Sell Something!

I need to pound it into my brain that I need to sell something.

For too long, I have been building sites with the idea of profiting from ad revenue. Well, I can make a profit with ad revenue, but not a very big one.

Online ad revenue is not where it should be. Online ads should pay very well since people are taking direct action and can buy something immediately from the advertiser. Online ads should be far more valuable compared to print ads. The problem, of course, is that online ads are worth pennies compared to the dollars commanded by print ads.

The poor performance of online ad revenue should get better over time, but I'm sick of waiting. I had the idea that I would build my sites and the ad revenue would improve within a few months, but now it has been years.

At least I'm not alone. The New York Times gets tons of online visitors and yet it makes way more from print ads in its dying print editions. Facebook is one of the most visited sites on the web and yet it is barely turning a profit.

It doesn't make sense, but I need to get it through my head that the online ad market is not mature enough to support my goals.

My other option is to sell things online. This is the approach taken b y many sites such as the Motley Fool investment site. They were not happy with their business model that was based on generating ad revenue so they switched to a business model where they make money by selling investment newsletter subscriptions.

My options are to sell my own products or to sell the products of other people through affiliate programs. My preference is to sell the products of other people through affiliate programs. The positive is that I don't need to handle the customer, shipping, and storage issues. The negative is that affiliate sales can often be a one and done situation as customers are sent to a merchant site and will often return to the merchant site directly to make repeat sales.

Another negative aspect of affiliate programs is that they are still in an immature state. Not all products and companies have affiliate programs. The ones who do often have limited link options and poor landing pages with poor conversion rates. The affiliate programs that do convert are crowded with competition because there are a lot of people trying to make money online.

I think I can reduce the negative aspects of affiliate programs by delivering good content to my visitors. Hopefull I will continue to build a user base who will return to read my content. I have a few sites where people come to my site to read content on a fairly usual basis. I will just start to push affiliate links to my visitors instead of hoping they will click on the ads. Hopefully the affiliate marketing industry will mature faster than it has been.

I did a few tests to see if I need to remove the ads on my sites in order to get more people to click on affiliate links. To my surprise, the click conversion rate didn't chage at all. Ads on the side don't seem to disrupt the eyeflow until the visitors are done reading the content and looking for other places to go or things to look at.

In addition to my content sites, I also want to build more online shopping portals. I like the idea of people coming to my sites with the main purpose of shopping and buying something. The problem is that I don't want to build and update the shopping portal myself so I am looking for white label solutions. I have tried a few, but I haven't found a good shopping technology partner I am happy with yet.

I also need to consider that the affiliate marketing model will be just as slow and immature as the ad revenue model. We all are early adopters in this digital business age and the excitement of the dot com boom has burst and been relaced by a long term optimism.

All I know is that getting clicks on ads and being paid 20 or 30 cents per click is very frustrating. It is very hard to get affiliate sales and commissions, but when they happen, they can be much more significant.

Its time to focus much more on selling something and much less on making money from ad revenue.