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While many people focus all their time on finding ways to generate traffic, having thousands of people visiting your website each day is actually pointless unless you can find ways to convert that traffic into actual income.

In this video we'll take a look at two of the easiest ways to monetize your website.

Specifically we’ll be looking at:

- The Seven Samurai Steps to Success

- Affiliate Marketing

- Google Adsense

- How Market Samurai can help you to monetize your website quickly and easily

To begin, lets just recap the overall process of creating a profitable website so that you can see how monetization fits into the picture.

At Noble Samurai, we view the process of developing an online business as having two main phases. These are:

(1) Research
(2) Implementation

Within these two phases, we’ve identified what we call the Seven Samurai Steps to Success.

The first step is to select a market, for example, photography.

The second step is to identify a niche within that market such as digital photography.

Step three is to identify a list of target keywords that meet the criteria of the four golden rules. This means that your target keywords should be relevant, have good levels of traffic, acceptable levels of competition and high levels of commerciality.

Once you’ve identified your target keywords and completed your research phase you can then move into the implementation phase.

The fourth step is to build your website using a system such as Wordpress or Wordpress Direct.

Once you’ve created your site, the fifth step is to develop high quality content that relates specifically to your target keywords.

This targeted content will help facilitate the sixth step which is to generate traffic to your website.

Once your website is attracting a steady stream of visitors, there are a number of ways you can convert this traffic into an ongoing source of income.

The process of converting traffic into income is called ‘monetization’ and is the seventh step to success.

So now that you understand the overall picture of how to build a profitable business, let’s explore two of the easiest ways to monetize your website.

These are:

(1) Selling Affiliate Products
(2) Displaying Google Adsense

The basic idea behind affiliate marketing is that you refer people to another website and if they make a purchase from that website, you receive a percentage of the profits.

This sounds easy enough in theory, but lets take a closer look to see how this actually works in the real world.

Let’s start with a typical website owner named Amy.

Over a period of time Amy develops a website containing high quality, keyword targeted content in the digital photography niche.

This content attracts visitors to Amy’s site. For example, this is a visitor named Ben.
Ben reads an article on Amy’s website which contains a review of an online photography course.

He likes the review and is interested in buying the course so he clicks on the link at the end of Amy’s article to find out more.

The link at the end of Amy’s article is a special kind of link called an affiliate link. And I should point out here that Amy is required to disclose the fact that she will receive a commission from any referred sales.

When Ben clicks on Amy’s affiliate link, the first thing that happens is that a third party website such as ClickBank, places something called a cookie on his computer. A good way to think of a cookie is that it is a token that identifies that Ben clicked on Amy’s affiliate link.

Ben is then redirected to the online photography course website. This website belongs to the creator of the photography course. Let’s call him the Vendor.

Ben reads about the course and decides to make a purchase so he clicks on the ‘Buy Now’ button.

Clicking the buy now button takes him to the ClickBank payment page.

Ben then makes a payment of $100 to obtain access to the Vendor’s online photography course.

While processing his payment, ClickBank checks Ben’s computer and finds the cookie that indicates that Amy originally referred Ben to the Vendor’s website.

Clickbank therefore takes Ben’s $100, subtracts its processing fees which come to $8.50
and then divides up the remaining profit between Amy and the Vendor.

The Vendor decides how the profits of each sale are distributed by setting an affiliate percentage in their ClickBank account. For this example, lets imagine that the Vendor has elected to share all profits 50 - 50.

In this scenario, Ben’s $100 dollars will be distributed as follows:

ClickBank will receive $8.50 for processing the payment

The Vendor will receive 50% of the remaining profits ($45.75)

And Amy will receive 50% of the profits ($45.75) for referring Ben to the Vendor’s site.

The best thing about affiliate marketing is that all these systems are completely automated.

So while Ben is reading about the Vendor’s photography course and making his purchase, Amy could be picking up her kids from school, or even making money while she sleeps.

Another popular way to monetize your website and convert traffic into ongoing income is Google Adsense.

Let’s start by taking a look at the difference between the Google Adwords program and the Google Adsense program because a lot of people get these two a little confused.

Google Adwords is generally used by advertisers as a way to generate traffic to their websites.

For example, the owner of the photography course Vince, might join the Google Adwords program and create an ad to attract visitors to his site.

Google then displays Vince’s ad on relevant websites and whenever someone clicks on his ad, Vince pays Google an amount of money for each visitor he receives.

On the other side of the equation, the Google Adsense program is used by Content Publishers as a way to generate income.

For example, Amy might decide to add Google Adsense to her website. When a visitor clicks on one of the Google ads, Google Pays Amy an amount of money for each visitor she generates.

Let’s take a look at an example of how the money might flow between an advertiser and content publisher via google.

To begin the process, Vince joins the Adwords program and creates an ad to attract visitors to his site.

Amy joins the Adsense program and displays Google Adsense on her website. Because Amy’s site is about photography, Google decides that Vince’s photography course ad would be a good match and displays this ad on Amy’s site.

Ben who is browsing the site sees Vince’s photography course ad and clicks on it to find out more.

Ben is then taken to Vince's website where he can read more about the photography course.

Vince pays google an amount of money, for example lets say $1.20 for Ben’s click...

...and Google in turn pays Amy a share of the revenue, for example $0.20 for generating the lead.

The exact amount of money Google pays per click is dependent on a number of factors including the topic of your content, the price paid by advertisers and the number of clicks you generate.

Let’s now take a look at how Market Samurai can help you monetize your website quickly and easily.

In the past there have been a number of obstacles that have prevented people from taking action and monetizing their websites.

The first obstacle was that in many niches it was difficult to find good products to promote.

The second obstacle was that a lot of people struggle to write the sales copy needed to effectively promote products online.

The third obstacle preventing people from monetizing their website was the technical knowledge required to pull everything together.

When we sat down to design the Monetization module in Market Samurai, our aim was to eliminate each one of these obstacles.

The Monetization module therefore contains three separate components:

The first component is the Opportunity finder which helps you to quickly find affiliate products that are relevant to your target keywords.

The Opportunity Finder also helps you compare products and decide which products will be the most profitable for your business.

The second component of the Monetization module is the Ad builder which helps you to quickly create effective advertisements by simply dragging and dropping elements into various templates.

And the third component of the Monetization module is the Ad Publisher which uploads and publishes your Ad to your website with just a few clicks of your mouse.

By eliminating the obstacles of finding products to promote, writing effective sales copy and publishing your advertisements, the Monetization Module in Market Samurai can help you to transform your traffic into an ongoing source of income quickly and easily.

So just to recap...

In this video we outlined the Seven Samurai Steps to success which were:

(1) Select a market

(2) Choose a niche

(3) Identify your target keywords

(4) Create your website

(5) Create keyword targeted content

(6) Generate traffic

(7) Monetize your traffic using affiliate products and Google Adsense.

We then took a closer look at affiliate marketing...

...and Google Adsense

And finally we saw that the Market Samurai Monetization module can help you to find products, write an effective ad and easily publish your ad to your website.