When Should I Start Monetizing My Website?

I know of many bloggers who jump into blogging for the sole purpose of earning money off their blogs by buying lots of traffic to their site which has loads of annoying advertisements and little original or quality content on it. Well, I used to be one these guys. I had big dreams that one day I would be able to support my life entirely or partly on the earnings my cyber-endeavors made me. I still have these ambitious dreams, but I go about them in a slightly different way now. Last time I used to try and copy other blogs, pretending to be an expert on certain subjects whilst actually having no idea what I was talking about- in short, having a  mirror blog and trying to be someone I wasn’t. Now I’m taking an entirely different approach compared to last time. Nowadays, I don’t pretend about that I’m expert and instead give my honest opinion as a blogger.

So, to the question that bugs many new bloggers and webmasters, when should I start monetizing my website? Well, my opinion is that you shouldn’t be too concerned about how to monetize your website first and instead concentrate on getting some good quality content up into you website. I used to focus a lot on ways to monetizing my website without actually building up on my website, pretty soon I found out that it was just a big waste of my time. The logic in this is if your website doesn’t have quality content, what contextual advertising programs would want to accept your site, and that with the little visitors you get when you first start a site, what are the chances that they would actually click an advertisement? There is nothing wrong with researching and implementing ways to monetize your website when it has just started, but make sure you don’t make it a higher priority than writing original and quality content on your blog.

I used to be a monetizing freak, as in I would find out about all the contextual advertising systems around and apply to them to get my website accepted. At that time, my website was really a crappy site with little real or useful information, and all I thought about was how to monetize. I got rejected from most of the reputable ones and got accepted in the more shoddy ones. After implementing advertisements into my blog from contextual advertising programs that I had been accepted in, I found out that I had near zero traffic and had wasted my efforts when I should have concentrated on actually building up my blog.

The reason why you should be more concerned about writing good and quality content before you start worrying about the ins and outs of monetizing a blog is that with quality content you’ll automatically (of course some basic SEO’s and site promotion must be done!) have lots of pages indexed by searched engines and links in from other websites that find your content useful, and that would in turn bring in traffic and visitors. Once you have a certain number of traffic and visitors, then only you should monetize your site and reap your hard work.

In short - you should only start monetizng your site once you have good quality and consistent content on your website with reasonable traffic and not the other way round.

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