How to make money from your DotNetNuke website

There are several ways in which you can monetize your DotNetNuke website. In this article we are going to discuss the methods that are available with the default modules in DotNetNuke.
These methods can be used with any type of website from a static to a dynamic website. The advantage of using DNN is the flexibility and ease of use for configuring and tracking.
Advertising
The first and easiest method for a web master to implement on their website is to enable advertising.

There are several advertising methods that you can implement and we will discuss each of them in turn.

Text/HTML
DotNetNuke provides an easy solution for combining all of the various advertising methods through the use of the Banners module. The Banners module allows you to rotate advertisements on each page load, while also allowing you to track the number of click-throughs for each advertisement.

The banners module can display all of the advertising types that are mentioned below; it is not just limited to displaying banner image advertisements.

You can learn how to use and configure the banners module in this tutorial.
Payment Schemes
Before we discuss the various advertising methods, we need to explain the payment schemes that the advertising methods tend to use.
Pay-Per-Impression
Your payments are based on how many impressions you display an advertisers’ banner for. An impression is a page view of the banner by a visitor to your website. Typically payments are calculated on a Cost-Per-Thousand impressions (CPM) basis ie. $5 CPM refers to $5 for 1000 displays of the banner. The higher the traffic on your website the more impressions you can generate and therefore the more advertisers you can display and create more income.

On very high traffic websites some webmasters use a pay per month method where you pay a set amount to advertise on the website for the month with a guaranteed minimum number of impressions.
Pay-Per-Click
You receive a payment each time an advertisement is clicked on. Payments for this can vary from a few cents to several dollars per click. The payment level depends on the niche and the consumer demand for the niche. Other factors that you need to take into consideration are your conversion level ie. How many times is an advertisement displayed before it receives a click? If you can generate a high CTR (Click-Through-Rate) and a high level of traffic you can generate a good source of income even from low paying pay-per-click advertisements.
Pay-Per-Lead
Here you receive a payment for any leads you send to the advertiser. The visitor to the advertisers’ website may have to supply their email address and sign up to an email newsletter before you receive a payment.

You need to bear in mind that this may involve two steps. The first is the conversion of the visitor clicking on the advertisement on your website and the second is the conversion of the visitor on the advertisers’ website signing up to the newsletter.

This type of income may receive fewer conversions than pay per click, but the payments per lead tend to be higher, so you can potentially earn a higher income than Pay-Per-Click.
Pay-Per-Sale
Potentially this method has the lowest conversion rate, but if the advertisers are carefully targeted to the niche topic of your website you could receive a large income. An example of this is the affiliate marketers that earn millions each year from selling other peoples products. In this method you only receive a payment when a visitor to your website purchases a product from your advertiser.
Payments
If you are implementing Pay-Per-Impressions advertising you can request payment for the advertisement up front before you allow the advertisement to be displayed on your website. For all of the other methods, payment tends to be held back until you have accumulated on average $100 in clicks / leads / sales. Also make sure that you double check how soon they make a payment after you reach the minimum payment level. Some programmes may wait 30 days until they pay you. This is important to check for the cashflow of your business.
Tip
If there is one tip I can pass on it is this. Test the advertisement method for a month and if it is not making enough money, analyze why:

* Do you need to increase the conversion rate?
* Do you need to increase the traffic?
* Is the advertisement suitable for your niche market?

Several years ago, I learnt a lesson the hard way. In the first year of creating a website directory, all of the advertising was based on the pay per sale method. The traffic on the website was high, the click through rate on the banner ads was good, but the sale conversion was very low (the products were not close enough to my niche). I made less than $100 in a year which I never received because the minimum payment was $100. I then switched to pay-per-click and pay-per-impression and made several hundred dollars in the first month! I realised I had literally lost thousands of dollars over that year from not testing and analyzing the advertising methods.

The DotNetNuke banners module allows you to rotate between ads that use the various payment methods, so you can easily setup and analyse the conversion rate of several advertising methods at once and avoid the mistakes I made.

As a starting point I would suggest that you try each of the payment methods and analyze which ones provide you with the most income for your website.

Note: I have had successes with Pay-Per-Sale; you just need to ensure that the advertisements are very close to your website market niche and that the visitors to your website are willing to buy products.
Advertisement Methods
You have several options available for advertising within your DotNetNuke portal. They can be split into two groups, image based advertisements and text based advertisements.

The DotNetNuke Banners module advantage
The DotNetNuke banners module can display a combination of these different advertisement methods at the same time and rotate between the various advertisements.

For instance if you have an advertising space available on the right hand column of your pages, you could display within the same column, a text ad, a Google Adsense ad and another text ad. With the next refresh of the page this could switch to a skyscraper ad and two text ads. You can learn these advanced configuration techniques in this tutorial.

This has the advantage that the position of the advertisements and the type of advertisement is always changing, which should help to grab the attention of a visitor and avoid 'ad blindness.'

Email Newsletter advertisements
If you send a regular newsletter, you could include advertisements within the email. But, make sure that your recipients have opted-in to the email as they could become very annoyed if you send emails trying to sell them products. Here you can learn about the Email Newsletters module.
Programmes
We have covered the various payment methods and advertising methods, the next step is to find advertisers for your website and this is actually not as hard as it may sound.
DIY - Do It Yourself
Probably the first advertising method to appear on the internet and the hardest if you are just launching your website. This involves approaching companies that provide products or services that complement the niche of your website. In most cases you will need to provide a PDF document outlining the cost structure for advertising, the niche market, and the number of visitors / page views you receive on average each month for your website.

Make sure you include a ‘Terms of Use’ document in-case any problems occur with the advertiser and also create a page within your website informing visitors that you offer advertising. (You could combine this with a banner advertisement that states ‘Would you like to advertise here?’).

If your website is already established with a high amount of traffic, you may find that advertisers contact you to advertise on your website.

Payment method: Pay-Per-Impression and Pay-Per-Month are typical for this type of advertising.

Advertising method: All banner types, text advertisements and even email newsletter advertisements are suitable for the DIY approach. You can charge varying amounts for the banner types and position of the banner on the page.
Advertisements for content
This is one of the popular and easiest methods for creating an income from your website. It also requires no maintenance as everything is automated.

The most popular programme for this is Google Adsense. All you have to do is sign up to Google Adsense and add the short Javascript code to your DotNetNuke Banners module.

This will display advertisements directly related to the content of your page meaning you have very specific advertisements related to the niche topic of your website.

Payment method: Pay-Per-Click

Advertising method: Text ads are mainly used, but banner image ads can also be displayed. You have the option for configuring the layout of the text ads into various banner sizes.

I would recommend you view An Introduction to Google Adsense followed by this video tutorial, which walks you through how to incorporate Adsense with DotNetNuke. This is recommended over just using the Banners module for displaying Google Ads to increase your click-through-rate and profits.

Here is a selection of programmes that are worth experimenting with:

BidVertiser

Yahoo Network
Affiliate advertising
Here you operate as an affiliate to another company. In most cases you register with the company as an affiliate through their website. Some affiliate programmes require that you have a website and sometimes a minimum amount of traffic. The company will decide whether or not to approve or reject your application as an affiliate; generally this is based on the content of your website. Once approved, you will have access to the affiliates section of their website which will provide you with:

Your affiliate id – Place this id in the advertisement URL link. This id is used to track the click-throughs from your website.

Advertisements – Banner ads, Text ads, Email content etc. If it is a good affiliate programme they should supply you with a large selection of advertising content to choose from. You can place these advertisements in the DotNetNuke Banners module along with your affiliate link.

Tracking Reports and Stats – A good affiliate programme will allow you to view the number of click-throughs / conversions / sales / leads that you have made along with the amount of money you have earned.

Extras – Support, tips, help, forum, pricing structure benefits for users that generate a high number of sales etc. All of these help to provide a good affiliate programme.

Payment method: Usually Cost-Per-Sale and Cost-Per-Lead, some programmes will provide Cost-Per-Click.

Advertising method: All methods can be used, image, text and email advertisements. You can also incorporate links to affiliate programmes directly within the content of your website. For instance, if you are writing a book review, you could include an affiliate link to amazon.com for the visitor of your website to buy the book.