Evan Carmichael shows how to make money from a magazine website through advertising. Update your content regularly, use Google Keyword Tool to find high-paying keywords like banking and insurance, and target U.S. readers where cost-per-click rates jump from $4.50 to $25 or more. Hire writers and guest contributors to scale content production without doing it all yourself.
Hi, I'm Evan Carmichael and welcome to a video edition of Ask Evan. Today I'm going to answer a question from one of my readers, Paul, who's asking about how to make money selling advertising on his website.
Pablo emailed me this morning. He's got a business in Zambia. It's a magazine catered towards entrepreneurs and he's having a hard time generating revenue there since the business climate isn't that great in Zambia, and he wanted my advice. So Pablo, here's 3 tips that I hope will help you grow your business. We're gonna get started by clicking on Pablo's website. So he included it here in the email, and as it loads up, it looks like a decent website. The first thing I noticed though is that it says January 2010 edition, so the website is over a year old, and that's not a great sign for anybody who's coming to the site as a visitor or as an advertiser. Lower down here, looks like it's talking about hosting the World Cup. Well, obviously the World Cup is over now. So if I'm a reader, if I'm an advertiser coming to this website, I'm probably not going to stick around very long. So if you're trying to attract advertisers, you want to show that you always have up-to-date content that's going to be of interest for them. If I'm an advertiser, I'm probably not going to invest budget in this website right now. If you're running an offline magazine and an online site, Maybe the offline magazine is really expensive to produce and you might not have the advertisers to support it yet, so start online. It's, it's a lot cheaper, hosting costs are not that much, so it's an easy way to keep your website up to date and showcase that you have new content and try to sell advertising online and maybe generate a revenue base that you can then move it offline as well to your actual physical magazines. But you want to make sure that you always have an up-to-date website that is showing new content that's going to be attractive for any reader, if it's a visitor to your site or an advertiser, to want to stick around and, and get more involved with your company. The next thing I want to talk about is how do you actually make advertising revenue from this website. And there may not be much of a business climate in Zambia right now, but there are pretty good ways to find out the type of content you can use that might attract some advertisers. A great tool that I like to use is the Google Keyword Tool. And what this will do is allow you to type in any keyword and it'll tell you the different advertising rates for it. So I can start off by doing international locations and let's just type in Zambia. The magazine and website deal with Zambia and different business opportunities in Zambia. So we'll do a quick search. See what type of things pop up. And what you can do here with this tool is on the right-hand side where it says Columns, you can go and pick approximate cost per click. And this is the estimated revenue that you can expect to make every time somebody clicks on one of your ads. So you want to try to target content— you can then sort it by cost per click— you want to try to target content that pays better. So if you look at it, anything related to insurance, investment center, travel insurance, neighbours, Intermarket Bank. So these are all keywords that are paying more. If we try to change our location, let's for example go down to Zambia, we could do a search, and this is all English language, and scroll down, and you can see it changed a little bit. So MSC Zambia, Indo Zambia Bank, Access Bank Zambia, Invest in Zambia. So things related to banks. So if I was writing content and try to figure out how I can sell advertising, I would try to target things related to the banking industry because that seems to be paying pretty well. Now these could still be pretty low clicks, so that the best click here you're looking at, you know, just over $4.50. What you might want to consider doing is trying to target an American audience because they tend to have the highest pay-per-click. So if we go to United States instead of Zambia See what kind of results we get here. So before we saw $4.50, here we're looking at $25 almost. So it's a big difference in the cost per click because there's more advertising revenue targeting an American audience. So if you look at mining companies, investments in Zambia, insurance in Zambia, it's still targeted to a business audience which could work for the magazine. But a great way to be able to get started and start earning revenue might be to try to target a more American audience because you can easily sell advertising to them and start making money with your business. So something to think about. I don't want to push you into something that you're not comfortable with, but definitely use this tool to figure out the types of content that you can write where advertisers are interested in, and then that can help guide your, your policy moving forward, start hopefully getting you to making some money and then able to grow your business and eventually move to your offline magazine as well. The last tip I want to give here is to try to think about your content strategy and try to not write everything yourself. I've talked about this in the past. If you look at my website as an example, I started off by writing a whole bunch of content, and it was good content. We got a lot of visitors from it, but there's always going to be limited by how much I can write. My time is limited, so I'm always going to be limited on my growth. So what I decided to do was I ended up hiring somebody to write these famous entrepreneur profiles, and she does a really good job, and she's worked for me for a number of years now. And then I reached out and started attracting other successful entrepreneurs to give their advice. So we partnered up with some pretty big-name people in the world of entrepreneurship, and they contribute content. And then we also have other people who are business coaches, marketing consultants, sales consultants as an example, and they write articles for our website too. So if I click on the business coach section for example, it'll load up a whole list of different business coach articles that are written by business coaches on our website. And if I scroll down, you'll see here that there's a whole bunch of people who are all business coaches who are writing for the website, and it goes down, down, down, down, down. And so they've contributed a whole bunch of content to my site, and it's great for them because they get a lot of exposure. It's great for me because we have lots of good new content to the website without me having to write it. And it's great for my readers because there's a lot more useful content for them to learn how to grow their business. So definitely start to look at how you can attract other people to start writing for you so it's not just you writing everything yourself. And if you start it online instead of offline with a magazine, then it's a lot cheaper to get up and going. You can start selling advertising and earn enough money to then grow your business and move to other ventures and other opportunities.
So that's it for this video. Remember, keep producing new content, follow the money, and get some help to get people writing for your website. I hope you enjoyed the video. Please give it a thumbs up below if you did, and I'd also love to hear your thoughts and feedback if you want to leave a comment. Stay tuned for the next episode.
