How To Make Online Money

One of the most useful (and free) tools to someone trying to make online money with their website is Google Analytics.

GA lets you create a snippet of code that you can place in your website’s footer template.  Then it tracks all sorts of useful information about your site:

• Number of Visitors
• Number of Page Views
• Source of Visit (referral, search engine, direct link)
• Keywords used in the search engines to find you
• Time spent on each page

…and more!

It’s tracked near-real-time…I’d say the refreshes usually happen within 10 minutes.

Here are a few things that I’ve found to be useful by examining the stats:

Popular Page – I noticed on one of my blogs that most visitors were viewing a particular page (not my home page).  It was a popular topic for that niche, and ranked well for the search engines for a particular keyword phrase.  But I didn’t have anything to sell on that page.  Since so many visitors were coming to my site, reading just that one page, then leaving, I decided to increase my chance to sell something by adding a blurb to the bottom of the post which was related, but pointed to an affiliate product.

On another site I noticed that most visits were going to the main page.  Since it was a blog, the main page’s content changed as I added new posts.  I looked at my affiliate sales and noticed the correlation between having clear affiliate links in my post on the front page.  Since most visitors were looking at my main page, sales always were higher when my front page post contained affiliate links.  If my content was ‘just’ informative, sales, while still there from other links on the page, dropped.

Keywords Used – I frequently check to see what keywords are bringing people to my site.  Sometimes I find that people are arriving at my site quite unexpectedly, using keywords that I never would have thought would be used.  The practical application of that is to take those keywords and create related posts so that other people searching variations of that keyword phrase might find a way into your site.

Traffic Sources – It’s good to know how much traffic is coming ‘naturally’ through search engines, vs. coming from referral sources.  And, it’s good to know what those referral sources are.  For example, I have found that for my niche, certain Social Bookmarking sites tend to drive more traffic than others.  Which means that I always make sure to include those sites now, when bookmarking a new post.

Visit Google Analytics and try for yourself!  Choose the URL you wish to track, copy the code snippet GA provides, and paste it into you template…usually right above the </body> tag, which is usually found in the footer of your template.

Have fun watching and learning as you track your website stats with Google Analytics!