Now, while it might be easy to incorporate monetization into your Flash sites that doesn’t mean you’re going to start rolling in dough within the first hour of lazily posting some Adsense boxes onto the corner of your navigation bar. If you are going to make good money from your website, you need to plan out a sensible monetization strategy. A good place to start is by answering a few big questions.
How Will Your Site Make Money?
There are a million and one ways to make money from your website, but most of them are variations on three main digital money-making methods. You can sell a product, you can sell a service, or you can sell advertising space on your site.
When you sell a product from your free website, you can either sell products that you produce yourself or you can sell someone else’s products as an affiliate and earn a commission. In general it’s easier to become an affiliate, though you can earn more money by selling successful products you developed on your own. The products you sell can either be a digital, downloadable product (ebooks, audio programs, videos, etc.) or a physical product that gets shipped to the buyer.
Selling services from your Flash website often revolves around selling a subscription service for a program, or selling a personal service that you can do like freelancing or consulting. The latter is a very popular and lucrative way to make money from your website, as you’re a high quality authority site or blog is becoming an increasingly viable credibility indicator these days.
Finally, you can sell advertising space on your site. This is probably the most common and popular method of making money from a website because it is the absolute easiest. All you need to do is add a little code to your site and you will have fully functional ads on your site, earning you money each time one of your visitors clicks on them. Most website builders don’t even require you work with any code, and let you place ads on your site with just a little dragging and clicking.
When Will You Monetize Your Site?
There’s a big debate out there about whether you should monetize your free website as soon as you launch it, or whether you should monetize it after you have a certain volume of visitors.
The arguments for both sides pretty much come down to what timeline for monetization is going to bother your visitors the least. One side argues that first time visitors will be put off by a site that is small but filled with ads, affiliate links and products to buy. The other side argues that your loyal readers who are used to free content are going to revolt the second you incorporate a product or ad box onto your site.
Overall, it’s best to monetize your web page design a little bit in the beginning and to incorporate more products and monetization methods as you go along. Most visitors are not going to be put off if you have an ebook up for sale or a single ad box on your site when they first visit, but they’ll probably feel suspicious if a brand new site is loaded up with a dozen products, hundreds of affiliate links and ads all over the place. Build trust before you build monetization methods.
Will Revenue Come First?
Finally, you need to decide whether your primary reason for creating a site is to make money, or to communicate with your audience. If you are aiming to make a business website to make money, then the sky is the limit when it comes to how heavily you monetize your site. If you are primarily aiming to make money, than you should utilize methods like light-boxes which are effective at both converting an annoying your visitors.
On the other hand, if monetization is just a side benefit of your free website, than you should take readability and usability into account first and foremost.
