The 10 Step Winning Content Strategy for Real Ad Revenue

The 10 Step Winning Content Strategy for Real Ad Revenue

Let’s start with the bad news. There are no free meals on the internet, and most “get rich fast” schemes are scams. You can’t just buy a domain, install a CMS, steal create some awesome content, and then sit back and watch the money roll in as you pick up a cigar-smoking habit and book your one-way ticket to paradise. It just doesn’t work that way.

Now that we’ve disappointed you thoroughly… Lean in closer as we’re about to tell you how to make money with a content website, the fastest and most effective way possible.

The tips below can help you:
Get a lot of traffic, pretty fast.
Attract mad social shares and go viral.
Earn great money from AdSense and other ad networks. Yup, that does actually happen.
Capitalize on sponsored content and affiliate marketing.
Bring in some of that precious organic traffic and loyal followers.

Infrastructure
Rome wasn’t built in a day, and required building materials and manpower hours. We’re not building an empire, but we do need to lay down some foundations.

Content Management System.

Ad Networks.

Crafting Content to Love
Now that we’ve got our basics, comes the hardest and most important part. Creating content people will love. How do we define love?

1. Choosing a niche.
But you don’t have to have a B.Sc. in computers to curate content about technological innovation, for example.

2. Curating, Creating and Aggregating Content.

3. Outsource Some Writing

4. Get Your Content Discovered and Shared

Monetizing Traffic
Now you want to monetize the hard-earned and sometimes rather expensive traffic you’re sending to your online property. That’s what we’re good at. So what do you need to do?

1. Pile On The Ads (but not too much).
It’s time to put up some ads. But remember: you don’t want a PPC farm no one will want to visit. It doesn’t only look cheap, but it doesn’t bring in much revenue. So you want to combine well placed, popularly-sized ad units with content recommendation ads, affiliates (more on them later) and sponsored posts. There are plenty of revenue sources to compliment AdSense.

2. Create “Golden Geese” Posts.
At this point you want to create another type of content: the golden geese. We’ve written about content targeting for high revenue keywords, and this exactly what these posts do. And then it’s just a game of numbers. If you promote those pages organically in your snackable posts? Some of the audience will click through down your funnel and closer to those precious highly-priced ads.

Another type of “golden geese” I like are affiliate pages with ads. For example, you can create a wonderful paginated list of things to buy your significant other on Amazon if you forgot Valentine’s. The Amazon products pay a percentage for each purchase, the ads around complement the content. And unlike the previous golden geese, these might be worth promoting with CPC ads on Google as well. For a short period of time, anyway. But you get the idea.

3. Optimize Like Mad
If you’re a regular reader of this blog than you probably know how obsessed we are with optimization. We’ve written a lot of posts about how to squeeze every possible cent out of your AdSense setup. Just piling on the ads will help bring in revenue. But if you’re paying for traffic and writers: you have to optimize to earn. So optimizing and A/B testing are a must.

Analyze the performance of paid traffic, social media shares, and subjects that “work”. Weed out the cheap advertisers, and maximize your CPCs.

With AdNgin you can create layouts that maximize revenues by testing multiple combination of ad placements, colors, sizes and formats on different platforms. AdNgin can also test content recommendation networks and tell you which is better for your site. As well as test for the best advertisers being delivered through AdSense. And did we mention it’s free to register?
4. Analyze, Rinse, Repeat
This is a game of trial and error and is always a bit of a gamble at first. Don’t give up if you don’t see revenues in the first month. Learn from what you have, adjust, and do it again but better and harder.

Once the system is running smoothly and your revenues are growing, you can outsource entirely and retire to that island in the travel agency ad. Alternatively, you can hire some quality editors and help them keep the machine running using what you’ve learned so far. You can do this from your tanning bed on the beach, of course. Just make sure your paradise has a good mobile connection.