How was the talk "Improve your website: Monetize your blog with WordPress"

The numbers

Aimed at the talk: 57 people.
Assistants: 40 people.
The last 13th of May of 2019 was held in the space that gives us ULab, the co-working center of Alicante.

It is important to mention that this talk has been attended by almost all the people who signed up, as you can see in the numbers, so a success. Thank you for complying with the assistance!

Important: We remind you that in the tool Slack have a channel registered to organize and to share the management of the meetup, specifically the channel we use is #wpalicante of Slack WordPress Spain. If you want to lend a hand, contribute ideas and become more active part of this community follow the instructions on the following page-> http://wp-es.es/slack/

Monetization with WordPress: the talk

This month we have a very interesting paper on monetization with WordPress from the hand of Alberto Sanz, aka @seoforce_, SEO and Growth Hacker, whose objective is to develop strategies for businesses that already exist on the internet but want to improve or for companies that start from scratch in the digital world. From his experience, he tells us how to monetize our blog or web created with WordPress. To do this he shares his Monetization Presentation With which you can follow this post.

As the subject was very interesting and especially attractive for questions, Alberto has left us time for it at the end of his talk. And to finish the day we have also had networking with refreshments in the kiosk of the Plaza de San Cristóbal thanks to our sponsors: Professional Hosting , your trusted hosting, and Weglot, the plugin to translate your web to the language you want.

We will then remark some points that have been interesting to us.

Topic Overview

There are many types of pages that can be created in WordPress in order to monetize. The most used is the blog but we will see that there are other types better for our purpose.
There are different ways to mount our WP and as we mount it can be more or less profitable.
Alberto shows us what model of monetization he uses to monetize a website. We understand as a model of monetization, what steps to continue to get monetized without going crazy.
There are different methods of monetization that can be interesting when it comes to profitable our website from legality. We will see what they are and how to develop them.

Types of pages that can be created with WP

Many people have a Web page with WordPress but few manage to monetize it. Let's look at the different types of pages that can be created and which can be more interesting to make our work profitable.

Informational Blog: The most used where items are hung and information is displayed to people. It is very useful to educate people but it is complex to monetize. An example of this type of blog would be one where we put a post on the origins of a football team and data from each of its players.
Transactional Blog: It is the blog that not only gives you information but recommends things to buy, both physical and services (which recommend which camera to buy, or what micro, what hosting service...). This type of blog already gives a little more money, not only for the recommendation itself but also for the possibilities of publicity.
Directory: It is a very interesting type of web. The idea is to census all the companies in an area dedicated to a specific theme (or organized by thematic). The important thing is to be able to position that directory well and that the people of the area enter to consult. Being well positioned, companies will pay to appear on it. We can also include publicity.
Affiliate Store: It consists in recommending products to other people making it appear that you had the product in your stock when in fact you redirect them to a purchase website (like Amazon, for example) that is who actually carries out the whole transaction and we take a Sales commission.
Ecommerce: This is the typical sales Web we all know and where we do need stock and make us all the transaction with the customer, sending the product, managing possible returns... The advantage is that you also take the full amount of the sale, not just a commission.
Corporate page: It is not only for agencies that sell services to companies. You can monetize with this type of page without having customers. Later we see how.

Methods to fill our WP content

Manually: We write each entry. The good thing is that you give value to people, writing for them. Which improves the SEO and therefore the positioning. The downside is that you have to work hard to give quality content.
Automatically: We get a way to generate the entries automatically. So we are able to generate many more content with less effort. The downside is that it is not as focused on people as the structure of the generated inputs are very similar to each other.

Monetization model in WP

When it comes to monetizing in WordPress depends much on the type of Web you have. Really your website can evolve as you learn and see the best way to monetize. The ideal for beginners is to start with a Informational Blog.

If we want to start making money, we can turn our Blog Information in one Transactional, since the products we talk about can start to recommend them. In addition, advertising on our website will be directed towards the same topic, which will report more revenue. We can also go including those products with some Affiliate Program For your purchase from our website, since we are recommending them.

The next step is to turn the Web into a Affiliates ecommerce. It is an online store like the one we know but without having us any product really. In doing so, the expense is zero and we do not have to handle stock, manage shipments... Much more comfortable when it comes to monetizing.

When we are working properly and successfully we can move to a Ecommerce Dropshipping. It must be one well understood, ie, having already passed through the three previous steps, we are a web of reference in the sector and we are well positioned in the search engines or social networks so it will be easy for suppliers in our sector want to work with no us. If we don't have this situation, it's better not to take this leap. With this advance, we will get more benefits even though we still have only one sales commission, since most of the money will continue to be carried by the supplier.

The last step would be the ecommerce with stock. With it we get all the money from the sale is for us, but also that we will have to start managing stock, shipments, returns... So you have to value it well if that's what we want.

Types of monetization

Internet Advertising Programs: When a company wants to advertise on your website. It's a passive, hassle-free income. It can perfectly be placed even in an informational web. The only downside is that you need to have enough traffic on your website so that you actually rent and come to a level of traffic revenues no longer grow proportionately. We could be talking that to win €4 daily we would need about 1500 visits a day and then with a blog of 400,000 visits does not win much more. So there are other methods that allow more interesting revenue.
Advertising platforms: The best known is Adsense, which is the Google advertising platform. What Google does in this case is to put certain publicity on your website (that which appears to you as a user on all websites when you have visited a particular page or article) and as owner of the website that has the advertising, you take 65% of what they pay for that Anun Cio. There are certain themes for which they do not allow you to use Adsense, as adult themes. There's another platform called Monetizer That gives very similar income. It is less automatic than Adsense and you have to approve its use equally but it can be quite advisable.
Purchasing Affiliate: It is when we recommend a user to buy a product that we have on our website. For example, we made an article on the top 10 paddle surfing tables on the market and in addition to the explanation we put a button that with a click takes you to Amazon to buy each of them. With this technique, the commissions we charge are much better than with the previous methods. The important thing is to know how to select the product and can be charged from 3.5% to 10%. To work this technique we have to be able to give information relevant to the user, if not, it is very possible that it does not work... Unless you generate an automatic website 65,000 entries with articles, because in that case it is highly probable that with some you take some sale. The most popular sales portal with affiliates is Amazon. Every time someone buys at Amazon, if you have taken it to that purchase with a small code you take a commission. In WordPress, with the plugin Woocommerce You can put in affiliated products. You can also use the plugin Aawp, to make automatic entries, which shows you the articles with a technical description. There are other companies that have their own affiliate platforms, such as El Corte Ingles, or other specific niches, such as PC components, in the case of a computer blog that will be much more profitable than using Amazon affiliates.
Sale of Sponsored posts: It's just about hiring an entry on your website. That is, if your site is of reference in your niche and you are well positioned, surely there will be companies that want to dedicate an entry to your blog and pay for that entry you will post talking about them. You can contact us privately or through some tools that already exist in the market as Unancor, Prensarank or Publisuittes (the SEOs also use them to get links).
Banner Sales: Advertising space within your website.
Selling leads or Dropshipping: Once I have my website well positioned I can sell both products and related services. Another possibility is to contact a hotel, for example, to make the website free of charge, through which you can book and collect a commission for each reservation that is made by the web. That can be done with any sector such as aluminum carpentry, photographers, graphic designers...

How to choose a product for Amazon affiliates

At Amazon commissions range from 3.5% to 10%.
We must look for products whose price the Commission compensates. Amazon is becoming the paradise of the Chinese and it is not worth putting on our website as a product of affiliates that cost €1. The ideal is to look for products with a price higher than €40.
Avoid computer products and technology because they are the ones that give the €3.5 and it is a small commission for what it can cost to position a computer, for example.
Find products that are usually purchased online. Avoid saddle-type products.
Avoid repetitive buying products because most likely through our recommendation website they will buy the first time but the following times they will buy it directly from Amazon.

Automation for monetization at Amazon

The first thing is to see what products are sold in your niche. To do this, you have to go to Amazon and get a list of the best sellers.
Once we know what products we want to reference, we create a Spin text. Within this spin we will have to include as a variable "the best sellers of Amazon" (Amazon only lets include this concept) and one of the products obtained in the initial step. We add as many variables with Shortcode as products we want to reference will generate a page for each product.

[Amazon bestsellers =» Product»]

Publish a page every 8 hours approximately. If the Publicásemos all of a sudden lose the power of being referents in social networks, which requires time and constancy (or a bot that publishes for you). As bots that can be used to share your feed on social networks periodically every 8 hours we have ifttt Or botize. The ideal is to share that feed in those websites, groups or fan pages that correspond to your niche.

Travel and Catering Affiliates

It is a very interesting niche to monetize.
It is necessary to think that any web that recommends trips well positioned is an "influence" so it is relatively easy to monetize in kind, ie, to get a recommendation on your website to give you free stays or any other service offered.
Booking is one of the travel websites that have affiliate program and WordPress Plugin, so in our travel blog we can recommend a hotel, for example, and put an affiliate link to book that hotel in Booking from our page. The problem of Booking is that it has no cookies so if the user accesses Booking to book from your page but closes the browser before booking and returns the next day, the sale will not tell you because it has not saved the information needed to remember Qu And the sale was yours.
There are other alternatives of affiliates to the Booking website, such as Skyscanner (flights), Hostelworld or Agoda (hotels). Even the web of The fork, restaurant Reservations has its affiliate program.

Other Affiliates

There are other more complicated affiliate programs but they also give better profitability, so you have to start with the previous ones and move on to these when we have experience.
These are affiliates for hostings, insurance, telephony or marketing tools.
The good thing about these affiliate programs is that once you get someone to contract a service through your website every month you get the corresponding commission as long as the customer maintains the service.

Final networking questions and issues

QUESTION: How to get traffic to your website. This is a real estate website.

RESPONSE: It's a matter of SEO. To improve it, one thing that can be done is to see in your sector what interests the customers and create content about it. In the world of the real estate you can be interested in the steps when you sell your house and what is done in the notary. Then we'll see how to sell it.

QUESTION: What do you recommend if we already have a stock-mounted ecommerce or a infoproducto And what we want is to set up an affiliate program for others to make us commercial. Is there a plugin for this?

RESPONSE: You can use the plugin Yith WooCommerce Affiliates.

QUESTION: How the door of a platform or company is called to offer your services and become an affiliate.

RESPONSE: The best way is to follow the steps discussed. You mount your blog or your social network, you make reference in the sector and position well (if you want to sell a product you need to know) and simply call and say where you come from, if the company you call worries a bit of your sector sure you know and E I'm delighted to be working with you. This is a well-understood dropshipping. At fairs It works very well this type of sale. Be careful because there is a legal obligation to inform users that they are buying through a user link.

QUESTION: To what extent it is interesting that someone who knows SEO know how to program.

RESPONSE: To the extent that you allow your wallet. The best thing is to have a headend programmer that will program you everything you need. If you can afford it, the best thing is to program you both simple and complicated because it will always take you much longer than someone who dominates, as long as you can pay.

QUESTION: Looking for the minimum possible expense, someone has found the YOAST SEO plugin. It has a paid version. Is it worth it?

RESPONSE: The free version is more than enough. Rather complicated is the SEO itself to complicate it more, especially in the beginning.

Glossary

Dropshipping: It is a modality of ecommerce where the business owner is responsible for obtaining clients for third parties over the Internet. The suppliers are the ones that really have the stock and carry out the shipment of the merchandise. Therefore, the person who performs the dropshipping takes a commission for sale and is responsible for the creation and maintenance of the Web, its correct SEO positioning to attract sales and management with the customer.
SPIN text: It is a text template with variables that allow automatic generation of web pages sufficiently different from each other so that Google does not penalized it. Obviously, it depends on the variables you enter and the use you want to make of those pages. It can be useful for online stores with a lot of similarity of content or Web pages of affiliation. It makes No sense to use it for informational blogs and other types of websites where the quality of the published content is important.
Infoproducto: It is a digital product, like ebooks, manuals, guides...