subject: When to Monetize Your Website [print this page] The most popular way to make money online is through affiliate marketing and other ads. Webmasters and bloggers give their information away for free in return for the revenue of affiliate sales and other ads. But when is a good time to monetize your site? (Monetizing simply means to add affiliate and other ads to help you generate a passive income online).
Some marketers will tell you to wait until your website has been ranked in the search engines, while others tell you that you can do it right from the beginning. So who is right?
The answer is that you can monetize your website whenever you want, as there are pros and cons to both methods.
Monetizing From the Beginning
When you choose to monetize your website right from the beginning it may take longer for the search engines to rank your site. This is simply because ads will cause your site to look spammy, especially if it is a new site. And thus search engines hold off with ranking a site that has ads on it to see whether or not it is a spam site or whether it is legitimate. A spam site will just keep adding more and more ads, while a legitimate site will add the ads in moderation.
However, monetizing your website from the beginning does not mean that your website will not be ranked, it will just take a little longer for the search engines to figure out that you are not spamming anyone. Thus it is perfectly okay to monetize your website right from the beginning.
Monetizing Later
When you wait to monetize your site, then it will be ranked faster in the search engines, so that you will get more traffic sooner. However, your users will become accustomed to the nice clean look of your site, and thus when you introduce the ads, they may be turned away. Therefore this could cause you loyal readers.
In addition to that, it is more work for you, as you will have to redesign and re-upload your web pages to accommodate the new ads. Thus you may as well monetize your site from the beginning not only to save you time, but you can start earning right away from your website.
There are many affiliate programs and ad networks that you can join to help you to make the most from your website. One of the best ads to run on your site is Google Adsense, along with Ebay and Amazon, which are a few popular affiliate programs. Depending on what market you are in, some programs will do better than others, so it is up to you to test the programs and see which ones work well on your site.
