Monetize your Green Website with Eco-Friendly Advertising

Monetizing your green website is just like monetizing any other kind of website.

Before you even dream about monetizing your green website, you need to understand how the green community works in order to leverage your blog and increase your traffic. If you’re hoping to build your community (before attempting to monetize), here’s some simple tips to consider before we dive into the good stuff.

• Dream big- share your green ideas
• Respond to comments
• Offer a chance to share your content, so others in the green industry can read/share as well
• Don’t just parrot articles, if your website is based around delivering green content. Use an original spin on your posts
• Engage your customers on all social networks– this will make them feel more valuable and they’ll visit your site more often

For starters, you have to have a good idea who is going to want what your site offers – all the effort in the world will bounce if you don’t target the right people.  While you could just “shotgun” your approach, and try to get everybody, that type of effort rarely produces much fruit for all of the labor it requires.

When you search out avenues for eco-friendly advertising, you will find that you have a lot of different possible channels. You can search out green affiliate networks and help them by way of dominating key phrases that they might have missed, sell advertising space on your site, or just produce your very own product.

There are tons of great green affiliate networks out there.  While they are as fluid and ever-changing as the currents in the ocean, you can find a host of them.

• Green Affiliate Programs
• Eco-Affiliate

just to name a few, will help you to find sites that may want to affiliate with you.

Simply put, affiliate marketing is where you help the owner of a product or service to reach a particular milestone, such as getting someone to opt into their e-mail list, or help them to make a sale, and get paid for the part you played in the event.  A proper explanation of affiliate marketing would go well beyond the scope of this article, but it can be an incredibly lucrative venture to engage in.

Your Web site has a lot of space that might be going to waste.  If you have a blank space that seems a bit “much,” you can sell that space to other green websites.  All you have to do is clearly document

• the niches of people that frequent your site
• propose how you could help the other site market their products via the use of your advertising space

There’s an abundance of sites out there where you can get hooked up with advertisers to make good use of your site, as well as sites that offer beginner’s information for getting into the space for selling ad space.

Most importantly of all, you can create your very own product.  This is, bar none, the best way to make money through a website.  There are a multitude of green products, both information-based and otherwise, that the world needs more of.  With your creativity, you can certainly find something interesting.  But of course, you will need more than just a product – marketing that could be helped with a blog (such as the kind that Wordpress.org allows you to set up), and some CRM tracking add-ons like:

• Contact Form 7
• Wordpress-to-lead

The landscape for monetizing your green site will change as new ad networks come out, but if you keep adapting your technique and changing your processes as you need to, you’ll successfully build and maintain eco-friendly advertising on your green website.

Image Credit: Sarah Modern