Thursday, September 29, 2011

Top 5 Reasons Why Your Website Isn't Making Money Online?

Shoesmoney’s iconic photograph holding that big money cheque from Google Adsense, has motivated many a folks to start up their online ventures (usually blogs) in a hope to become the next millionaires. However, 99% fail. The reasons vary from - Lack of commitment, lack of hard work to lack of ideas .At the end of it, their dream run is crashed even before it gets started. I have advised in one of my earlier post that monetization of your website is important and advertisements can’t be the sole source of revenue. You need to have multiple revenue lines. However, out of those 99% online publishers who fail to make money, majority of them rely, only on advertisements and continue to fail.


Does that really mean you can’t earn decent money from advertisement alone?


You can, but it will take time and can be frustrating at times. For Most of the online publishers, the first choice of weapon, continues to remain - Google Adsense. However, the money earned by the beginners continues to remain significantly small because Google shares ad revenue in a slightly different manner. For big publishers, the share is more and for small publishers the share is less.
So just because you are a small publisher, will you continue to earn peanuts?


No there is more to the story. There are five other major factors because of which you are a noob at making money from your website. They are as follows:


1. You don’t produce high quality content on frequent basis – This means your websites doesn’t fulfill the first requirement of luring visitors to your site which to give them Fresh, Relevant and Interesting content at a Frequent Pace.


2. You don’t have quality backlinks – if less people link to you, then that becomes a testimony that not many people like, whatever you produce. Depute a Search Engine Optimizer (SEO) who can artificially create a few backlinks and also develop a long term promotion strategy for your website.


** Above two factors are required to give you better ranking in Google, Bing etc. Higher Ranking brings more visitors on your site and more visitors means better probability of making money.


3. You are getting lots of Returning Visitors - Its great to have a loyal fan following however, most of the returning visitors turn to become Ad blind (as they get usedto to the ad spots) and refrain from clicking them. So, if you want more visitors to click on your ads, you need to develop strategy to attract a regular stream of New Visitors.


4. You are getting lots of traffic from social media and not from Search Engines - It has been observed that visitors or traffic generated via social media tend to click less on the ads as compared to those who come to your site while searching for a product/service via search engine. As they are in the “search mode” and continue to click on those links which may match their requirement, the possibility of them clicking on your ads becomes huge. Nonetheless, don’t shun your social media optimization strategy as you still need it to help you improve your ranking in the search engines.


Last but not the least –


5. You are using more of image ads and less of text based ads - Text links ads look boring but they pay you more. Image ads looks attractive but they pay you less. Many studies have suggested that - Users tend to click on text links more than image based ads.


Conclusion- Now that you have got some idea about - why your site isn’t making the kind of money your would have expected it to, start working on it. I don’t say something magical will happen soon, however, gradual improvement will improve your prospects of making money through your site. Wish you the very best and happy money making :-)