Lesson 9: Monetizing Your Website

Transcription

1 Chapter 1: Introduction Lesson 9: Monetizing Your Website This lesson is about monetization, making money from your WordPress website. I know this may not be your primary goal, but as long as you've put in the time and effort to create an online presence, there's no reason you shouldn't benefit from all that work. And even if your site isn't commercial, there may come a time when you want to solicit donations or sell promotional goods. Online selling has become more sophisticated in recent years. In the late '90s, many people migrated their retail businesses from mail order to the Internet. In those days, websites and shopping carts often were separate entities. Customers located what they wanted on your Web pages, but then placed their order on a system that didn't look anything like the rest of the site. It was difficult to promote items on one part of the website and link them to the other. From both an aesthetic and a technical standpoint, it could be a mess! Nowadays, these functions are well-integrated, and developers have created hundreds of themes, plugins, and shopping carts specifically for monetizing WordPress websites. I'll show you how to select the ones that best fit your needs. Besides shopping carts, there are many other monetizing opportunities: Pay-per-click (PPC) programs Banner advertising Affiliate marketing Subscription or member websites Digital downloads, like e-books and music We can divide these programs into two revenue making-strategies: referring your visitors to other websites, and selling your own products. Let's examine these strategies to see what would work best for you. We'll begin with visitor referrals in Chapter 2.

2 Chapter 2: Getting Paid for Referrals Making money from visitor traffic is a passive activity. Unlike running an online store, you don't have to carry or ship inventory, offer customer service, or handle transactions. Instead, you just insert ads for other peoples' websites and earn money when your visitors go to those sites. Pay-per-click (PPC) is the original visitor referral model. Companies like Google and Yahoo set it up to sell ads on their search results pages. The major pay-per-click players Google's AdWords is the most popular PPC program. Advertisers bid on keywords, and the highest bidders get top listings, next to the organic (non-paid) search results. Advertisers are charged only when a visitor clicks their ad. This differs from the traditional advertising model, in which the number of people exposed to an ad determines the cost. So where do you fit into this? Well, Google runs a parallel program called AdSense, which pays websites to display its customers' advertisements. If you sign up, Google will syndicate contextual ads ads geared to your site's content on your pages. When your visitors click these ads, Google pays you. The other big search companies, MSN, Yahoo, and Bing, have merged their PPC programs into the Microsoft adcenter. We're going to examine how the Google program works because it's the largest. I'll demonstrate on my own account and insert the ads into the water gardening website. Getting Started With AdSense Important: This is an explanation only. Please don't join AdSense yourself until your own site is up and running.

3 The first step is to sign up for a Google account, if you don't already have one. Then you'll register with AdSense. It takes about a week before they let you know if you've been approved. If you are, they'll send you a publisher ID number. You'll choose the ads' format. These range from banners that span pages to the vertical format you often see in sidebars. Google AdSense sample formats In the form that follows, I've selected a small sidebar ad block, and I've named it according to its dimensions.

4 Google ad creation form Google lets me choose colors and style. When I click Save and Get Code, I can copy the HTML code. Now I'll go to my Widgets page (Appearance > Widgets) in the WordPress back end to install the ad. There are many WP custom widgets that accommodate PPC advertising, but for now, I'm going to use a simple text widget.

5 AdSense Code in the text widget I've given a title to the sidebar ad and pasted the Google code. Since you haven't yet joined Ad Words, the screen shot below won't be on your site. But for illustrative purposes, here's what it would look like on the Web page: AdSense display ad Google uses a proprietary system to match your page content to the ad subject, but it doesn't always work. Since you're paid by the number of times visitors click the ad links, you want ads that appeal to your target audience. That landscaping ad you see on water garden site above, for example, is too local. It won't get too many clicks outside southwest Virginia. You can refine the ads you get by downloading a plugin like Better AdSense Targeting to get closer matches. When a visitor clicks an AdSense ad, Google credits your account. And when your credits reach a certain threshold, you'll get a check in the mail. Unless your site attracts millions of visitors, accepting PPC advertising won't make you rich. But it's an effective way to cover some of your costs without much effort. More WordPress Plugin Suggestions Here are a couple of other plugins to consider if you're running pay-per-click advertising:

6 Ad Injection: This is one of the most complete PPC plugins. It inserts AdSense or adcenter advertising into your widgets or your content. It also lets you decide exactly where the ads should appear and who to show them to. Better AdSense Targeting: This plugin lets you mark the content that you want Google to read when it decides which ads will appear on your pages. To find these plugins, type their names in the search bar on your Plugins > Add Plugins page. Sell Your Own Advertising If you're feeling entrepreneurial and don't want a middleman between you and your visitors try selling ads and banners yourself. Ordinarily, you'll need to ring up some big visitor numbers to appeal to advertisers. But here's where finding a niche can help. If your website is specialized and unique, it's more likely to appeal to a particular kind of audience that some advertisers might also want to reach. If there's any "standard" for Web display ads, it's a 125 x 125-pixel box. Using an image editing app, you can create an "Advertise Here" ad that size and link it to a page describing your audience and your rates. Our Marina theme allows you to insert 125 x 125 ads into the sidebar without even using a widget. Let's give it a try. First, I'd like you to download four ads I created, along with some material for later in the lesson. Click the icon below, unzip the folder, and save the files like you ve done with media used in previous earlier lessons. Download Lesson 9 material 1. Open the display ads folder. To upload the four images to your water garden website, go to Media > Add New. 2. Click Select Files, and select all four ads (CTL+A). Then click Open. 3. After the files have been uploaded, go to Media > Library and click the one labeled 125 x 125 pond packages. 4. On the Edit Media screen, add this text to the Alternative Text field: Complete pond packages from under $ Copy the entire link from the File URL field, and click the blue Update button.

7 Edit Media page with File URL circled 6. Next, go to Appearance > Marina Options. 7. Scroll down to the 125 x 125 banner settings area, and paste the File URL you just copied into the Banner 1 Image field. (If we were going to link this ad to a real advertiser's website, we'd enter that link in the Banner 1 URL field below.) Image link entered on Marina Options screen 8. Scroll down and click Save Changes. Repeat these steps with the other three ads: Copy each File URL from the Media Library, paste each URL into the correct Banner Image field on the Appearance > Marina Options page, and click the Save Changes button. Then take a look at the sidebar on the home page.

8 Edit Media page with File URL circled Good work! You've added our own ads to the water garden website. More WordPress Plugin Suggestions If you use a theme that doesn't have the ad display option, install the WP125 plugin. Not only does it place your ads in a widget, it also lets you decide how to display them and how long they should run. Need a little help selling and booking advertising? Check out Komoona, a free plugin that lets you set prices for your ads, fields your inquiries, and even collects payments. For more information, visit Komoona Website. Chapter 3: Affiliate Marketing WordPress is the platform of choice for affiliate marketing, the practice of using your website to drive business to online merchants. According to Jupiter Research, affiliate programs have become a $3 billion-a-year business! Here's how it works: Suppose you'd like to take advantage of the popularity of those smart speaker devices. You could create a website that compares the major players in this category Amazon's Alexa, Google Home, and

9 one or two others. So you do the research, add charts and photographs, and set up a blog section where visitors can ask questions and talk about voice-controlled speakers. If you've created useful content, your site will begin to draw people who are in the market for the product. Now you join the affiliate programs of Amazon, Google, and the other sellers. You put ads and links on your site, directing visitors to the Alexa and Google Home websites. And every time one of your referrals makes a purchase, you'll get a percentage of the sale. There are usually four main participants in the affiliate model: the seller (sometimes called the merchant); the network that represents the merchant; the publisher (the affiliate website owner); and the customer. Some big merchants, like Amazon, run their own affiliate programs. The system works best when the affiliate attracts visitors who are likely to end up buying the merchant's products. One way to do this is to create a website (or operate an existing site) that contains the kind of information a prospective buyer would search for. That's one of the goals of our fictitious water garden site to explain how to build a water garden and expose our visitors to merchants that sell the items our visitors want. Niche sites (those that specialize in a very specific subject) often are the most effective affiliates. Unless you join a self-administered program like ebay's or Amazon's you'll need to sign up with an affiliate network. The network will give you a list of the merchants they represent, along with their commission schedules, and they'll submit your application to the sellers. When you're approved, the network will provide display and text links, keep track of your sales, and send your commissions. Because the networks also share a portion of the total sales, you pay nothing for these services. There are hundreds of affiliate networks. To find niche merchants, search the Web for the niche subject + "affiliate network" for example: water garden affiliate network. If you have a particular merchant in mind, go to its website and look for an affiliate link. The big players in this category are CJ Affiliate (formerly Commission Junction) and LinkShare. Amazon and ebay are among the largest self-administrating merchants. Creating an Online Shopping Site When you want to sell products directly to your visitors, there's no better way than installing a shopping cart and opening your own online store! There are dozens of WordPress plugins designed for this purpose.

10 But before we start, it's important to understand what you'll be getting into: It might be more involved than you think. Online retailing requires product descriptions and photography, inventory control, collecting and depositing taxes, setting up shipping systems and terms, and accepting customer payments. In addition, you'll need to provide customer service, make sure transactions are secure, and effectively market your products. Software capable of tracking this information is necessarily complex and will require plenty of time and effort to set up. So be prepared to put in a lot of effort to create and operate your online store. And no matter which shopping cart you select, plan on spending plenty of time reading the documentation before you add the first product. No matter which cart you choose, the process is similar: Organize your products and decide how you want to present them. Each item should have its own page, but you might also want create shopping pages displaying multiple products, sorted by category. In some cases, this will require you to create your own page layouts or use the shopping cart's short codes. Virtually all shopping carts have a large number of settings you'll have to configure, so expect to spend lots of time in the back end making decisions. Since only you know what your store requires, please understand that neither I, nor anyone else, can make these choices. It'll be all up to you! In the next chapter, you'll practice building an online store for a few water garden items. I'll show you the basics and point you to the documentation, but I'll expect you to refer to the software's instructions if you want to expand the site. We don't have enough space or time to walk you through every step. And even if we did, it wouldn't help you much once the course was over and you're on your own.

11 I ll say it again: Building an online shopping site requires a lot of work and the ability to think independently. I can't do that for you, but I can help you get started! Chapter 4: Using PayPal to Sell Products and Services Online Before PayPal came along, it wasn't easy to collect money online. Internet sellers had to establish a merchant account with a bank or other processor to handle credit card transactions. The processing charges were high, and banks were very selective about the online sellers they'd work with. PayPal has democratized online collections, becoming one of the world's largest payment processors. Virtually anyone who has a bank account can sign up with PayPal, which will handle your customers' credit card charges or bank debits for a fee that's competitive with the pickier financial institutions. If you're planning to sell just a few things on your website or if you want to solicit donations or contributions for your blog or non-profit PayPal is the way to go. You can also build a simple shopping cart using PayPal's free tools, or simply add a payment link in a sidebar. No matter what form of business you have individual, sole proprietorship, partnership, or corporation it takes less than five minutes to create a PayPal account. Once you're signed up, PayPal helps you configure a payment gateway for your customers. A simple link takes them to your PayPal page to complete their transactions. And PayPal credits the payments to you within hours. So if it s simplicity you re looking for, WordPress Ultra Simple PayPal Shopping Cart is the way to go. More WordPress Plugin Suggestions PayPal Donations: This is a widget that lets visitors contribute to your PayPal account. You can also explain who'll benefit from the donation. WordPress Ultra Simple Paypal Shopping Cart: This plugin lets you put an Add to Cart button anywhere on your site and display a shopping cart on any page, post, or sidebar. PayPal handles the credit card processing. Shopping Carts You can always use PayPal as your credit card processor, but if you want to sell more than a few things online, you'll probably want a more sophisticated e-commerce system.

12 Shopping cart is a simple enough term, but it refers to an enormous variety of online applications designed to sell products. Because WordPress is one of the world's most popular content management systems, developers have created scores of free and premium shopping cart systems and plugins. Check the Supplementary Material section for links to some of the most popular carts. Which to choose? Use the chart below to decide which features are most important to you: When you're ready to choose your shopping cart, compare what you need to the available features of the WordPress plugins. Check the Supplementary Material section for links to shopping cart developers. Let's Go Shopping Now let's install a WordPress shopping cart plugin. I chose WooCommerce for several reasons. It s free to try and many of you will likely never need to go beyond the basic features which would require that you start paying. It was bought by WordPress

13 three years ago because they think it s great (so it plays well with WordPress and you ll find yourself comfortable with the user interface). There must be a reason that over a third of all online stores are based on WooCommerce. (Just as there s a good reason that WordPress itself powers over a third of all Internet sites.) WooCommerce isn t as dead simple to use as the WordPress Ultra Simple Paypal Shopping Cart plugin. But if you plan (hope) to grow into a powerhouse of commercial activity, might as well start with a plugin that can accommodate any acceleration in growth and pretty much any size as well. Nothing s perfect of course. The two primary drawbacks of the WooCommerce plugin at this time are that it doesn t support any multilingual shopping, and your choice of templates when using the free version are limited, as would be expected. That said, if you re interested in possibly using this plugin, let s give it a tryout now. Instructions for downloading and installing WooCommerce: 1. Go to Plugins > Add New, and search for woocommerce. 2. You ll see a bunch of hits because there are multiple aftermarket plugins (AKA extensions). But the one you want is by Automatic and boasts over a million active installations. 3. Click Install Now, then click Activate. 4. This commerce system requires that a few new pages be added to your site. And there are some additional settings such as your tax gathering preference and weight calculation (ounces? pounds? grams?) Let s have the Wizard walk us through the basics of setting up WooCommerce, so click Run the Setup Wizard.

14 5. Fill in the form, then click Let s Go.

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16 6. When asked about payment preferences, let s keep things simple for now and choose just PayPal (with the option to let customers who have no PayPal account still make payments via their credit card). You can always expand these options at a later date if you need to. 7. Click the Continue button to specify your shipping, weight, and measurement options.

17 8. Deselect the offer to switch to the Storefront theme. We want to keep on using Marina for now, but if you wish, go ahead and explore Storefront. It s easy enough to switch back later to Marina if you want to. The tax option is useful and the Chimp can help increase your sales.

18 9. Click Continue. WooCommerce is now visible in your WordPress dashboard. Choose WooCommerce > Settings. Then click Connect: 10. Take a little side-trip to Pages > All Pages. See if you can figure out how many new pages WooCommerce added to your site:

19 WooCommerce Customizer This plugin does far more than I can explain here. So I'll get you started with the basics, and you can explore all its features at your convenience. Now that WooCommerce is installed, let s look at some of the settings. 1. Go back to WooCommerce > Settings. 2. We want the visitor (AKA customer) to fully understand that this site has a store. So click the in the Customizer link:

20 3. Several options open up. The store notice allows you to place an ad that appears everywhere on your site:

21 The Product Catalog section allows you to specify where and how to display your goods. In the Product Images section you can specify image size and cropping. The Checkout section is where you decide what details the customer must provide, are optional, or aren t even listed on your checkout form. You also decide how to handle privacy notices and other legal info.

22 Add Your Products Let's configure WooCommerce to display a product from the class project site. 1. Go to WooCommerce > Products > Add New.

23 Tip: WooCommerce has made an effort to parallel the standard WordPress user interface so you should find it easy to work with. Notice how the term Add New is like what you re already familiar with in WordPress (Posts Add New and Pages Add New). Also the WooCommerce Products > All Products resembles those areas with the Posts and Pages screens.

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25 Tip: If you see a warning about an insecure connection, don t worry about that now. We ll cover this topic at the end of this lesson. Just make a mental note that before you publish your real ecommerce site, you will want to change to a HTTPS system: 2. In the title field type: American Pond Kits 3. Now find the Lesson 9 media folder you downloaded earlier in this lesson. The Shopping cart content folder contains the written content in plain text format (water garden kits.txt), along with a product picture (.gif). 4. In the description (main text box) area, paste the water garden kits.txt information. So your new product page looks like this:

26 5. Scroll down and fill in the price and short description. Leave the Virtual and Downloadable options unchecked. These categories are for items like consultation via or a game they would download items not in the physical world that have to be sent to them. 6. Finally let s add our picture. Go back to the main text box and click to set your mouse cursor just to the left of the second paragraph that starts with These American. 7. Click the Add Media button and in the Media Library, click the picture with the eagle. 8. Click the Insert Into Product button in the lower right corner. You ll see your image located where you put the cursor.

27 That s it! Click the Publish button and when it stops revolving, click the View Product link up top. Well done! You have the start of an online store.

28 Tip: Various additional customizations can of course be made to your product pages. Think of them as similar to posts. Remember, the way that you modified pages and posts is much the same as the way you deal with products. For example, if you want to change the category from uncategorized to kits,

29 just start by clicking Products > Categories, then making changes as shown here and clicking the Update button. But there's more. Open Appearance > Widgets, and you'll see that WooCommerce has also loaded its own widgets. The key word is products which to WooCommerce is their version of WordPress pages or posts. Here s where you can get creative with your theme s sidebar.

30 As you ve likely noticed WooCommerce is a pretty full-featured ecommerce toolkit. Online sales employ quite a few different configurations, but whatever you re selling I m confident you ll find that WooCommerce will be able to handle it. And if you don t see what you need in the default installation, take a look at WooCommerce > Extensions of which there are currently exactly 100 available. Tip: If you want a theme that s ecommerce focused and totally friendly with WooCommerce, check out Storefront, WordPress s official WooCommerce theme. If selling online is your goal, and you want to make the most of WooCommerce--you will want to take the time to explore these well-done tutorials and other documentation for this powerful system: Protecting Your Customers With SSL a new hole. You've no doubt heard the horror stories of what happens when thieves steal online shoppers' personal information. Despite huge improvements in Internet security, the bad guys always seem to be one step ahead. Put another way, cryptology and other security efforts are a kind of back-and-forth game. Every time the good guys plug a security hole, the bad guys make a new move and open

31 Even the largest retailers fall victim to data theft. While there are no guarantees your store won't wind up in the same situation, it seems that criminals are more interested in companies like Target and Amazon. Bigger fields to harvest. Still, even the smallest online merchants need to take basic precautions. The best way to protect yourself and your customers from online theft is to make sure their information is encrypted. Encryption is the process of disguising information so that only authorized people can use it. The word time could be encrypted as n1ujnfa%. The four letters are in there, but disguised. This is a pretty easy one to decrypt. Toss out the first two and last two meaningless filler characters, then lower by one each remaining letter in its alphabetical order number. u becomes t, j becomes i, and so on: time. Fortunately online (SSL) encryption is far more complex and thus more secure. On the Web encryption most often employs technology known as SSL (Secure Sockets Layer). I'm sure you've seen sites that use SSL: Their URLs begin with instead of And when you're visiting an SSL page, browsers display a lock icon on the address field. SSL allows customers to securely send information like credit card and Social Security numbers to the merchant. Should you install SSL for your own online shopping site? The answer is an absolute yes, unless a third party's website processes the transactions for you, as in the case of PayPal or on an affiliate website. To use this security technology, you'll install an SSL certificate from your host or a company that specializes in selling them. There are both paid and free SSL certificates. Depending on the level of security encryption you choose, the price can run from nothing to well into the thousands of dollars. If you use SiteGround as your host (among others) it's free to get your site an SSL certificate. Here's how: Then after that, I'd suggest using the Really Simple SSL plugin to add your new certification to your WordPress site.

32 SSL Plugin Suggestion If you run into problems trying to display insecure elements on your SSL page, install the SSL Insecure Content Fixer:.SSL Insecure Content Fixer. For more information on SSL, check this lesson's Supplementary Material section! Well, that wraps up our lesson on monetizing your WordPress website. Join me in Chapter 5 to review what we've covered. Chapter 5: Summary While it's not everyone's goal to benefit financially from a website, at some point in the future you might need a system for collecting money or selling products. Once again, WordPress is there to help, with hundreds of plugins that will turn your site into an efficient online store or affiliate. The easiest way to make money from a blog or website is to run pay-per-click ads and banners. You can sell them yourself or get hooked up with a program like AdSense, which will pay you for visitors you refer to its advertisers. On a slightly larger scale, you could become an affiliate of a large or specialized online merchant, sending them potential customers in return for a percentage of their sales. Or if you want to sell your own products or services, WordPress is compatible with free and premium shopping cart plugins. Some, like the WooCommerce app we installed, can handle every aspect of running an online store. In our next lesson, we'll spend some time polishing up our class project website and talk about blogging and social networking. I look forward to seeing you there!