Make More by Moving Up the Food Chain

If you rely largely on advertising for your revenue — whether direct, affiliate or contextual — you’re making money by encouraging your visitors to buy or do something elsewhere.

There’s an important concept there that we often never think about: If the advertiser is willing to pay you $0.10 per visitor that you send them, then that visitor must be worth noticeably more than $0.10 to them. Otherwise, they wouldn’t be willing to pay you that, right? (In other words, why would I consistently pay you $0.10 for something that only makes me $0.09?)

So, you can increase your revenue significantly simply by getting into the same business that they’re in.

Now, often that’s much easier said than done, but look around your site. Who’s advertising there? Could you expand into their business? If so, you move from just making marketing revenue — which is only a small percentage of the advertiser’s total profit — to getting the whole pie to yourself.

At that point you can start paying others $0.10 per visitor to drive traffic to your site, and you really start to get some traction.