Big City Designs » Blog

Monetizing Your Site

Joe — Mon, 01 Mar 2010 01:13:30 +0000

Take a look around the internet these days. Check your mail, your facebook page, maybe search for some stuff on Google… before you know it you’ve sat through roughly 20 minutes of advertising in as many minutes of browsing. More and more, the trend is to make websites turn a profit by monetizing sites through paid advertising rather than through paid memberships. Content providers offer a seemingly free service in favor for paid advertisement space in their own content network.

YouTube, Pandora, and Hulu are also prime examples of what I’m talking about. They intersperse paid advertisements throughout the content they display and users often sit through 5 minutes of paid advertisements for each hour they spend on the website. Monetizing a site in favor of charging membership fees is a great way to allow your website to grow organically through word of mouth. People are much more prone to take advantage of a free service which allows them to try before they buy.

One way of monetizing your website is by displaying paid banner advertisements and text ads through Google’s Adsense program. What Adsense allows you to do is insert a few lines of code into your website that will display ads from their network on your website. Your website and countless others are used as part of Google’s content network for displaying ads for people who pay to advertise on their network. The more clicks your websites advertising space generates, the more money you make. It’s that simple.

ECommerce With Magento

Joe — Sun, 28 Feb 2010 08:52:06 +0000

Here’s an interesting fact – Online Sales rose to $34 billion dollars last year to account for 5% of total retail sales. This statistic is astounding because it indicates that more small business owners are reaching out through the internet to level the playing field with giant retail stores.

This growth is because it has become easy and cost efficient for small business owners to create, own, and manage their own website complete with catalog and shopping cart. Magento is an open source E-Commerce platform that is easily setup, skinned, and configured to allow you to setup your catalog simple and quickly.

View Demo

Are You Using Google Analytics?

Joe — Sat, 27 Feb 2010 09:06:30 +0000

I recently had a conversation with a client about Google Analytics. It occurred to me to write this article in response to some pretty standard question pertaining to what analytics is all about. In a nutshell, it’s a way to track what your website visitors are doing and where they come from. Google Analytics can be incorporated into any website.

New Years Eve Around The World

Joe — Fri, 01 Jan 2010 09:07:42 +0000

Photo montage of New Years Eve around the world.

Photos taken around the world of New Years Eve 2010.

10 Ways SEO Can Turbo Charge Your Marketing

Joe — Fri, 18 Dec 2009 05:36:29 +0000

You can have the most beautiful website in the world, but if no one can find it, that’s like hiding the Mona Lisa in a closet. If you have a website, you need to optimize it. The main objective when you built it was so that people would see it. Search Engine Optimization (SEO) is the foundation of generating traffic.

ORGANIC RESULTS

1. Most people trust organic search results. If your site is not at the top of the search listings you are losing traffic and potential clients / sales.

LOCALIZED SEARCH

2. The ways that people search have changed. Optimizing your website for local / geographic searches can increase the number of conversions you receive. People are much more likely to do business with someone from their local area. This is especially helpful if you have a brick & mortar location.

LEVEL THE PLAYING FIELD

3. Your competition is already on the internet. They’ve got their marketing game plan together and every day that you aren’t marketing your business online they are grabbing visitors that might have seen your website. Optimizing your website will give you the edge you’ve been looking for.

WRITE CONTENT PEOPLE WANT TO READ

4. Optimizing your website content also involves writing search relevant content. It’s one of the easiest way you attract visitors and keep them on the page. The more information they find on your website that appeals to them, the easier it is to convert them. That is the main objective, conversions.

STACK THE ODDS IN YOUR FAVOR

5. More visitors equals more conversions. When you optimize your site, you are increasing the odds that your site will appear in a search query by 1000% or more. Search engines are stupid animals and look for specific things that will reflect how your site is ranked. It’s important that you optimize the site to meet these requirements.

EDGE OUT THE COMPETITION

6. Stay ahead of your competitors. If your competition puts up a website and you do to. If they add certain features and functionality to their site, you do too. If they advertise in the search engines, so do you. It’s about remaining competitive and leaving nothing on the table. Optimizing your site is one of the best ways to get natural organic traffic.

BECOME AN AUTHORITY

7. Being first in the search results gives vi8sitors the impression that you are an authority in the industry. They are much more likely to do business with you because they have faith that the search engine is presenting them with the most relevant content that matches their search.

SEO TRAFFIC IS FREE!

8. With SEO you’re not paying for your traffic. Optimizing your site means you have exposure whether you pay for it or not. With pay-per-click, your visibility hinges on whether or not you have the highest bid. Once your competitor jacks their bid up, your visibility begins to slip. However, with SEO – your site is visible all day long, 24/7 and it doesn’t cost you a penny!

LONGEVITY & POPULARITY

9. Secure your spot now! Optimizing your site now establishes longevity in the search engines and the longer a website has remained at the top of the search results, the more hits that it receives. Popularity and longevity are key to establishing long term high search engine rank.

REPEAT BUSINESS

10. Repeat business is more likely in visitors from natural search results. Customers referred from search engines tend to stick around for longer, which increases customer lifetime revenues via SEO.