WHEN SHOULD YOU MONETIZE?

Don't Make the Mistake of Trying to Monetize Too Soon. Concentrate on Quality First.

Most people begin their online venture thinking about the money. Focusing on the money before focusing on your customers is a sure path to failure. So, when should you try to profit from the services your website or blog provides? In other words, when should you monetize?

Before you monetize, your website should meet several criteria, particularly if it is geared toward providing information through quality content. You should seek to develop a good website and beneficial product/service before trying to profit from it. There are a few rules of thumb to follow when deciding when you should monetize.

Here they are:

When Should You Monetize: Quality Content

People don't use the internet in order to make you money. Don't treat your site visitors like that is their purpose. They will know and resent it. Provide them with what they want. Build their trust before trying to monetize.

In other words, you need to have quality content before you try to monetize. Don't look chincy with 2 or 3 pages and a bunch of "buy me, buy me!" areas of your website or blog. You should have between 30 and 50 keyword-driven content pages before ever worrying about monetization.

If you are a design whiz and put some of the easily integrated Monetization Options in as you go, that is fine. But, don't seek to monetize before you seek to serve the informational needs of your visitors. Time is a non-renewable resource. Invest initially in the content of your website or blog. Once you have stored up plenty of capital in the form of content, then branch out and spend focused time on monetization. If you do it in reverse, you will likely see much slower traffic growth than if you create the content first.

A visitor to your website should be able to spend hours reading your content, and it should all be information that is relevant to your niche. If someone can read through your content in minutes instead of hours, don't worry so much about monetization. Keep building your content base.

When Should You Monetize: Directory Listings

Before worrying about monetization, you should also make sure your website is listed in a few niche directories. This will help your traffic flow get started. Check out the Open Directory Project .

When Should You Monetize: Backlinks

Getting inbound links (more commonly called "backlinks") to your website is critical if you are ever going to convince Google and the other search engines that your website is an authority site for any given keyword.

Backlinks will come if people find your website and think it is beneficial enough to link to it from their website. Getting a few backlinks is more important than having all your monetization plans implemented.

When Should You Monetize: Traffic Considerations

Focus your energy on creating quality content centered on keywords. This is how to get people to link to you and find your website in the first place. Getting Website Traffic is the most important thing you can focus on. It will determine whether or not your plans succeed or fail. So, it makes sense that getting traffic is primary, and your specific monetization plans are secondary, right?

Build traffic. Spend time each week specifically doing things that are designed to bring people to your website. Make sure you are indexed in Google and as many other search engines as possible.

Usually, you should focus on making the first sale in any new business. That holds true for online businesses as well, with one caveat: focus on getting your first 1,000 or 5,000 or 10,000 visitors to your website first. Think of each visitor that comes to your website or blog as a "sale."

Then, once you have sold your traffic on the benefits of your website itself, you can more successfully implement the rest of the Monetization Options you incorporated into your plans.

When Should You Monetize: Conclusion

For long term monetization success, don't jump right into trying to turn your non-existent website traffic into piles of cash. You won't get far that way. Focus on the basics first. Implement your money-making strategies second.

And remember, it all begins and ends with website traffic. The next department is absolutely vital if you want to achieve any measure of success. Click the link to learn about Getting Website Traffic.