How to Turn Your Website Traffic Into Money

Andrey Novoselov Andrey Novoselov
Updated:
Reading time:  10  min.
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One of the most crucial topics for bloggers is learning ways to earn money from website traffic. Many webmasters think that contextual advertising is the only way; however, many more options to monetize your blog are available. Every website has its own facilities and audience. Therefore, it is very important to find which selling method works best or mix the methods to maximize your earnings from the blog. Here, we will share brief, classified information about methods of selling your website traffic.

How to monetize your website traffic

Learn the System of Blog Traffic Monetization

You set up your own blog, and have done all the technical work, such as its design. Everything is the way it should be. However, your income from the blog does not pay off in terms of your effort, time, and invested money. There might be two problems:

  • The amount of the traffic you have.
  • The way you turn your traffic into money.

To get good earnings from your website, you first need a good amount and quality of traffic. Without a certain amount of traffic, even the best method of monetization will not bring you good payouts.

Attracting people to your website is the main requirement for earning from the blog. Later comes the important role of the monetization method. There are several types of web traffic you can attract. Following, you will find each of them.

Affiliate marketing is one of the best ways to earn money, since a single sale will generate a high return. To earn on flights, hotels, car rentals, and other travel services join one of 100+ travel affiliate programs on the the Travelpayouts partnership platform.

It’s easy to use. You should use various tools, including links, widgets, and banners, as well as more advanced solutions like White Label and API. For each sale made via your link, widget, or other tools, you’ll receive a reward. In addition, simple and easy-to-read reports will help you evaluate the effectiveness of tools to increase income from your website. Connecting to Travelpayouts and using partner tools is free. Join the platform now.

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Types of Web Traffic to Your Site

Traffic type changes depending on where your audience comes from. You must promote your website and get traffic from different sources. Understanding which type of traffic you have enables you to improve your project and earn on your travel blog. Also, you can attract different types of traffic so that you have more traffic to sell.

Search Engine – Organic Traffic

Search engines are the most common sources of traffic in this niche. This type of traffic is called organic traffic. Google is the world’s leading search engine for organic traffic to blogs. Nonetheless, there are many more search engines, like Yandex, Yahoo, Bing and so on.

The main problem is that webmasters focus only on Google and ignore the other search engines. However, it is very profitable to have traffic from search engines besides Google. Therefore, to increase your audience and your earnings, try to get traffic from different engines. We have collected 20 of the best sources to learn SEO. There you can find more information.

Another important point about having traffic from search engines is the content of your blog. Search engines work with the content of your blog to send visitors to the answers they need. Strategies to have better content that drives more traffic from search engines are known as Search Engine Optimization (SEO). Here, you can learn more about SEO strategies to have better traffic on your blog.

SEO skills are vital for any marketer, blogger or business owner who really wants to understand how SEO works to drive as much organic traffic as possible from search engines to their website for free. You must apply on-page and off-page SEO skills, link building, and SEO-content-writing skills. As well as regularly update existing articles.

If you decide to try affiliate marketing, keep in mind that you need to create a certain type of article to earn a good income from your blog. Watch a lesson from our course with Sharon Gourlay to find out what types of articles you should write and why they will work best for affiliate marketing. In general, the “Boost Travel Affiliate Revenue Using SEO” course will help you understand how SEO works and how you can use it to work on your articles to earn more about affiliate marketing. Watch this course for free on the Travelpayouts Academy website.

And for the ultimate outcomes it is recommended to combine organic SEO with Google Ads as you can target various audiences through different channels. At SeekaHost University you can learn all these digital marketing skills through effective step-by-step online tutorials delivered by SEO experts at digital marketing company ClickDo.

Social Networks

Promoting a blog on social networks such as Facebook, Twitter, Instagram, Telegram, etc. is a new trend. Social networks are highly used throughout the world. Many people try to sell a product/service there, even though it is not effective in some niches.

Despite its low effectiveness, webmasters should not underestimate traffic from social networks. There are three ways to gain traffic from social networks:

  •   Paid;
  •   Free;
  •   Mixed.

In the first case, you buy only the traffic (for example, from Facebook Ads) or directly pay to the social account’s owners. In the second case, you build your own page or group, develop it and gain traffic to your website from Facebook or another social network page.

We already described in detail how to advertise a blog on Facebook.

Email Marketing

Another type of traffic comes from the email letters you send to your subscribers. Your subscribers are seen as loyal followers and present the possibility of a high conversion rate.

Email marketing

Email marketing is an old method compared to social networks, but it still works. Read the success story of Maggie and Michael, the authors of “The World Was Here First” blog. Email marketing is a source of income for this duo. Their history proves that email monetization is still a relevant way to attract traffic to a website. You can offer your audience lead magnets for newsletter subscriptions and you can use emails to sell your own products or brands services through partner marketing.

Paid Traffic

In this type of traffic, you buy traffic to your website and direct the paid traffic to earn more from it. This is called traffic arbitrage. You can increase the income of your blog by buying traffic from advertising networks like Google Ads.

For example, you can spend $200 to buy traffic and distribute this traffic to sell flight tickets from your travel website and earn $250 as a commission. To earn on this type of traffic, you must be careful in distributing it. Often, it’s not easy to find a balance between cost and income. Learn more about traffic arbitrage in the travel niche to make more money.

From Bookmarks

Being saved in bookmarks is a bit difficult because it must attract and impress the audience so much that they will want to follow you regularly.

However, it is never impossible if you supply your audience with interesting and trustworthy information. Bookmarks can generate loyal and quality traffic, which is very important for converting traffic into money.

Tip: If you want to increase traffic from bookmarks, build it! Remind your audience to subscribe to you or to add a page for bookmarks. Such a strategy would help increase your traffic from bookmarks. Of course, the content on your webpage must be high-quality and regularly updated.

Type-in

Type-in traffic occurs when a visitor writes your domain name in the browser to visit your website. To have such traffic, you need a memorable domain name. Therefore, choose a domain name related to your content – one that visitors will easily remember.

Learn how to come up with a blog name hassle-free. Don’t forget about the complexity of the domain name.

Ways to Sell Your Traffic

So far, we have mentioned the importance and types of traffic you have. Traffic is substantial for earnings, but without an appropriate method of website traffic monetization, it is meaningless.

Different methods to sell your traffic in the niche are:

  1. Direct selling;
  2. PPC — pay per click;
  3. PPV — pay per view (also called CPM, cost per mile, as traffic by the PPV model is usually sold by the thousands);
  4. PPS — pay per sale (also called CPA, cost per action);
  5. PPL — pay per lead.

Direct selling is when you sell ads spots in your blog directly to a buyer, without an intermediary. This type is available only for big and well-known projects unless you have a media kit or some sort of “advertise with us” page. This page is essential for everyone who’s seeking direct traffic selling. Usually, a media kit includes charts, tables, and stats about the website’s traffic. It can be made for free, using AdSpyglass Media Kit Maker, for example.

PPC is the model in which your income comes from each click your visitor makes on ads in your blog. However, in the PPV model, you earn money from a certain number of views. In PPC, the income is not guaranteed, as you earn only if someone clicks on the ad. In the PPV model, you can easily predict how much you will earn. For example, your website has 10,000 views daily; if you join the partner program and sold each 1,000 for $2, you will earn $20 per day.

PPS (pay per sale) and PPL (pay per lead) are often confused with each other. Both of them use one term – CPA. That means you will earn on traffic for actions: sales, registrations, subscriptions, and so on.

The PPS model brings you a certain amount of revenue share from the service or products you sell in your blog, such as a sold flight ticket. For example, if you sold a $500 flight ticket with Travelpayouts, you would get 1.6% of its price.

On the other hand, the PPL (Pay Per Lead) model is when webmasters get money if their visitors take an action apart from purchasing a product or service. For example, downloading an app or subscribing to an email newsletter are both PPL methods, while hotel booking or buying insurance is PPS.

Let’s briefly look at real-life examples:

ModelWhen you earn
DirectFor every sold place for ads
PPCFor every click on placed ads
PPVFor the number of banner views (clicks don’t change income)
PPSFor sold goods or services, such as hotel bookings
PPLFor leads – if a person shared contacts, subscribed, downloaded an app or took any another action.

Types of Ads and Advertising Networks

The most common ad type is contextual advertising. A common mistake is to think that the most common ad type is the best one and fits all websites. Each ad type has its own advantages and is appropriate for certain types of blogs.

Types of ads and advertising networks

Different types of ads have different effects on the amount of income you earn from blog traffic monetization. To broaden your salary from blogging, choose the best method of advertising for your blog from our list below.

Contextual Advertisements

Contextual ads are believed to be the most used and profitable sort of advertising. In contextual advertising, the ads are shown to the visitor according to the blog’s content and keywords. For contextual advertising, you must join an ads platform.

Ways to sell website traffic vary according to the advertising network. For example, Google AdSense, the most famous contextual ads platform, uses the PPC model of earning and has its own strict rules and conditions.

Apart from Google AdSense, there are more advertising networks, like Media.net. Click here to learn more about the advertising network.

Native Advertisements (Teasers)

Many people are confused about the difference between native advertising and contextual advertising. Although they work in a similar manner, they look different.

In native advertisements, also called as ‘teasers’, the ads are embedded in the context. The visitor becomes aware of the ad only when they click on it. However, in contextual ads, visitors know that they are clicking on ads from the beginning. The second main difference is that the contextual banner user knows some features in advance, and wishes to learn more. With native ads, the user has limited knowledge; they click out of curiosity.

For example, an advertiser asks you to create a native and contextual ad for a power bank to use in travel.

  •   The native ad of the power bank will look like an article entitled ‘A perfect tool to save you in your travels’. This way, visitors will be attracted without knowing that it’s an ad.
  •   For contextual ads, it would be ‘Buy the Xiaomi 10 000 Mah power bank to save you in your travels!’

Briefly, native ads attract audiences to click by teasing them without their knowledge that they’re clicking on an ad. It works in the PPC model of income as well.

Other Types of Ads

Direct, contextual and native ads are the three most popular types of ads. However, there is also another type, known as aggressive advertisement. This type might bother your audience, but it is another website traffic monetization technique.

Usually, aggressive ads work by the PPV method. There are three common types:

  1. Pop-up;
  2. Pop-under;
  3. Click-under.

Pop-up and pop-under are the types of pop ads. Pop ads appear without visitor’s ability to control them, by opening in a new window.

Pop-ups are ads that appear above the window that visitors are using. They distract visitors too much. Pop-under ads are opened beyond the window that visitors are reading. They do not distract as much as pop-ups do.

Click-under ads are almost the same as pop-under ads. In click-under, a background window is opened only when the visitor clicks anywhere on the website. However, pop-under ads appear behind the window, without visitor’s permission or click.

When using this type of ad, you must be careful. They might bother visitors so much that you lose your audience. They are not recommended if you want to keep your audience.

It may seem that pop-under and click-under ads bother visitors less than pop-ups do. However, users are not happy to get unexpected pages, regardless of the type. Moreover, Google can penalize you by causing you to show up lower in the search engine results page.

If you want to show pop-ups, show them after your visitors have spent at least one minute on your website. This time is enough to let the user learn all they want to know and to avoid losing your audience.

Example of Ads & Monetization Strategies for a Travel Blog

It is not obligatory to choose only one method. The best method can consist of 2-3 different ways to sell blog traffic.

For example, you can combine PPC and CPA methods in the form of contextual advertising and teasers. You can sell hotel rooms through contextual advertising and get revenue from booked rooms while making native advertisements for X brand power banks and earn by PPC.

Here is what you should consider so that you don’t disturb your audience too much by placing ads everywhere.

The best example of the monetization strategy is when the user is happy to see the ads. For example:

  • You place contextual ads, and the user sees the goods or services they wanted to buy.
  • You place CPA tools, such as flight search forms, and while reading the post, the user wishes to buy tickets.

This means your aim should always be to provide the best content even if that content is advertisements. Always provide relevant information. Do not advertise information that is not interesting for your audience.

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What is the best way to sell website traffic?

You may think that the best way to sell website traffic is the way that generates the highest income, but it’s not. The best way is the one that balances the comfort of your audience and your level of income.

As mentioned, two factors affect the money you earn from blog traffic. First is the type and amount of traffic you have. Second is the way you sell your traffic. Both are almost equally important.

Apart from these, the CPA method will bring in a good amount of income and be useful to your audience. You get a revenue share from the services sold.

If you have good traffic quality with a conversion rate, you do not need to count pennies from PPC and PPV. Publishers who are buying ads from you usually pay less than in CPA, as these models are created for the mass market.

Travelpayouts offers a high amount of revenue share with a wide range of available tools and offers. There are more travel affiliate programs out there; you can learn about all of them and choose the best one for you. The CPA model is available not only in the travel niche, but in others as well. Learn about the 25 best affiliate programs to choose your niche.

Do not limit yourself by sticking to one method; experience all the options and combine different strategies!

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