Matching Revenue Streams to Traffic Sources

The comments on my latest stats post turned to the subject of monetization and how it relates to traffic. In this post I’m going to explain how to determine what kind of monetization to use based on your traffic sources.

Not All Traffic Is The Same

Blogs are fantastic because they are very good for generating all kinds of traffic such as search engine traffic, social traffic, referral traffic from other bloggers and so on. Other types of websites such as niche sites struggle with certain types of traffic sources such as social traffic.

The trouble is that different kinds of monetization work better for different kinds of traffic so what do you do when your overall blog traffic is split amongst different kinds of traffic? Ideally, you would provide several kinds of monetization and tweak them so that the right traffic sees the right monetization. Let’s look at this from the angle of traffic sources.

Search Engine Traffic

People who come from a search engine are looking for something specific. If they find it at your site then that’s great. If what they are searching for is a solution to a problem and your site happens to sell that solution in some way then you can make good money. Generally speaking, a large portion of search traffic is not particularly tech-savvy and they are quite likely to click on ads.

SE traffic is more receptive to on-page advertising such as AdSense than other kinds. Now the trouble is, programs like AdSense are very easy to implement so many bloggers put those ads up first but it usually takes a few months to build search engine traffic because your site needs authority before it is going to rank for any decent keywords and that takes time.

Another alternative is to display banner ads such as ads for affiliate programs in your sidebar. An advantage here is that you get to select what ads are displayed unlike with AdSense where you leave the decision up to a computer.

To do well with programs like AdSense each post needs to be targeted well to a certain keyword or group of related keywords and these keywords need to be something that advertisers are bidding on. Many blogs are not focused enough to do well. Mine is a prime example – most of my mosts are long, and rambly and don’t focus on keywords all that much so when I was running my AdSense experiment I found that the ads were very poorly targeted to my audience.

Social Traffic

This is the kind of traffic that comes from sites such as Digg and StumbleUpon. Usually the visitor will not have seen your site before and is probably just one click away from a whole bunch of other interesting sites. These surfers are tech-savvy and know the Internet well. They know an ad when they see one and do not click on them. Quite often, a large number of ads on a page will turn them off and quickly send them to the next page.

How do you monetize social traffic? You give them free stuff. These people like freebies, a free report of some kind or an email course is always a good bet. These are the primary methods that I use to monetize my traffic here. You need to make it easy for them to get the free stuff without going over the top with the cheesy marketing hype. A popup that appears a few seconds after the page loads has worked extremely well for me, as has my header section which prominently displays a download link to my WordPress ebook.

Referral Traffic

This is basically any traffic that has come from another website so technically it includes social traffic but I prefer to put it in a category of it’s own. Into here I would classify visitors who come from links in other blogs such as from your commenting efforts, article marketing, other people blogging about you and so on. The big difference with this kind of traffic and social traffic is that the link they are coming from usually gives an insight into who you are or what your post is about so they have been ‘warmed up’ a little before they get there.

This traffic is fairly is mixed as far as on-page ads are concerned. If they know you you are as a blogger and are coming from a recommendation from another blog then often they will be quite highly receptive to ads for your own products including freebies. They are usually more tech-savvy than your average search engine visitor but perhaps not quite as much as social visitors.

Putting it All Together

Ideally you have traffic coming from a wide variety of sources in which case to monetize it effectively you may need more than one method. If you have a large amount of both social and search engine traffic and use something like AdSense, make sure you use something like the whoseesads plugin to show the ads only to the search engine visitors.

Having some kind of freebie is always a good idea, but of course you need to monetize it somehow for it to be an income stream for you. A good backup for most kinds of traffic is a few banner ads for affiliate products that you deem to be appropriate for the kinds of topics that you discuss on your blog. When you begin to get a reputation and find your referral traffic growing, think about creating your own products to sell on your blog.

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