Internet Marketing: Make Money from your Hobby
Most professional internet marketers will tell you that you should not turn your hobby or interest into your main income source on the internet – simply because you're far too close to the subject matter and tend not to be objective about making money. They do have a point, that's true. In that you can get lost in the content without focussing on the monetization of your site. Yet, the passion you have in creating a site about your hobby or interest can be harnessed to become an advantage.
I've been building the Celtnet website for almost three years now. And, yes, it was a site built around a true passion of mine: revealing the truth about the nature and number of Celtic Gods and my passion for medieval Welsh literature and translating that literature. This was a true passion of mine and being a passion I focussed on content rather than monetization. OK, so I added a recipe section at www.celtnet.org.uk/recipes which was focussed on ancient recipes from different eras and I did put Google AdSense ads on those pages which yielded a trickle income for me.
I can't tell you how happy I was when I received the first Google cheque for my ad placements. I was completely over the moon — and this from someone who has designed websites for others and has been involved in various website design projects for over 20 years. What it did give me was the impetus to think seriously about my website and ways to monetize it. After all, at the time of that first Google cheque I was getting over a hundred thousand visitors a month and most of them were doing little but staring at my pages.
What it did teach me, however, was that I actually had an audience for my website. I might have positioned my site in what most people would consider a very specialist niche but it was a niche with a significant audience. So I began doing my research and I found that I also had very little competition in this particular niche. Those years I spend adding content without making money might have been financially wasteful but they did give me a solid platform from which to begin monetizing my site.
I'm sure what I've said above isn't new to you. You're probably in a very similar situation yourself if you're starting out in the internet marketing field. But if you have a solid website and if you're pulling-in a decent number of visitors then you can capitalize on that traffic to your website.
The Strategy:
First I added Google AdSense ads to all my web pages which instantly increased my revenue by a third. The point here, don't ignore any of your web pages. They can all make you money. My researches on placement also revealed that Google AdSense ads at the header and on the right hand side of the web page were most successful in terms of generating clicks.
Once I'd fixed the basics the next step was to add affiliate marketing pages to my site. The majority of my visitors were using Celtic-based searches to find my site. So it was easy to focus on the Celtic market as the source of potential affiliate revenue. When I looked into it, the Celtic-associated market is huge with everything from clothing though books to artworks and even recipe ingredients such as meats available.
My chosen niche interest was a potential goldmine in terms of monetizing my website. My first choice of what to do was pretty straightforward and I designed a page based on Amazon books that dealt with Celtic design. This fitted with the theme of my website well and guaranteed an instant influx of visitors to that page. After all I wasn't selling anything, just telling people about sourcebooks that would allow them to create Celtic Art. After that I began to look for affiliate partners that created Celtic materials, whether clothes (as in my Celtic Sheepskin affiliate page) or jewellery (as in my Celtic Rings information page).
Again, most people looking for Celtic-associated information would be interested in Celtic-themed clothing or Celtic jewellery. So I generated some pre-selling statements on the page and gave my visitors an overview of the products available. Again, I wasn't selling anything just pointing out items of Celtic interest.
The other point to take home from this is that all this has been done organically. By using a few simple SEO techniques to increase visitors (which you can learn about in my eBook — Maximize your Web Traffic) and focussing on items that will be of interest to visitors of my site I've sought primarily not alienated my core visitors (who are after information) whilst at the same time directing a significant number of more general visitors to pages that provide them with more information on a product or area of Celtic interest whilst offering them things that they can buy. Simple things like telling people the history and meaning of Celtic ring forms drawn in the visitors and gives them confidence that they are buying a ring based on a genuine Celtic motif. It's all about gaining the confidence of your site's visitors so that they trust the companies whose products you are introducing to them.
The truth is that a niche can be far more profitable than a 'me to' site simply because there's less competition. If you can drive traffic to your site and you have products that a number of people will want to buy them. The moral of this story is that if you have an expertise in an area and if that area has an appeal to sufficient numbers of visitors then there's no reason why you can't use this expertise as the foundation for a successful business.
As for me, what I need to do now is to move my information-related pages (such as this one) to a sub-domain of this site which will be info.celtnet.org.uk which will allow me to better integrate the various information products and pages of this site.