Making money from website adverts

Our Biz-find sites have no affiliate adverts (you mean you never noticed!?) Apart from advertising the paid premium members, and these very blogs from my home page, which; by the way, is now growing online real estate, I have shied away from Google advertising or banner advertising, for two good reasons:

One: the money in banner advertising is now one word: atrocious, well it is on a site like this, which is a generalised free business directory with business blogs and B2B lead generation. So how wide is the subject of business? The term pachyderm comes to mind.

If you are considering banner advertising on your site, you need to consider one word ‘Niche’!

The only online netpreneurs who are making money from banners are the niche websites, and the more targeted the site, the better. Getting paid of banner ads comes down to a few factors. Firstly; how much is each click worth? Some are less than half a cent and some clicks can be as high as $50! You better do your research; the sites that are targeted are more likely to get higher paid clicks.

If you have a website for property UK for example, and you have banners for houses in UK well, that’s a lot of places and people generally want to live in one area so if you had a website for houses for sale in Liverpool for example, then a Estate agent in Liverpool is probably going to pay quite a bit of money for an ad on that site, well only if you can prove you are getting the traffic that is, not forgetting Estate agents make ridiculous amounts of money selling houses so the click price can be high!

Secondly, Traffic; Across the board, the number of websites visitors that click website adverts has gone down quite steadily over the years as more and more people are just not seeing ads, the average number of clicks for a dollar revenue is now around 600 visitors, of course there’s a lot more maths in there but that’s the very general rule of thumb that I have researched, so to make a living say in the UK and I would hazard a guess that a reasonable standard of living now in UK is £1500 a month, then you would need a website generating; wait for it:

Around 1 million visitors a month!

That is quite a task. We at Biz-find are full time and have been in the industry since 2005 and we are still learning day by day and we create around 50,000 B2B visitors a month across all our directories. We have written over 1 million words on blogs and have around 50,000 followers and likes on social media sites to who we share all our new listed companies and all our content written by top business people in their fields. That took many years work!

The second reason is the difference between branding and advertising; unless you have a company car and you are quite prepared to go out and educate the people who are using your site about the difference between plain advertising for ‘clicks to purchase’ website visitors, and the branding principle of getting you clients name seen and recognised, albeit subconsciously, for brand trust and loyalty through impressions, you will struggle; because in my opinion that’s a hard sell:

“Well Mr Jones your ad on my site is £100 a month, but please don’t expect an ROI for at least a year, because my website visitors have to get to know you and see you enough before they trust you enough to buy from you”

Poor old Mr Jones is selling Balloons for £3.50 a bag is going to find it hard to justify a £1200 spend on your site, even if it is local, to get loyalty before he sees a sale!

Biz-find.co.uk our flagship site is now raked in Alexa in the top 250,000 out of all the sites on the net (there are roughly 650 million sites out there, that gives you some prospective eh!) Which we are proud of, yet it took over 100 blogs at two a week, sharing all to our social media reach each time, and nearly 1200 user added companies, the first 500 listed companies which we had to beg to join, even though it’s free, were an opus to convert I can tell you!

 So if you have just got your redundancy money, you have bought a nice desk from Ikea and you are just about to embark on a new career as an netpreneur, you had better be very niche and hope that you have at least a million people around the world who you are going to blow away each week with amazing content about your niche subject, and have very few competitors in your field who are already blogging and sharing consistent content, before you get a Clickbank account or register with OMG affiliates.

 You had also better be prepared to blog every day and have enough cash for say around 5 years, say £100k in the bank to spend on your bills each month till you see a penny from your efforts.

If you are not already put off, social media marketing and content strategy are now recognised areas of the Sales and Marketing world, which need to be studied and your knowledge kept up to date daily as it’s evolving so fast. You also better have some kind of sales experience as well to be able to close off business. To add to the mix is a certain grasp of  business acumen, a knowledge of company set up and trading within your prospective country, all mixed in with a determination that a quarter of a million quids worth of a few Tony Robbins seminars can instil for motivation, and voila a netpreneur is born, you have passed the test, you can now take the kids to school, gloat at the other Parents, and go the gym in the afternoon!

Makes you want to call up your old boss and ask him if you can come back doesn’t it!?