How to make money with content
In the introductory article on how to make money we looked at the very basics of making money provide something that people think they need. We used the example of meeting two sets of needs and gaining money (not to mention marketplace traction that could be reused) as a result.
With this article we are going to look at how to use content such as might have been generated in the previous example. If you want to have more money right now then this might not be the method for you unless you already have some content that is ready to use or are willing to pay someone to create the content for you. There are plenty of sites that sell exclusive rights to content at a reasonable price.
The best content for this form of making money is content that is focused. Marketers talk of keyword targeting or optimising for certain words. To be honest 99% of that is simply staying focused on the topic at hand.
The content acts as the "thing" that you offer that brings people needing to advertise and those needing specific content to the same place so that you can profit from this. Google, Yahoo and MSN are all great partners for this. They all offer contextual advertising partnerships (adverts are select automatically based on the context (subject) you place them near) where they pay you for the clicks your content can organically generate (that means the clicks that happen all by themselves because you have real people on the site).
Now in the example from the how to make money introduction we "knew" that there was a lot of traffic for a specific search phrase and we knew that there was a lot of people willing to advertise on content with that and similar phrases.
How did we know?
In short - research. A quick and simple test of advertisers is to do a search with a number of different engines for key phrases that you might be using. If you see plenty of adverts next to or inside the results then you can be sure that people are advertising on these keywords. The more people doing this then the more they are likely to be paying and the more we might earn.
The next thing to do is some general "keyword research" to find out the search volumes for those keywords (and related keywords). This is not much good for content you already have but is perfect for selecting the subject of content for future projects.
When placing the adverts on your content you will need to strike the right balance between getting the adverts seen and getting your content seen. This will differ depending on audience, topic and even site design.
Some content will benefit from advertising partners that you have selected specifically. For this contextual advert brokers are of little use. You are now looking at selling the adverts yourself (not an option if you have just started) and using another partner.
Fortunately another type of partnership exists in the form of the affiliate program. This will be addressed in a separate article.