Put product reviews on your website

With your site up and running for a while, it is time to get serious about your initial monetization, even though you don’t have much traffic yet. Of course, if you will be selling your own merchandise, you will have already set up your catalog and payment center during the website setup process.

If your website is a blog, and you have decided to monetize it by offering advertising space and by promoting affiliate advertisers’ merchandise, then you will be wanting to start placing your ads and product reviews tastefully throughout your website.

Remember there are two types of ads, and that you will be most probably be using both. Pay per click ads create revenue for your website if you have high-traffic, and affiliate ads (in the form of product reviews, not banners) will earn you a commission on products sold through your website by that advertiser.

Be aware that many advertisers require a certain level of traffic on your website before they will become affiliated with you. That makes it a little harder for you at first, but there are very many other advertisers who don’t have this requirement--so don’t worry. Pay per click advertisers are especially picky about not advertising with low-volume new sites, so you might just concentrate on affiliate sales at first, until your site traffic increases.

Once you have established relationships with advertisers and have written and posted your product reviews, it is time to concentrate fully on building traffic to your website.

Email marketing

Email marketing. Cringe.

Don’t you hate spammers? Me too. What lowlifes. I can’t think of enough bad words to call them. They waste our time, fill up our mailboxes with trash, hijack our email addresses, cause us to spend money on antispam software that never really works. Arrrgh! I hate them!

I hope you will never be so totally rude as to impose yourself on another human being by sending out spam. If you are reading this blog, I just KNOW you have more class than that.

The point of this post is to remind you that you don’t have to be a spammer in order to use email marketing. You just have to work hard to win people’s confidence and slowly build up a legitimate list of people who really want to hear from you.

Not spam. Newsletters. Stay tuned.