When you focus on getting people to visit your website there are plenty of challenges and expenses involved. Even when you focus on SEO, you are putting countless hours of work in to get people to visit your website and you certainly want some rewards for all of that work. The obvious main benefit is getting people to contact you for helping them with real estate help, but what about those people who don’t contact you? Wouldn’t it be nice to make money off of those people who have just used your site for information?
Keep the focus on Conversions
There are many ways to make money from your website. The primary goal should be one that focuses on generating leads for your business. When you take the time to add other revenue streams to your business website it means not taking away from your primary business (i.e real estate, service business, etc.)
Before you start to add these aspects that can generate revenue for you, ensure that you have a good understanding of what your current conversion rates are at currently. If you are currently hitting 7%+ conversion rates (i.e 7% of contacts are turning into a customer) then you are doing well and are ready to consider making money from those who aren’t converting into contacts.
Generating Revenue
When you decide to make the leap to generating revenue there are many different directions to go. We invite you to consider two different ways that you can tackle to generate some extra revenue.
- Google Adsense – This is one of the most well known programs to generate revenue easily from your website. With Google Adsense you can place small ads on your website and Google will display the most relevant ads based on your content. You can see how these ads are displayed on our real estate focused websites of Long Beach homes and Long Beach Condos websites. We have placed them at the bottom away from the core content so if someone clicks on it, they really must not have wanted any help with their real estate needs ☺. Don’t worry about your competition showing up as you can filter which ads are allowed to show on your website.
- Affiliate Programs – There are many types of affiliate programs. There are those that cover nearly everything, such as Amazon, and then specific ones that cover anything from products (i.e. shirts, gear, auto parts, etc.) to online software solutions (i.e. accounting, SEO tools, autoresponders, etc.). With affiliate programs generally the content needs to be tailored to that specific affiliate; however, consider in the field of real estate that you might be writing about lending and there are affiliates who will pay for loan related leads (that’s a good match)
- Lead Sharing – Provided you have the proper disclosures on your site you may be in a position to share the leads that don’t work out for your primary business. For example there are many sites online that are looking to fill the need in the home improvement space (i.e landscaping, tree trimming, etc.). Some of these sites, when the lead doesn’t work out for the primary business then resell those leads to other home improvement vendors (i.e. cabinets, tile, etc.). When you look at your business ask yourself what related businesses could benefit from your leads. Make sure to be compliant with your lead capture activities and source good vendors to sell your leads too.
You may never make a killing on using Adsense, implementing an affiliate program, or reselling your leads, but it certainly can help you to offset some of your spending. As long as you monitor your conversion rate to make sure you aren’t taking away from your core business the extra revenue can be a wonderful way to help pay for server bills or offset the money you spend on pay per click advertising.
