Your Mother Was Right. Why listening to your Mother will make you more money online.

Scott Trimble Halfagain.com
Table of Contents
A nasty dose of reality .............................................3
9 reasons your website is losing money ....................4
The rules of website monetization..............................5
Waste not, want not.................................................7
On-site monetization................................................8
Affiliate marketing how/why.......................................9
The solution............................................................10
7 reasons................................................................11
A new era of monetization........................................13

My name is Scott Trimble and my mother, like many, likes to dispense unsolicited advice. 'Don't cry over spilled milk.' 'If everyone jumped into a well, would you jump too?' 'If you don't have something nice to say, don't say anything at all.'
When I was a kid, her habitual advising drove me nuts as these cliches usually came at the times I least wanted them. As I grew though, I learned to appreciate it. Even now, busying myself with day to day tasks, her voice will creep up on me and deliver some, forgotten motherly truism. And sometimes, it can actually be pretty helpful.
A while back, my mother's advice (from 20 years prior) and my online business collided...
The collision.
I have a number of websites, many of which are monetized primarily with affiliate products/offers. I happened to be looking at a few of my websites' statistics and was pretty unhappy with what I saw. From website to website, the story was the same. I asked my partners if they noticed the same trend with their own affiliate sites and they concurred. I then started asking more website owners and the story was the same with them also. I found that this 'problem' was practically a universal. If you currently have a website, you'll undoubtedly recognize it also...
A nasty dose of reality.
Most people that come to my site (and likely yours also):
- leave quickly. - don't buy anything through my affiliate links. - don't click my pay-per-click ads. - don't find what they're looking for. - don't come back. - don't do anything more than burn my bandwidth.
Now, don't get me wrong - these sites are generating revenue. They're making some sales, getting some clicks and garnering some page views for the ads I run. However, the problem here is 'some'. Some, at least in my book, doesn't cut it.
After mulling over this dilemma, the words of my mother came echoing back to me from the past. I was about 8 years old and had poised myself over the kitchen trash can, readying to dump half of my dinner into the garbage. My mother, who'd become wise to my ways, snuck up behind me and roared STOP! I froze like a deer in the headlights. She proceeded to lecture me on the cost of food, how hard she and my father worked to put it on the table and
the perils of wastefulness. She ended, with the timeless expression that brought us here. "Waste not, want not."
20 years later, it was like my mother leaped out of my computer, pointed at my website stats and exclaimed "You're wasting all of this valuable traffic. There are starving people in (name your favorite impoverished place) that would give anything for this traffic!"
And it occurred to me that I AM wasting a lot of valuable traffic. As I mentioned above, most of it leaves these sites without doing ANYTHING. No clicks, no purchases. Warm blooded bodies with a credit card in their pocket are asking me to give them a reason to buy something and I'm not doing it.
I'm not alone.
Unfortunately, this is the story for MOST sites out there and the response is is generally pretty apathetic. Most website owners simply roll over and take this 'traffic waste' as the status quo. Most of their traffic doesn't convert to anything, so the answer is to get more traffic to make up for it.
But this logic is all wrong. And shortly after realizing this and brainstorming with my 2 partners, the solution presented itself. A simple change that any website can make, that ultimately has a dramatic effect on sales and revenue. ALL done with the same website and the SAME traffic. No new traffic acquisition. No messing with search engine optimization, link campaigns for advertising. A stupidly simple, but as testing has shown, incredibly powerful 'tweak' that makes the website owner more money, with what they already have.
But I'm getting a little ahead of myself. I digress…
What if you don't even have a website yet?
Maybe this is all Greek to you. You may not even have a website yet. In that case, check out the list under "A nasty dose of reality" again. As things currently stand (if you're doing things the way everyone else is) this is the future you have to look forward to.
Poor website monetization is a huge (to put it lightly) problem on the web. Sure, getting traffic can be a pain in the butt, but making the most of this traffic seems to be the REAL stumbling block to many websites.
So, let's first look at your current standing and what's wrong with it…
The 9 reasons your website is losing money:
Here are the 9 reasons people are leaving your site without making you any money: