Turn Visitors into Cash

What Are the Best Tools to Monetize my Visitors?

Congratulations. You have now created a lead-acquisition system filled with visitors whose trust you’ve earned and who’ve made the conscious decision that it’s safe to buy from you—that’s the power of a nurtured relationship!

They’ve been coming regularly to your site looking for the information that you provide and now they're ready for something that goes beyond free information—they want to pay you so you can help them go more in depth.

The question now is, what types of tools and platforms are ideally suited for your site to monetize your visitors? Let’s look at several options:

At the beginning of your online income journey when you monthly traffic is very low, the payouts will be small—usually in the single digits per month. But even if you get between $4 and $9 a month as you're ramping up your traffic, this is $48-$108 in a year that didn't cost you a penny to create.

At the beginning your ad revenue will be low because it'll come from cost-per-click ad networks (where you only get paid revenue share if a visitor clicks on your ads). But as your traffic increases, you'll be able to qualify for cost-per-impression ad networks. These networks will pay you whether a visitor clicks on an ad or not, so your ad revenue will increase more rapidly.

To access cost-per-impression ad networks your site will need to have a minimum of 10,000 pageviews per month and you'll begin to earn low to mid thousands of dollars/year. And by the time you get to 300K-400K monthly sessions, you'll be easily bringing in $10,000-$12,000 a month, all of it passive!

2- Commissions from affiliate networks

Another important source of income for online earners is affiliate commissions (which, incidentally are the main source of income for this blog).

In essence, a large number of vendors complement their in-house marketing efforts with external affiliate marketing partners who write reviews and recommendations of their products and then pay them a commission on each sale to compensate them for their operating expenses.

This transaction does not impact the cost to the end customer (i.e. whether visitors make a purchase directly from the vendor or from the affiliate website, the pricing will be the same.)

The advantage for vendors is that instead of spending money up-front on marketing, which will impact their cash flow, they rather receive less for each purchase by outsourcing their marketing costs to affiliate partners.

This is a great path to generate online income with high margins if you do content marketing because your main cost will be the required tools plus your writing time, and once you have enough cash flowing in you can even outsource the writing as well.

3- Revenue from sales funnels

Next on your online income menu are sales funnels, or funnel pages.

Funnel pages typically replace the thank you page that appears in response to a visitor requesting your lead magnet through an opt-in form (you can also trigger funnel pages directly from an advertising platform like Google Ads or Facebook Ads).

The goal of funnel pages is to present visitors with a paid offer that greatly complements your lead magnet at a great discount. Typically, you'd want this offer to be the "next thing" your visitor will need after they've implemented the strategies or recommendations contained in your lead magnet.

For example, your lead magnet could show your visitors how to set up an eCommerce website (this is your "freebie") and your funnel offer could be your paid time-tested strategies for rapidly converting visitors into sales offered for just $25 (presented as a $75 value)

In order to increase your online income further, you'll want to also implement upsells, downsells and order bumps.

An order bump is a quick offer presented with a checkbox inside your checkout page, and usually consists of an impulse purchase type offer for a low amount of money (e.g. your swipe file with marketing copy for your funnels for an additional $7).

An upsell is a page that appears after your visitors click the order button on your checkout page, and is typically used to present the next-level more expensive but still highly discounted offer that they'll need after consuming your main funnel offer (e.g. this could be a full training on high-converting Facebook ad strategies for your funnel for just $89—a $199 value).

Finally, a downsell is a page that appears if your visitor declines your upsell, and it presents them with a smaller priced upsell (e.g. your Facebook Ads swipe file for $35—a $99 value).

With enough traffic you'll be able to create a nice pipeline of additional revenue for your site.

4- Sale of information products

Finally, an additional online income stream you can create cost-effectively is the sale of Information products, like online courses, eBooks, audio files, etc.

Information products have the highest margins of all four options because there's no middle man taking a cut of your profits. Beyond the cost of production (typically your time) you'll get to keep all of the profits, making this type of online sales a powerful revenue engine for your site.

What's neat about this approach is that you always get paid in advance of delivery and you can even structure your offering to be dripped over time creating a recurring revenue stream through monthly subscriptions, providing a nice buffer of recurring revenue as you continuously market to new visitors.

And best of all, there are a number of great information product creation platforms out there that will do all of the purchasing, delivery, notifications, subscription management and payment processing on your behalf for a reasonably low monthly fee.