How to Make an Awesome, Free Media Kit in Under Two Hours

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For site owners who have plans of selling ads directly to premium advertisers and weaning themselves off of ad networks such as Google AdSense, one of the first steps in the process is developing a media kit that offers a “snapshot” of your property and audience. This process can be intimidating if you’ve never done it before, so we’ve put together a guide and template. (By the way, MonetizePros members enjoy access to our Media Kit Generator tool, plus other monetization tools, insider reviews, and in-depth e-books: click here to sign up.)

Below is a step-by-step guide for creating a quality first draft of a media kit, including the resources used for various features of the document. You can view a PDF of our media kit, or open up a Google doc that can be edited to include your site’s information. (We don’t mind.) If you want some additional inspiration for an extended media kit, check out our feature article, Seven Media Kits That Make it Rain. 

We used the presentation option within Google Drive to create our PowerPoint-stye media kit. This is basically a cloud-based alternative to PowerPoint that can be used by anyone with a Gmail address. We selected one of the dozen or so pre-loaded slide themes (Paper Plane), though there are several sources of additional templates if you want to get even fancier.

Cost: Free, though you’ll need a Gmail account to create presentations (instructions here).

For capturing and editing pictures of your site, Awesome Screenshot is quick, easy, and free. We were able to take a picture of one of our more popular tools to include in the media kit, as a way to highlight the type of content that’s found on our site.

In addition to taking basic screenshots, this tool lets you crop, add text and shapes, and blur out any information you don’t want to share:

Cost: Free.

IconFinder has a huge library of icons that can be downloaded for free. There are some premium ones as well that sell for a few dollars apiece. We used this resource to find and download the icons used throughout our media kit to highlight various aspects of our audience.

Cost: Free for many of the icons, with some premium icons available for purchase (generally for $1 to $3).

Google Analytics is used by just about every major website to provide statistics about traffic. Once a line of code is installed on your site, you’ll get detailed information about how many visitors are coming to your site, what they’re doing while they’re there, and why they eventually exit.

There are dozens of metrics available from Google Analytics that can shed some light on the nature of your audience. Ideally, you’ll be able to identify a few that identify your audience as engaged, loyal, and fast-growing. Some to consider include:

Time on sitePageviews per visit% of Return VisitorsAverage Visits per MonthMonthly Unique Visitors / PageviewsGeographic Location

Cost: Free.

Quantcast can be used to get additional data about a site’s audience that Analytics can’t provide. The demographic information is pretty basic, but it’s enough to give a good snapshot of the audience coming to your site. Metrics available include:

AgeGenderEducation LevelHousehold Income

Quantcast can be up and running on your site in a matter of minutes, though you will need a bit of time to collect meaningful data about your audience’s demographics.

Here’s a sample screenshot of the Quantcast data for Goodreads.com:

Quantcast can provide additional detail into each of these categories, and also shows some of the other Web properties your audience likes, as well as trends over time.

Cost: Free.

In this media kit, we decided to include prices for each of the ad units available. Some publishers may not wish to have this information publicly available, preferring to share pricing info only when a serious request comes in. But if you do want to include, you may want to do some research on what reasonable rates for your niche are.

BySellAds, which functions as a marketplace for publishers looking to sell their premium inventory, is a good resource for researching appropriate CPMs.

Cost: Free (to browse at least).

Using only the free resources highlighted above, we were able to put together what we think is a pretty decent media kit that highlights our site and gives potential advertisers a good understanding of the value in promoting their products and services here. Feel free to flip through the presentation, or copy and edit the entire thing to showcase your own site.

 

How to Pick an Affiliate Marketing Offer

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For sites looking to monetize their existing traffic through affiliate marketing, a major determinant of success is picking the right offers to run. The difference in earnings from a bad offer and a good one can be enormous. Unfortunately, finding the “right” offer isn’t exactly easy; if you’re using an affiliate marketing network such as Commission Junction (now CJ Affiliate), SharesASale, or LinkShare, you will have literally thousands of affiliate offers available to you.

As with many aspects of Web monetization, the exact strategies will vary from site to site. There’s no universally superior affiliate marketing offer or merchant. There are, however, some general guidelines on factors to consider when evaluating potential affiliate marketing offers. We’ll dive into several of these below. We’re using screenshots from ShareASale throughout this article to illustrate the process, but the tasks and terms will be generally similar across the major affiliate marketing networks. (By the way, if you’re enjoying this article, you may want to subscribe to our free newsletter; we’ll send monetization tips straight to your inbox each day.)

The major affiliate networks will have thousands of offers available to you. The vast majority of them won’t be appropriate for your site, in the sense that the products or services advertised aren’t relevant to your audience.

One of the major factors that determines affiliate marketing success is the click rate on your site, or the percentage of your visitors who click on an affiliate marketing link. The more targeted and relevant the offers you present, the more likely your visitors are to click through to the merchant site.

Every network offers affiliates a way to filter through the numerous offers presented. Take the time to go through the various categories or search for specific merchants that you think would do well on your site. There’s no set of rules for filtering through the options; you’ll ultimately need to rely upon your familiarity with your audience and your gut feelings about what types of offers will perform.

If your site is more general in nature (e.g. a personal blog or general news site), you may have a bit more flexibility and a deeper pool of initial candidates.

The commission is generally the percentage of a sale that is paid to the affiliate for referring a customer. The commission percentage can range from the low single digits to more than 50%. (E-products generally have the highest commissions since the margins are close to 100%.)

Though commission rates are obviously important, this number definitely needs to be considered in connection with the type of offer. A merchant offer that pays 50% commission seems very attractive in a vacuum, but if the product offered isn’t relevant to your audience and the creative is no good the results will probably be uninspiring.

In other words, the equation for affiliate marketing revenue has several variables:

Revenue = Visitors x Click Rate x Conversion Rate x Average Sale Price x Commission

In many cases, offers with the highest commission may result in sub-optimal click or conversion rates. The commission percentage only comes into play if you actually generate sales.

Some offers will feature unique wrinkles in the commission structure:

Multi-Tiers: While most commissions are a flat fee, some offers will pay out different percentages depending on sales volume.

Bonuses: Some merchants will offer bonuses for reaching certain sales thresholds, creating another opportunity to generate revenue for major affiliates. For example, a company may offer a $500 bonus to affiliates that generate $25,000 in sales in any given month. While only a very small percentage of affiliates will ever hit this target, it can translate to a higher effective commission rate (the extra $500 on $25,000 in sales is effectively an additional 2% commission). Here’s an example of a bonus commission offer (in this case, $625 for hitting the $25,000 mark and $1,250 for generating $50,000 in monthly sales):

The presence of multi-tier pricing and bonuses can obviously increase the overall attractiveness of an offer.

The hardest aspect of an affiliate marketing offer to evaluate may also be the most important. Your ability to drive traffic to merchant sites via affiliate links is one of the primary revenue drivers, and it depends in large part on the tools you’re given. These tools are the advertisements merchants have available for affiliates to use on their site. The better the ads are, this more clicks they will get.

Networks will generally provide a preview of the creative files a merchant has before you sign up. There are a couple elements of ads to evaluate:

Technical aspects, such as sizeOverall quality

The first point is straightforward enough; affiliates need to identify offers that include ads that will fit easily into their site. For example, if your site has only 300×250 ad units you’ll want to stick only to offers that have a 300×250 ad.

Harder to evaluate is the quality of the ads.

Generally, larger and wealthier merchants will be able to spend the time and money to produce a wide variety of high quality ads.

Affiliates receive credit for a conversion by placing a cookie on the computer of visitors they send to a merchant site, allowing the network to attribute sales to specific partners. Many merchants will give credit for a sale to an affiliate even if the sale comes after the initial visit to the site. For example, assume:

Visitor clicks affiliate link on publisher site;Visitor browses merchant site, but doesn’t buy anything;Visitor returns to merchant site (by typing in URL) a week later and completes purchase.

Many merchants will still give credit for this sale to the affiliate, even though the visitor came directly to the site and not through an affiliate link when they completed their purchase. This is a fair solution in many cases, since many customers take time to make a decision and commit to a purchase. In the scenario above, the affiliate still provided a valuable service to the merchant–getting the customer to their site–and deserves to be compensated for that.

Here’s an example of a cookie that lasts for almost 6 months:

A 30-day cookie is the standard, but there can be quite a bit of variation here. Some cookies expire after just a week, while others run indefinitely. From an affiliate perspective, the longer the cookie length the better.

Many networks provide metrics on the earnings of other affiliates with certain offers. The standard metric is EPC, or earnings per click. This unit is generally presented as the total earnings for every 100 clicks received. An EPC of $97 means that for every 100 clicks on an affiliate link to that merchant, affiliates are generating $97 in revenue.

EPC can be converted to RPM, or revenue per thousand impressions, as follows:

RPM = (EPC  / 100) x (CTR x 1,000)

This assumes that you know (or can estimate) the click rate that an affiliate offer will get on your site.

This metric is a way of summarizing the conversion rate, average ticket price, and commission percentage. It does not take into account the click rate that an offer will receive. So while EPC is certainly a useful stat to consider when evaluating potential affiliate offers, it must be considered alongside the click rate an offer will receive. A great EPC combined with a bad click rate won’t translate to great earnings. (In other words, the highest EPC isn’t necessarily the best offer.)

Reversals refer to completed sales for which the commission is cancelled and returned. This can happen for a number of different reasons:

The order was cancelled by customer (and refunded by merchant);The transaction was a duplicate (i.e., customer card charged twice);The transaction was fraudulent;A violation of the merchant’s affiliate policy was committed.

Reversal rates are generally in the low single digits; it’s standard for about 1% of transactions to be reversed. If you see offers with extremely high reversal rates, that could be a red flag. It doesn’t mean you should necessarily stay away, but it’s worth understanding why so many transactions are returned. For example, there’s something strange going on with this merchant:

A lower reversal rate equates to higher revenues.

Affiliate marketing compensation arrangements generally fall into one of three categories:

Pay-per-sale (most common)Pay-per-lead (somewhat common)Pay-per-click (pretty rare)

The pay-per-sale and pay-per-click structures should be pretty obvious. Under a pay-per-lead arrangement, affiliates can get paid even if the merchant doesn’t generate any revenue. In most cases, this would involve earning a commission when a referral starts a free trial to a service. Even if they never pay for that service after the trial expires, the commission is earned.

You may eventually determine that certain types of pricing arrangements work better on your site and with your audience. Excluding pay-per-sale offers, however, will dramatically limit the pool of options at most affiliate networks.

Success in affiliate marketing ultimately comes down to finding the right offers for your audience, and effectively funneling your traffic to your merchant partners. Picking the relevant offers that feature attractive commissions is a tough process, but one that is worth spending a considerable amount of time on.

 

How to Use Autoresponders to Boost Revenue

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Though an email address may not seem like much–just one of hundreds of millions out there–it can be an extremely valuable asset. While many site owners spend a great deal of time trying to get new visitors to their sites, there generally isn’t much thought on how to get previous visitors to return to the site (and, ideally, engage at a deeper level). Today we’re going to dive into email autoresponders, a powerful tool for better monetizing your existing traffic base.

An autoresponder is a series of email messages that is delivered at pre-determined intervals. Generally, the clock starts when a visitor to your site signs up for a membership or newsletter; they’ll then start receiving a series of emails at times you determine.

For example, an autoresponder email sequence might look like this:

Immediately Upon Signup: Welcome email1 Day After Signup: Autoresponder email highlighting a free tool available on the site5 Days After Signup: Autoresponder email highlighting three pieces of great content10 Days After Signup: Autoresponder email highlighting another free tool14 Days After Signup: Autoresponder email pitching an upgrade to a paid membership

As we’ll discuss below, each of the bullet points above can potentially be broken down into its own autoresponder with a series of emails expanding upon the particular point.

(By the way, if you’re enjoying this article, you may want to subscribe to our free newsletter; we’ll send monetization tips straight to your inbox each day.)

In order to set up an autoresponder, you need only to have an email service provider. (We use MailChimp; instructions for creating an autoresponder are pretty straightforward.) You’ll have to make a few decisions as you go through this process:

What is the primary goal or the autoresponder?How many emails are included in the autoresponder?How frequently are autoresponder emails sent?What is the call-to-action (or desired recipient action) for each email?

In addition, you’ll obviously need to write subject lines and copy for each email in the series.

To show how you may be able to use an autoresponder to better monetize your traffic, think of the problem we’re trying to solve.

Problem: Most visitors spend only a few minutes on your site, and aren’t able to discover or fully appreciate all of the content you’ve created there. Even if they give you their email addresses, they’ll likely only ever see a small fraction of your site.

Many sites focus on stuffing visitors full of all of their content while on the site. That’s like trying to get them to drink from a fire hose.

 

Solution: Think of autoresponders as a more measured, gradual approach to selling a product or exposing your audience to your site’s content. Instead of trying to close the deal immediately on-site, you get a chance to make the pitch over the course of several detailed emails. You’re letting them drink from the fountain instead of the fire hose.

There are a number of different approaches to setting up an autoresponder. Your strategy should be built around one primary goal–an action you’d like to see the recipients of the autoresponder email take. For example, your primary goal may be for recipients to:

Upgrade to a paid membership (generating premium revenue)Click through and spend time on your site (generating ad revenue and increasing loyalty)Forward to a friend (growing audience)Share socially or link (growing audience)

For sites that sell a paid product, autoresponders can be a great way to gradually familiarize potential customers with the value your product offers. If your paid membership product has a number of different features (like this one), each triggered email can highlight the benefits of a singular feature. If your product has one primary feature (like this one), an autoresponder can be used to show different ways the tool can be used or to highlight success stories.

Our autoresponder includes an email highlighting our free Media Kit Generator tool. This is a tool that many new members might not see during their initial visit, but that many want to check out once they’re aware it exists on our site:

In other words, think of an autoresponder as way to walk potential customers through your landing page. Except instead of letting them read (part of) it in one sitting, you get to explain your product in a series of emails.

If someone signed up for your newsletter (or gave you their email address for another reason), they clearly liked something about your site. But odds are that most subscribers have not seen the best content and tools you have to offer on your site.

If you have one killer tool or article, it’s easy enough to funnel visitors there (for example, by linking to it in the nav bar, using a Hello Bar, or various other techniques). But for any property with several great resources (a term that can include articles, tools, e-books, etc.), it is always a challenge to get visitors to focus where you would like them to focus.

In other words, it’s difficult to highlight the best content you have to offer and steer visitors when they’re on-site. But autoresponders are a great way to do this effectively. By highlighting the best content on your site, you can increase quality indicators such as time on site. There are also some direct monetization benefits for sites that monetize via display advertising: more pageviews translates directly to more revenue.

For sites that already have a deep library, this approach allows publishers to leverage existing work. There’s no need to create new content; simply highlight the best parts of your site already in place.

We also have an email in our autoresponder sequence that simply highlights an article on our site. We’ve identified what we think is one of our most in-depth and useful guides, and crafted an email designed to get our subscribers to check it out. Success here is a simple social share or even a click-thru to the article:

Though we don’t focus much on linkbuilding or other aspects of SEO, it’s worth noting that there is a potentially significant (and positive) side effect. If you’re able to gradually highlight high quality pieces of content to the right people, you’ll probably be able to attribute some new inbound links to your autoresponder.

If you’re taking this approach, your autoresponder should include a series of emails highlighting what you think are the most “linkable” pieces of content you’ve produced.

For sites that monetize via affiliate marketing, an autoresponder can put several different affiliate offerings in front of subscribers over the course of a few weeks. There’s a fine line to walk in terms of being overly promotional here; if you’re shamelessly hawking products that you make a fee on, you’ll see some pretty high unsubscribe rates. But if done tastefully and in an informative way, an autoresponder can be a great way to showcase products and services that cut you in for a portion of the total sale.

Perhaps a better use of this technique would be to work an affiliate marketing-focused email into the autoresponder sequence. For example, after you’ve sent a few emails highlighting some of your best content you may send one that highlights some of your favorite tools and resources.

Most autoresponders (including a few of the examples below) borrow from a number of different strategies and thus seek to accomplish a number of different goals. For example, an autoresponder may focus primarily on highlighting or explaining free content and resources, with occasional plugs for paid membership upgrades or affiliate offers.

While we’re at it, here are some other ideas to include in an autoresponder:

Social: Invite subscribers to like you on Facebook, follow on Twitter, subscribe on YouTube, or connect on LinkedIn.Sister Sites: If you publish more than one site, let subscribers know about what the other properties have to offer.Coupons: If your site is set up to run sales where you offer paid products at a discount, an autoresponder can be a great way to encourage subscribers to take advantage.

When evaluating the success of an autoresponder, you’ll want to consider some of the obvious metrics such as open rates. In addition, there are some other stats that can give you a feel for how well you’re doing:

Completion Rate: Ideally, everyone who signs up for your subscription will receive the entire autoresponder chain. In reality, you’ll probably see some drop off along the way. If there is a big increase in unsubscribes at a certain point in the chain, you may need to tweak your strategy there.Click Rate: The goal of most autoresponder emails involves getting the reader to click through from their inbox back to your site. The percentage of opened emails that end up on the site is a good indicator of the success in this initiative.Conversion Rate: Ultimately, an autoresponder’s success is measured by the number of email recipients who convert to s specified goal. Detailed tracking can be set up here using Google Analytics so you’ll know exactly how efficient your email sequence is.

If you’re more of a visual learner, the image below might help to clarify the nuances of an autoresponder. This first one is from SmartPassiveIncome.com; it demonstrates a mix of free content with a regular “upsell” email designed to get subscribers to pay for a product:

Below is another example, this time of a more detailed autoresponder sequence used by Digital-Photography-School.com. This one also sprinkles in promotional emails with regular updates (i.e., free content):

If you want to learn more about autoresponder tactics, the best thing to do is to experience them firsthand. Start by signing up for these:

ProBloggerCopyBloggerKISSMetricsCrazy Egg

We’ve spent a considerable amount of time setting up an autoresponder for MonetizePros subscribers. We’ve created a great suite of tools to help with Web monetization, and we’re using our a series of triggered emails to explain to subscribers exactly what’s available to them. Our primary goal here is to get subscribers to come back to the site frequently and hopefully pass along our site to a friend or colleague. If you sign up for free MonetizePros membership, you can see exactly how the sequencing works and the emails are structured.

Autoresponders take quite a bit of thought and work to set up, but can be an effective way to accomplish a number of goals. Whether you’re looking to build links, grow your audience, generate additional display ads, or convert visitors and subscribers into paying customers, autoresponders can be an effective way to market your product.

 

How to Monetize a Forum: 50 Tips, Guides, and Resources

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They were the original form of online social media before anyone coined the term social media, and forums are still going strong. We know you’ve probably already read a lot about creating and managing forums; what you really want to know is how to make money from all your hard work. Here at MonetizePros, we’ve got you covered. (By the way, if you’re enjoying this article, you may want to subscribe to our free newsletter; we’ll send monetization tips straight to your inbox each day.)

TripAdvisor.com Forum

With so many active users and pages, you can make money directly off your forum. Use ad networks. Sign up to ad networks, such as Google Adsense, and let them do the leg work and find advertisers. It will cost you some of your revenue, but it’s an easy way to get started.Sell ad space directly to companies. Cut out the middleman, and agree on a CPM or CPC fee with advertisers directly. This requires more work, yet you get to hand-pick the ads, ensure they’re right your audience and keep all the money they generate. (Also see: Should You Sell Ads on Your Website Directly?)Mention products you affiliate-sell. Once you build trust with your audience, you can drop an affiliate link during a forum discussion if you know of a product that would be perfect for the person asking a question. Clarify that you’re an affiliate and explain why you think the product would be a great fit.Add a sub-forum that sells. Introduce a sub-forum that’s dedicated to nothing but advertisements. It could be a job board if your forum is for professionals in a given industry, or it can work as an e-store. Members who aren’t interested in advertisements will avoid this part of your forum, so this works best if you know your audience is on the lookout to make a purchase (or find a job).Add a sub-forum for product reviews. Encourage members to post product reviews and post some yourself. Add affiliate links to these posts when applicable.Turn links in user-generated content into affiliate links. Whether or not you create a sub-forum for this, members will post links on your forum. Switch those you can into affiliate links yourself or use software to automate the process.Invite industry leaders to live posting events and affiliate-sell their products. It’s a win-win situation: Members get their questions answered, industry leaders get exposure to possible new customers — and you get a happier community, a possible new connection and affiliate commissions.Sponsored sticky posts. Charge companies to stick a thread that advertises them at the top of your forum. It’ll be the first or second post on the page for a pre-determined period of time, no matter how many threads are started or updated.Barter advertising. Offer companies free advertising in exchange for them promoting you, too. Don’t limit yourself to the Web. Depending on what ad space on your site is worth, ask for advertising space in brochures or a booth at a conference.

Whether you read forum threads, create surveys — or, better yet, both — your forum is a rich resource of data, which you can leverage in several ways.

Learn what they want and create a mailing list opt-in they can’t resist. Forum members discuss what they like and don’t like about your industry, so it’ll be easy for you to figure out what they want so bad, they’d give their e-mail address for it. It’ll be much easier to sell through e-mail once they opt in to receive regular updates from you than it will through random ads on your forum.Learn what they want and create products and services to fill the gap they tell you exists. Or, better than the previous option, figure out what they want so bad, they’d be willing to pay for. Create what they want and sell it to them.Learn what they want and pitch a collaboration to leading brands or experts. You could develop products or services together, which could lead to earning money. It could also lead to promotional opportunities and establishing yourself as an industry leader, which could open up new monetization possibilities. Digital-Photography-School.com Forum

At times, you want to create a forum to support other ventures. In fact, a forum can be just the right addition to take your business to the next level.

Start a forum around your business. If you sell bicycles (online or offline), start a forum for bicycle enthusiasts. It will connect your brand name with your audience’s thoughts about bicycle and establish you as the go-to expert in the field. Plus, forums often come up in search engine searches because they’re updated often; so if you’re not getting enough search engine traffic, consider adding a forum to your company site.Run contests and games to create product awareness. Contests and games can generate more activity, which could be great for ad clicking and audience building. They could also help spread the word about your products, which would increase your client base and sales.Advertise your own company. Who says ads on your forum need to advertise other people’s businesses? Instead of relying on commissions, create ads that promote your own products and services and spread them around your forum.Offer exclusive offers or discounts to forum members. These offers could be available to anyone who happens to drop by the forum, to active members only, or to new signups (which would encourage registration).Use your forum to generate traffic to another site. You could do the selling there and leave the forum to member discussions. Unobtrusive ways to do this include creating a forum name that relates to your other site’s name, adding an RSS feed that links to your blog on the forum’s sidebar, and redirecting the forum to be a part of the main site’s URL (for example: forum.yoursite.com).Use your forum as a bonus offering when you sell other products or services. Offer to answer product buyers’ questions there. If joining your forum costs money, offer free access to anyone who buys a product from you. Once they have a positive experience in your forum, their loyalty to your business will grow. Set a time limit on the free access and, if they have a good experience, some customers will end up buying forum membership too.Enable easy opt-in to a mailing list during forum registration. Even if your forum is free, chances are it requires registration. Allow people to easily sign up to receive updates when they register. Then, use your e-mail list to sell directly to their inboxes.

 

Forums put you in a unique position, where you are constantly interacting with people who have an interest in your industry. Leverage this position to create larger profits.

Interview experts and broadcast it via a podcast or webinar platform. It will serve your community while giving you learning opportunities. If all goes well, you’ll be able to stay in touch with the expert and build a new business relationship.Hold an offline event or conference. Invite both community members and potential members to get to know each other and you offline, and network in person. This type of customer conference enables you to charge for event tickets, strengthen your community and brand awareness and/or sell your products live.Invite brands to your community’s offline conference. Sell brochure or booth spaces to companies and experts in your industry. You could also work with them on creating campaigns that combine the online and offline worlds. FreelanceWritersDen.com is a membership site with an active forum.

Any forum is a form of membership site, yet you can take it one step further and generate revenue through subscriptions.

Limit access to paying members only. If you have expertise in an industry, know industry leaders you could convince to regularly post on the forum or you’ve created extremely valuable content you could include there, consider closing your doors to non-paying forum members. You’ll start earning a reliable, recurring income.Go freemium. Include free sub-forums for people to try out your site and increase your traffic, and limit access to premium materials to paying members only. If you have a lot to offer, you can even have 3 layers: absolutely free with no premium access, partial access, and unlimited access.Make it cheap. Pricing decisions aren’t easy to make. Attract more members and lower your churn rate by making membership cheap to purchase. But blow buyers away, and make them feel like they’re cheating you out of a more deserving price by providing unbelievable value.Make it expensive. Decide on your business goals before deciding on a price. Consider building a brand of exclusivity and prestige (and back it up with unbelievable value). Fewer people will join, yet those that do might have money to spend on additional products. They could also have the money that entices brands with more expensive products and bigger advertising budgets.Limit number of participants. If you choose the latter approach, intentionally limit the number of participants, creating a waiting list that acts as an e-mail list and makes them want access even more — be it to your forum or to another product you offer meanwhile.

When you lead a community, and one that creates so much industry data, you pave the way to branding yourself as an expert. As a result, you’re creating a key to unlocking endless possibilities.

Soft-sell by leading the community. If you do nothing else to monetize your forum, ensure that people associate you with the forum. Keep your contribution consistent and valuable, and place a clear link to learn more on how you can help.Hold an offline conference solely for industry professionals in your niche. Showcase data you’ve generated from your forum about these professionals’ customers and prospects, presenting yourself as an expert and opening new possibilities for you in the industry.Run other companies’ forums. Use your experience of running a successful community on your own forum to pitch yourself as an expert and do it for pay for other businesses.

Yes, there are a lot of forums out there, yet not all of them do everything they can for their business or audience. Be the one that does, and you’ll see your income soar.

Provide an enjoyable mobile experience. The number of people using smartphones and tablets to access websites is constantly growing, but most forums fail to cater to their needs and end up losing members. Stand out in the crowd by having a forum that delivers an easy, enjoyable mobile experience.Add social proof. If you and/or your forum have been featured on top sites or media outlets, or won awards, add these places’ banners to your home page. This is an easy way to stand out in the forum crowd and create trust, which leads to members sticking around, clicking on ads and making purchases.Start threads around keywords you want to rank for. As time passes and more quality discussions take place on your forum around these topics, Google will present your threads to its visitors. Success here can be translated both into greater monetization on your own forum and into consulting opportunities for other companies.Start threads about hot topics. Set Google Alerts and follow Google Trends and Twitter Trends. Start threads about hot topics that relate to your industry. This will establish you as an up-to-date expert and be another step toward standing out in the Google crowd.Let your forum act as a focus group for brands. Hold contests to select forum members that will get to test new products. The members will then create testimonials — forum posts, blog posts, videos — so that there’s plenty of “regular people praise” on launch day. Charge brands for this access and ensure that all testimonials come with a mention, link or watermark that references your forum. You’ll get great PR and be able to present your forum as one that’s associated with brands and gives out perks, which could help you grow the number of forum participants and product buyers.Enable sharing of posts with special offers or contests on social media. Let forum members easily share forum posts that include perks on social media platforms to allow more people to buy from you.Enable signing up with social media. Signing up with e-mail takes several actions, and you risk losing new members. Let people sign up quickly with their social media accounts, especially when you know most of them are coming to take advantage of a special sales offer.

You don’t have to be a big brand to earn from someone else’s community. There are plenty of ways to monetize forums you don’t own.

Choose your user name carefully. While forums don’t often allow blatant self-promotion, some will let you get away with a user name like “Iceland Tour Guide”. If that’s the case, know that it’ll be easier to notice (and penalize you) when you promote yourself, yet if you add value to the community, people will start seeing you as an expert and might inquire about your services via private messages.Offer a discount code in your signature. Most forums allow a signature, which shows up below each one of your posts. Add information there about who you are and what you’re selling, and include a discount code “for my friends from the forum”.Promote occasionally. Once you’ve built trust, you could casually mention something you’re selling, or send a member a private message with a link to learn more. This is trickier to do on someone else’s forum, but once you’re a valued member of the community, most people won’t mind, as long as you don’t do it too often.Volunteer to be a guest expert and sell your product. Offer the forum owner that you’ll answer members’ questions in a live posting event. At the end of the event, offer members a chance to buy a product or a service you sell, or refer them to your own forum. Clarify in advance that it’s OK to make these offers in exchange for your time and effort.Give away something for free to the forum’s community. Promote your business or forum by offering something for free on another forum in exchange for some promotion. Make it a contest that gets your name out there to as many people as possible. FirepoleMarketing.com Forum

We know it’s easier to find information on blogs and social media than it is about forums, so we’ve done our research and dug up the best of the Web for you. 3 Easy and Effective Forum Monetization Tips. MonetizePros: Our own Michael Johnston breaks down 3 great, usually overlooked tips that can help you stop struggling to monetize your forum.How to Make Money with Membership Websites. Carol Zombo: This 58-page SlideShare presentation is for those who intend to charge a forum entry fee. Among others, get inspired by offline membership programs, gain ideas for types of content to include, and choose from membership models.Tap User Psychology to Build an Indestructible Community. ProBlogger: In a guest post, Richard Millington of FeverBee, and author of Buzzing Communities: How to Build Bigger, Better and More Active Online Communities, tells you how to create emotionally-connected, enduring communities that will follow you anywhere. His post might focus on blogs, but his points can be more easily applied in forums.ForumCon. An annual conference for forum professionals, where companies like Google, CNet and Adobe present. ForumCon also has useful blog and YouTube channel.How to Find a Profitable Membership Niche. Jeremy Gislason: This 26-page SlideShare presentation gives you a quick guide to setting yourself to success by choosing a profitable niche, finding products that are already selling well — and those that advertise them and might be willing to buy advertising space from you, too.How to Improve the Success of a Membership Program. Entrepreneur: Dave Lavinsky encourages membership program owners to measure the number of subscribers, cancellations and average subscription lengths, among other metrics. Whether you charge for membership or not, measuring how many members remain active on the site and for how long can help you create a better management strategy that will support greater monetization.How to Monetize Your Online Community. Ning: Ning, a company that helps other companies create their own online communities, hosts Patrick O’Keefe, author of “Managing Online Forums” and “Monetizing Online Forums”. In this 1 hour video presentation, Patrick talks about forum ads, affiliate links, in-text monetization, product-related discussions, audience segmentation, working with brands, membership programs, and more.Getting Value out of Forums. Firepole Marketing: Sean D’Souza founded 5000bc, a forum for small business owners to come together and thrive. In this podcast, he tells Danny Iny what it takes to keep a community going strong and profitable for more than a decade, even when he takes his annual three-month vacation.

Forums might seem like one of the most challenging online platforms to monetize, but their targeted, passionate audiences can open a wealth of opportunities for you. Mix different options together, consider your audience’s benefit first, and you’ll soon discover that the sky is the limit.

 

10 Free Tools to Help You Sell More Ads

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If you run a website that has a large and valuable audience, there is the potential to unlock significant value (i.e., cash flow) by weaning yourself off of ad networks and selling your valuable inventory directly to premium advertisers. Unfortunately, making this switch is much easier said than done; selling your ads is a long process that requires a great deal of time and effort.

While there’s no substitute for time and hard work, having access to some handy resources can help you work more efficiently. Below are 10 tools we’ve identified that can help publishers market their site, get in touch with the right people, and ultimately close a deal.

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If you want to sell ads at any sort of scale, you’ll eventually need a media kit that highlights your audience and helps advertisers figure out exactly what services you offer. Below are some tools that can be useful when building your first media kit. (Also see: Seven Media Kits that Make It Rain.)

Free Media Kit Tools. This list at Hubspot has a number of great tools for putting together a media kit. Particularly useful are Skitch (for creating screenshots), IconFinder (for getting free images), and FontSquirrel (for finding creative and free for commercial use fonts).

We also have a free Media Kit Generator that can get you a basic version of your media kit in no time.

Finding appropriate advertisers for your site can be a time consuming process. An ideal advertiser is one who would both be a good fit on your site (i.e., has products and services that appeal to your audience) and who is willing and able to spend money on marketing.

Here are a few of the tools we like for lining up advertisers and tracking down the appropriate contacts:

SellerCrowd. This online community of media buyers is a great resource for finding out almost anything you need to know about an advertiser, a campaign, or an agency. All you need to sign up and sign in is a LinkedIn account; then you’ll have access to thousands of threads with detailed information about the appropriate contacts, relevant email addresses, and preferred strategies.

In most cases, there will already be answers on the site to most questions you come up with. But in the event it hasn’t been asked before, it’s pretty easy to throw it out to the community and get a response back.

AgencyCompile. This research tool is simple but incredibly useful. Users can enter in a brand (e.g., General Mills) and see all the agencies who work on that brand’s marketing campaigns. The database can also be searched by agency, showing all accounts that are held at a particular agency. (This can be useful if you have a good contact at a certain agency, and want to know if there are any accounts that may be relevant to your site.)

There are also advanced search options that can be extremely useful in targeting certain locations or certain types of advertisers. AgencyCompile is completely free, which makes it one of the most useful tools on this list. (A few of the ones highlighted below offer limited free functionality.)

WhatRunsWhere. As the name suggests, this tool shows you where advertisers are running. Publishers can use this tool to see who is advertising on similar sites in their niche, generating leads of relevant companies who are known to be spending to run online campaigns.

This tool isn’t free–in fact, it’s quite expensive (starting at $150 / month). But it is possible to get a three-day trial for just $1.00; that’s enough time to let you gather quite a bit of information for almost nothing.

RedBooks. This online directory has information on more than 15,000 advertisers and 10,000 agencies. If you have identified a company but aren’t sure who the correct contact is, this site can be a great way to get your hands on a name and email address.

RedBooks isn’t free, but they do offer a 48-hour free trial (or 10 profile views). If used wisely, that can get you quite a bit of valuable information. Starting a free trial there appears to be a manual process; it takes a while to actually get started.

Moat. This site provides a similar service, but is 100% free. It’s pretty easy to use: enter in a brand, and you’ll see all the advertisements being run by that brand currently (including a list of sites where they’ve appeared).

This can be useful if you’ve identified a company you think would be a good fit for your property, but aren’t sure how active they are with digital advertising campaigns.

LinkedIn. This might seem like an obvious inclusion, but it’s worth highlighting. LinkedIn is a great resource for tracking down names within the marketing department of a company or within a certain division of a media buying agency. The free version of LinkedIn gives you most of what you should need here, as long as you don’t mind stalking potential leads.

Tracking down the appropriate contacts for an advertiser is often very challenging. But the really tough part comes once you have names and email addresses; then you’ll need to get them to respond and eventually strike up a conversation.

Staying organized and disciplined is a big part of the ad sales process; you’ll need to be persistent in your outreach. Here are a few good free resources to help keep your prospects straight:

Zoho CRM. This free CRM is part of the Zoho suite of business products. While Zoho doesn’t have all the features of solutions such as SalesForce, the price (free) is much better.

If used correctly (i.e., in a disciplined, organized way), Zoho can be a great tool for keeping your leads organized and gradually chipping away at your “wish list” of advertisers.

Insightly. This online CRM lets you manage contacts, existing deals, and potential new advertisers. Insightly is cloud-based (which means you can access it from anywhere) and can scale to accommodate a larger sales force down the road. Insightly is integrated with Google Apps, Gmail, and Outlook.

Boomerang. This free extension offers up some awesome emailing capabilities, making it easier to see who has read your emails and reminding you when it’s time to get in touch with potential advertisers again. You’ll have the option to return messages to your Gmail inbox if no one replies within a set amount of time, which can be very useful when trying to juggle a number of different advertiser leads.

Boomerang has a basic subscription level that is completely free. If you start using certain functionality regularly, however, you may have to upgrade; although a $4.99 monthly membership gets you just about everything you need.

In addition to the tools above, we’ve created a number of guides and tutorials to help through the ad sales process. Check out the links below for some of the resources we have here at MonetizePros.com:

 

Here’s How You Get 5 Ads Above the Fold (Without Cluttering Your Site)

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When it comes to maximizing display ad revenue, there is often a temptation to move ads higher up on the page to boost visibility and clicks. In general, the higher up on a page ads appear, the higher the percentage of visitors who will see and interact with them. But maximizing both short-term and long-term revenue isn’t as simple just throwing a bunch of ads at the top of a page. Doing that brings a couple of risks into play: for starters, you risk your site getting penalized by search engine algorithms that are on the lookout for ad-heavy layouts.

But more importantly, moving a bunch of ads above the fold can lead to a big decrease in performance. If the above-the-fold section of your site is heavy on ads and light on content, visitors are likely to either hit the back button or scroll down to find the content (which moves the ads off screen). In other words, the ideal solution is to have ads both: 1) above the fold, and 2) next to your page’s content. That’s obviously tough to do, since there is a limited amount of real estate available.

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Below is an example of a site that does a pretty good job accomplishing both of these goals. There are five ads above the fold, but also a substantial amount of content:

In addition to several well-placed ads, there is a ton of content above the fold. That means that this site is likely at zero risk of any penalty, and that visitors will spend time consuming the content in close proximity to ad units.

Included in our count of five ad units are a custom search engine box (labeled as #1 above) as well as a 160×90 link unit box (labeled as #3). Both of these generate revenue by leading visitors to landing pages where ads are presented, and both have the potential to generate attractive, incremental RPMs.

There’s also a smaller 160×130 rectangle, which helps to get the ad count up while keeping the space requirement down.

It pays to be creative with your site layout and ad implementation. Featuring both quality content and quality ads above the fold is a tough task, but clearly not impossible. As you browse the Web during the course of your daily work and pleasure, keep an eye out for implementations that effectively position both quality content and relevant ads in places where visitors can easily consume them both.

 

How to Establish a Direct Affiliate Marketing Relationship

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The two primary players in any affiliate marketing arrangement are the content-creating affiliate and the product-selling merchant. But as affiliate marketers know, networks such as Commission Junction and LinkShare are key components of the “ecosystem” as well. Just as many sites that monetize via display advertising attempt to establish direct relationships with advertisers and cut out ad networks, successful affiliate marketers may wonder about eliminating networks and working directly with their merchants.

In this article, we’ll explore the options for affiliate marketers looking to cut out networks entirely and establish affiliate relationships directly with merchants who will compensate them for any sales generated.

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To understand the potential value in establishing direct relationships with merchants, a quick refresher course on the economics of affiliate marketing may be useful. We like this visual as a way to summarize:

What the chart above doesn’t show is the role of the affiliate marketing network (e.g., Commission Junction or LinkShare). From the publisher’s point of view, the affiliate network is involved very early on in the process, generally supplying the ad creative and affiliate links used to refer traffic. They’re also involved at the last (and most important) step in the process: a portion of the commission earned by the affiliate goes to the network who matches them up with merchants and handles the various administrative functions.

Whenever there’s a network in the middle, the payout to the publisher will be diminished by the “cut” that player takes. So there is an opportunity to make more money in affiliate marketing by cutting out the middleman network and keeping the entire commission intact for the affiliate (publisher).

But establishing direct affiliate marketing relationships is extremely challenging for a number of reasons, which we’ll get into below. While there are certain instances when a direct relationship makes sense, most affiliates will be better off accepting that networks are part of the equation and focusing on finding the right merchants and maximizing referrals.

If you’re attempting to establish direct affiliate marketing relationships, it’s important to fully appreciate the value that networks provide. To over-simplify, the network exists to:

Match up merchants and affiliates;Handle the administrative aspects of an affiliate-merchant relationship;Protect affiliates.

The “matchmaking” service–offering access to a pool of merchants–is the role of a network that likely comes to mind first. But the administrative workload handled by networks can’t be overlooked; they handle all the tracking, reporting, and payment processing that arises during the steps shown above. While that might not seem like much, it can add up to a significant amount of time each week.

Affiliate networks also offer a certain degree of “protection” in the sense that they ensure revenue you earn is properly attributed and paid out. When you start establishing direct relationships, you put yourself (to some degree) at the mercy of the merchants you’re able to land as partners.

There is a reason why many major merchants prefer to utilize affiliate marketing networks instead of setting up their own infrastructure. Just as the administrative burden can become overwhelming for publishers with multiple relationships in place, it can be too time consuming for merchants as well. Maintaining direct affiliate relationships involves building out an infrastructure to track referrals, calculate commissions, and process payments. While that may sound like a relatively straightforward process, it can become a major investment with plenty of potential complications and liability issues.

Even eHarmony, one of the Internet’s largest affiliate merchants, uses Commission Junction to power its affiliate relationships:

Many other major brands that use affiliate marketing take a similar approach and let one of the big networks do the heavy lifting for them: see DirecTV (CJ), Best Buy (LinkShare), and Overstock (LinkShare).

Many major merchants use multiple affiliate networks in order to maximize their reach. HootSuite is one such example; they’ll work with affiliates through either Commission Junction or ShareASale:

Of course, there are some companies out there who run their own affiliate programs without the help of a network. Below is a list of just a few of them:

(We have a forum thread going with a list of direct affiliate programs; if you know of another, please add it there!)

If you want to uncover more merchants who partner directly with affiliates, just keep your eyes open. When you see affiliate links, do a quick search to see if the related merchant runs their own program. (We came up with the list above by reviewing a few of the bigger affiliate marketing blogs and investigating the most prominent affiliate links on those sites.)

Direct relationships between merchants and affiliates will generally develop in two (very different) scenarios:

An affiliate generates a huge volume of monthly sales and commissions; orA merchant has a small operation and a very limited number of affiliates.

Let’s start with the first scenario above. Suppose an affiliate is generating $100,000 in monthly revenue for a merchant, and getting $25,000 in monthly commissions. In this case, the network between the two may be taking $10,000 a month for its part in the process. In this case, the merchant may attempt to go around the network and set up a direct relationship with the affiliate–perhaps with a 30% commission.

Note that merchants reaching out to establish direct relationships with affiliates will only focus on the “whales” who generate the most revenue. While it’s possible to run a few affiliate marketing relationships directly, opening up this benefit to everyone quickly becomes overwhelming.

At the other end of the spectrum is the small merchant who is only willing or able to work with a handful of affiliates. In this case, the merchant and affiliate may come to an agreement and utilize a “low tech” solution to determine commissions earned (e.g., a custom referral path and an earnings statement powered by Google Analytics). This type of affiliate relationship will typically develop when there is a logical affiliate relationship between two parties, but the merchant isn’t interested in opening up the affiliate program to a wide range of partners via an affiliate network.

The vast majority of affiliate relationships are run either through networks or through custom platforms established by merchants. There’s a reason for that; these types of arrangements are the easiest to manage, and allow scale for both merchants and affiliates.

But there will be instances where an ideal merchant isn’t active on an affiliate marketing network and doesn’t have their own platform in action. There may be instances where a potential merchant partner doesn’t even know what affiliate marketing is.

If you have identified merchants for whom you think you could generate substantial revenue through an affiliate marketing relationship, there’s no reason not to attempt to set up a direct relationship. There’s also not much magic to pursuing this type of arrangement; if there isn’t a pre-existing relationship, start by reaching out to your potential partner and telling them a bit about your site.

From there, it’s some good old-fashioned business development. A few tips / pieces of advice:

Gather as much information as possible about their current marketing plans. How are they generating sales / leads now? Do they have any affiliates? Are they open to more?If you’d be the first affiliate, make it as technologically simple for your partner as possible.Be prepared to explain exactly what affiliate marketing is, and how it can benefit them.

In some ways, trying to establish a direct affiliate marketing relationship with a merchant is a lot like trying to get an advertiser to run a campaign on your site. But there is a major difference here that you should consider when reaching out to establish direct relationships: the biggest hurdle to overcome from the perspective of the merchant isn’t a cash payment (as it is with advertising) but rather an administrative burden.

In general, affiliate marketing relationships will fall into one of three categories:

Facilitated through a network such as ShareASale, Commission Junction, ClickBank, or LinkShareRun on the merchant’s in-house affiliate platformCustom deal set up directly between two parties

The vast majority of affiliate marketing relationships will be established either through a network or through the generic, impersonal interfaces of the companies who have established their own platforms. While the opportunity to generate additional revenue exists if networks are cut out of the picture, the substantial benefits they offer, including administrative responsibilities, makes them a pretty vital part of the affiliate marketing ecosystem.

When opportunities to establish direct relationships and negotiate customized commission deals exist, there is likely already a relationship between the two parties. The biggest hurdle to overcome here is generally the administrative and technological burden, since there are no payment required unless revenue is generated.