When To Start Monetizing A Website? | EelKat on Making Money Online

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In the world of money-making "gurus" it's often said to build your site, build your traffic, getting 10k to 1100k views a month, before even thinking about monetizing and creating a product. And I've always thought that way of thinking was seriously flawed.

In my mind (and therefore what I did) I feel that you should create your product first, then after you've perfected the product, then you build a site, and put the product on the site, right from day one, even before you start getting traffic.

Why? Because having a lot of traffic doesn't mean having a lot of sales. It only takes 1 visitor to buy your product, and how do you know that one visitor won't be your first visitor? And if your product is not their when they visit, who knows if they'll ever come back to see it later? That then becomes a missed opportunity.

So in my mind there is no such thing as too few traffic, and so, yeah, I'd say go ahead an get your product out there regardless of high or low traffic. It's never too soon to start selling.

The estimate that I've always found most accurate was to assume that you'll get 10 clicks for every 1,000 views and 1 order for every 10 clicks. So 1 order per 1,000 views.

This is what I've experienced in my own niche at least. But my niche is a small and fairly unpopular niche, so I would also expect if you had a more popular niche you'd get a better ratio of views to sales then I get.

It depends on your product.

For example, if you are making handmade items, then you're best option would be to sell them on Etsy and embed the Etsy widget on your site. That way you don't have to deal with collection money or adding a shopping cart, because Etsy does that part for you. If you were selling used items, eBay is the best option, and if selling used books, Amazon is best. If you make large canvas painting ArtAmerica is likely the one you'd go with. There exist lots of such places to help you sell your physical products online. Which one you choose depends on the items you have available. 

(Etsy, eBay, and used books on Amazon are all methods of income used on my SBI site, and when I was doing it regular, was pretty good. It had potential to become a full time income, had I focused on it. But I put very little effort into it as it's just a side thing I added and is not my primary focus.)

Or, if you don't want to go through a 3rd party, you can just upload photos of your items and use PayPal buttons.

Or, maybe you have a service. Perhaps you do psychic card readings. For this you have the option of a listing on Etsy, or using the PayPal button on your site and dealing directly through email or Skype to deliver the reading. Or you could join a psychic network that provides you with a 900 number and takes a % of your fee. Keen is the most popular provider of 900 numbers for such services. 

(Psychic card reading brings in the HIGHEST amount of income for the LEAST amount of time and effort. I can quickly make $100 or more an hour doing this. If you are good at it you can charge $10 or more PER MINUTE, but you need a lot of experience and training in card readings and have a high rate of accuracy before you can start charging those prices. I've been doing card readings for 40+ years so, I'm able to charge much higher than normal prices.)

In the same line of work, spell casting, curse removal, hot footing, and rootwork can bring in $100 to $1,000 PER SPELL. (I'm a Voodoo Priestess, that's why you see me offering these types of services from my SBI site.)

Perhaps you have a more local service, such as lawn care. For that you don't need an online pay option as they'll pay you in cash when you arrive at their home. All you need in this case is contact info.

Or maybe you are an author writing novels. You have LuLu to help you with hardcover book sales, Kindle and Smashwords for your ebook/digital sales and Kindle Paperback for your paperback book sales. All of them provide embed tools allowing you to embed your products (books) on your site, allowing your visitors to click the product and buy it. You never have to deal with the customer at all, because the company collects payment and ships the product. 

(Book sales is my SBI site's #2 income source.)

Or if you are an artist, painting watercolours or canvas art, and you want to sell prints of your work instead of the originals... for those types of products you have Zazzle and CafePress. Same as with books, you embed the product listing on your site and the company handles the payments and shipping so you don't have to. 

(Zazzle is my SBI site's #1 source of income by the way.)

If you want to get into something like dropshipping, then I'd recommend a Shopify store for that. Trying to build a dropshipping storefront with SBI is difficult at best. SBI is made for content/article sites, not store fronts. Shopify is made specifically for store fronts and is easy to link into your SBI navabar (I did that with mine back when I had a Shopify store, and I had my shopify store layout matching my SBI layout, so viewers never knew they had left my SBI site, it looked like all one site). Unfortunately health issues got in the way and I no longer had the time or energy to devote to a dropshipping Shopify store, so I shut it down.

So, those are the selling products of my SBI site methods that I have used.

If you are looking to get into more "get rich quick making money online" type of products like video courses or pdf reports or that sort of thing.... I'm afraid I have no advice to offer in those areas, as I've not tried that sort of product selling method.

How you go about selling your product, what types of method for collecting payment and delivery, everything, is going to be totally dependant on the product itself. Handmade products require shipping, digital require a way to download and read, services require you show up at specific times and places.

It's difficult for anyone to give you very specific to you and your product advice, when we don't know what your product is. All we can do is tell you what types of products we've sold off our sites and how we've done it and that may or may not be helpful to you because it may or may not be a product similar to your own.

So, I don't know if any of this info will help you or not, because I'm not sure if any products I've sold are similar to what you plan to sell or not.

Hopeful it has given you some ideas on where to get started at least. Good luck with it.

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