Since making money is the ultimate aim of our Web Empire, we need to know how we are going monetize our sites before we build them, as that can affect the layout and content of particular sites. For our Dinosaur example, as with any other topic, we have these general sources, and within each some specific examples of typical monetization sources:

Advertising Agencies

  • PPC links like Google Adsense, or ads other advertising aggregators  like adbrite or fastclick
  • Text links like TLA or backlinks and linkadage

Custom Advertising

  • Ads from lodging providers at destinations like Dinosaur National Monument
  • Ads for Eco-Tours that include dino excavation sites

Affiliate Sales

  • Dinosaur books and videos from Amazon
  • Dinosaur posters  from Allposters

Your own Products

  • Dinosaur ebooks for children (i.e. how to catch a dinosaur; dino care and feeding; etc.)
  • Educational dinosaur-related multi-media presentations

Other monetization options that may fit your topic, though they aren’t very easily applied to dinosaur-oriented sites, is to offer services (dinosaur sitting?), a subscription site, or selling tangible products (you could sell fossils, but it probably wouldn’t be profitable enough to be worth the effort).

These are just a few examples of the sorts of things you might consider under monetization. So, how does this affect site development? If you are selling advertising space, be sure not to make the factory site look junky by including too many ads — on other sites, experiment, and see what works best (i.e. is most profitable). For affiliate sales, provide a lot of information before sending people off to the affiliate site. You want to pre-qualify them, so that a high percentage of those who click through to the affiliate actually buy something. You don’t want to send away potentially profitable visitors down a non-profitable link. Luring them to click on something that won’t buy is self-defeating.

Put a lot of options in your site design for easily placing ads, both those you sell and ads for your own products. This is easily done using PHP and includes() within if(file_exists) conditional statements. Side-bars can be a series of such conditional statements, prioritized according to the importance of the content. Then it is easy to fill-in with ads and links.

In our last post in this series we will look at further considerations for designing the individual sites.