Making a profit from your site requires monetization, getting paid for all of your efforts in creating a website and getting traffic to it.
Even for those who are not in this business for money, monetizing your site will off-set the costs.
Research is extremely important for your on-line business success, looking at how the competition is making profits is crucial for your success.
You will find some different methods of E-Commerce but researching the most successful sites among your competition is the most important.
Traffic is the key to profits and without it your business will not achieve the type of success you intend.
Traffic represents the people coming into your business so you want to concentrate on getting traffic in every way possible.
Doing this will generate sales and allow you to improve your methods for your next site.
One site I have used that will allow you to see who your biggest competitors, types of ads used, the sites reach and more is Adbeat.
com.
Before you start thinking "that's wrong or cheating", remember your in business and any business that hasn't profited from studying their competitors are business no longer competitive.
Android smart phones exist because Google wanted to not just emulate Apple's success they wanted to become the smart phone leader.
Turning Your Traffic Into Money How you monetize your site will be determined by your research but the most common is with advertising.
People are always buying products on the Internet and that is the traffic you want visiting your site.
Not just any traffic will translate into sales for your site.
If your products are in the weight loss field, traffic from bodybuilding will not convert many sales.
You need qualified visitors looking to buy your products, so you want to advertise directly to that Market.
With your research you want to find out where your competition is advertising, what group (age, race, gender, yearly income) buys weight loss products? Then you advertise to your Market on those types of sites to get qualified leads and sales.
Do the research, this will help you to generate qualified traffic to your site using most all of the traffic methods.
Another part of your research should include use all of the methods your competition and experiment with a few others starting with small buys for testing.
The method that gives you the best return will require you to go "all in" and scale up your efforts to maximize your profits.
You can advertise from most anywhere on the planet and still market to your audience.
Most of your marketing efforts should be at least 70% U.
S.
as this is still where your products will generate the most leads and sales.
When you have fine tuned your research and can scale up even more you can market to other countries too if your offer allows (some affiliate offers are country specific) Generating traffic can be very difficult but for the beginner you will need to explore paid traffic.
Once you understand how to get traffic through paid advertising like your competitors you will be able to duplicate the same process for more sites and regulate a steady flow of traffic to them.
You can monetize your site with banners, affiliate offers, cart or purchase buttons and many others but let your research dictate which works more often than the other.
Traffic equals profit and good advertising gets you there.
Having good qualified traffic to your site means you have a flow of potential customers but what if those customers look around and leave, do you have to buy more traffic to get them to come back? For good monetization of your site you need to "capture" those potential customers into your list or capture page so you don't lose them.
On your site your own offer of a useful product such as a free booklet or newsletter will "capture" the visitor to your auto responder list.
Look at your competition and you will find these capture pages which is just the site getting customers to approve sending them emails with information useful to the on related material.
Get a free account for your business research and sign up to a few of your competitions newsletters or capture pages.
This is something you want to duplicate in having an auto responder loaded with related content emails set to go out at specific times.
This builds a relationship with your customers and also allows you convert more sales, the average customer usually will buy a product online after multiple visits or emails.
GetResponse and AWeber are among the leading auto responders and they have tools and training available to help you get set up.
Plus they offer to set up your first account for $1 the first 20 - 30 days.
There are also advertisers that will pay you to put their ads on your high traffic website, affiliate programs and search engines have Pay Per Click or P.
P.
C.
These are the Google and Amazon advertisement banners or boxes you will see on some competitor sites (there are other P.
P.
C.
programs this is just a few).
So for each link on your site clicked by your potential customers the more you will get paid.
Again more traffic results in more profit and that's always exciting! Affiliate Marketing Another method of monetizing your traffic are with affiliate programs.
ClickBank, Clicksure, Peerfly are good, have good commissions, reputable offers and commissions.
Another great resource for you is Offer Vault, here you can find the affiliate offers that are converting now.
After finding the offer you want then you can sign up for the affiliate site that has the offer.
This process can take a few days but I recommend that if the affiliate sign up has a contact phone number you should call.
Establish a regular communication with your assigned manager as sometimes they will alert you of new profitable offers and can tell you what is working for other affiliates now.
Keep all content on your sites related, don't combine offers of different niches, send paid traffic for these offers directly to a landing page or funnel.
The basic idea is, traffic generated from your site will go to another site that can offer a product that you do not carry.
Many programs can keep track and make records of transactions that was made possible because of site linkage.
When purchases are made by customers that was led by your site to their site you get a percentage of that sale.
Affiliate programs would give you the benefit of monetizing your traffic without the actual need of carrying or promoting a certain product.
There are various ways to monetize traffic but it does take time and effort, there aren't any magic buttons or "done for you" methods that have supplanted any on-line marketers day job.
Even if you don't have the time to write emails for your auto responder, make landing and capture pages you must have time for research.
Utilize the research as I have described and you will be on the right path to a successful online business.
Always keep in mind that your research is the foundation of your ability to success because it is more than just vital information.
Your research provides you with the knowledge of "how to" which enables you to Make Money Online successfully! Gen Guillory