AP 0814: My Website Is Doing Well. Now How Do I Monetize It?

AskPat 814 Episode Transcript

Pat Flynn: Hey, what's up everybody? Pat Flynn here and welcome to Episode 814 of AskPat. Thank you so much for joining me here today. As always I'm here to help you by answering your online business questions five days a week. We have a great question today from Max, but before we get to that I do want to say that this episode is brought to you by Bamboo HR.

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All right, now here's today's question from Max.

Max: Hey Pat, my name's Max Miller and I run a humor and entertainment website called RuinMyWeek.com. First off, I'm a huge fan of SPI and everything else you've given those of us who want to make money doing something we enjoy, and live life a little more freely. It's been huge help for me. Long story short, I spent about nine months building the site, filling it up with content, beefing up the SEO in any free time I had. Since I launched in April I've had over a million page views, and half a million uniques. My Facebook page has skyrocketed from under 20 K to over 125 K. My other socials have picked up significantly as well.

My question for you is, how do I begin to truly monetize all of the hard work I've put in on this site? Since it's an entertainment website I'm not really selling anything, and it's a bit harder to push affiliates. I have Google Ads and I make about 100 to 175 a month off of those. I'm a bit overwhelmed at how well this has done out of the gate, and would like to get to a place where I can benefit from all the hard work. Any advice would be greatly appreciated. Thanks for everything.

Pat Flynn: Hey Max, thanks so much for the question, I really appreciate it. First of all, congratulations on all your success. I love hearing stories of people who just put something up on the internet, and then all of a sudden they just can't even believe the success that they're having. Now, the success that you're having is all the exposure, and the traffic, and the social aspects of it. That's awesome. Now you're looking to monetize, so let me help you.

First of all, you're doing well with Google Adsense. 175 a month, it's not a ton, but it's something, right? What I would do is actually start with what's working first. Optimize your Google Adsense. There are potentially other ways to monetize, which I'll talk about in a second. See if you can test different ad spots, ad types, images versus text, or using both. Google Adsense will typically offer you some advice in terms of how to increase the income that you're getting. I mean, that helps their business as well, so that they often provide those messages in your Ad Sense dashboard. If they've shared anything with you, follow their advice in terms of how to improve. That's where I would start.

Now secondly, entertainment sites, especially ones with large amounts of traffic, can do a very good job of advertising not using Google Adsense, but using what I like to call “private advertising.” You're going to have to reach out, or find other companies who want to get in front of traffic, and that's a thing. Other companies, they want to get in front of traffic. The more, I guess targeted your traffic is, the easier it is to find those companies because they're going to want to align with companies just like them, or who have customers that would use their products. It may be a little bit difficult depending on what it is you're talking about, but that's another option to explore.

What I would do to help you understand what things that you can reach out to, or what companies you can reach out to, and place on your website, or have a deal with them specifically where they would pay you pretty much a monthly retainer to have an ad on their website, or have certain number of emails go out to your list, or other kinds of advertising on your social. You can look at other companies, or other entertainment sites that are talking about similar things to you, and see how they're monetizing as well. See what ads are popping up in their Google Adsense, and see if you can actually reach out to those companies and strike a deal with them.

Those are some things that you can do, and you can also use tools like SEM Rush. That's going to also give you some insider information related to not just your keywords that people are finding you for, but also what some of your other competing websites are, and where you can go and dive into sort of what ads are being spent on their websites and stuff. That can give you a good start.

Then there's also a couple of other things I want to share with you. There's some entertainment websites that do very well with publications. You probably can't go down the route of traditional internet marketing, finding a product that will provide a solution for your audience, cause your audience is there for entertainment, right? It's not a course, or a membership site, or anything like that. What I would do is see if there's some publications. You can even take a lot of the things that you've already published, if you have the right to. Package them together, and publish them. This is something that The Oatmeal does very well.

Now, mind you, they do have a lot of more visual and graphic related cartoons, and it is a humorous website. They package these things into things that can become coffee table, books, and just nice little fun gifts and stuff. There may be a way for you to do something like that, where you can take stuff that you've already done, package them together, and sell it either as an ebook, or probably even a physical book if you wanted to go down that route.

Finally however, the thing I would recommend you checkout is a tool and service called Patreon, P-A-T-R-E-O-N. This allows you to provide a sort of PBS like mechanism on your website, or with your brand that's sort of paid for by the viewers of kind of thing. You can have fans, and it doesn't take very many of them to really support your brand, and make you a significant income. I actually interviewed the founder of Patreon and another user of it, who has been making thousands of dollars a month. It's simply through small incremental pledges from their users. From a dollar to five dollars a month, or per show, or per episode that comes out, if they have a podcast.

This adds up, and it's a great thing because your fans can feel like they're giving back to you for the work that you're doing, and they know that they're supporting this thing that you're up to, and you can see these fans kind of step up. Instead of having ads, you can have people pledge if you will, and pay small amounts of money to help keep you going, and keep you supported. I would definitely check that out as well. That's Patreon, P-A-T-R-E-O-N dot com.

All right Max, thank you so much for the question. I hope this gives you some good insight, and some information on where you can go from here. I want to wish you all the best. We're going to send you an AskPat T-shirt for having your question featured here on the show. For those of you listening, if you have a question that you'd like potentially featured here on the show as well, just head on over to AskPat.com and you can ask right there on that page.

Thanks so much, I appreciate you all, and here's a quote to finish off the day by Lord Beaver Brooke. That is, “Business is more exciting than any game.” Although I kind of half agree with that, business is definitely exciting. To me it is kind of a game, right? Gamification, I love to gamify things and not compete with others, but mainly compete with myself.

Now finally, if you want to join me live today or any Friday at 1:30 PM Pacific, head on over to Facebook.com/SmartPassiveIncome where I conduct an hour Q and A session live called, “AskPat Live.” Hopefully I'll see you there. You get your questions answered, and no I'm not going to be giving away a T-shirt for everybody whose question gets featured there. But I am giving away stuff at the end of those broadcasts, and you have to be on live to win. Check it out. One more time that link is Facebook.com/SmartPassiveIncome, and you'll see the broadcast there. 1:30 Pacific Friday's, see you there. Thanks guys. Take care, love you, bye.