switch and begin to host ads on your website.

Kelkoo Group is trusted by many of the world’s leading stores to deliver high quality traffic that converts visitors into shoppers. By partnering with us you’ll have a choice of integrating our offers on your website via a choice of Shopping API, Product Feed, off the shelf solutions or Display Ads. Our top publishers have a track record of success and are able to grow quickly, earning up to €300k revenue each month.