Alan asked for my advice as to how to monetize this new site, knowing that I have had success with Google Adsense.



First off, Alan needs to consider whether sales are his primary objective. If so, the addition of Adsense to the site, whilst bringing in extra income, might reduce potential sales.

Adding Adsense to his site would be a quick and easy way to make money. I suggested a horizontal Adsense link, just below the main navigation bar which runs across his index or home page. This would look natural and looks like part of the website navigation.

Also, the addition of a Google skyscraper unit on the right of his page would add value to the site, and also increase his income, but without detracting from his primary objective of sales.

Now, Alan is an expert on health, but not so good at search engine optimization. His heading for the page of "Simple health treatments by non-invasive electronic acupuncture" may explain what the page is about, but it isn't going to get him hordes of traffic from the search engines - no-one is looking for either "simple health treatments" or "non-invasive electronic acupuncture"! Zoom along to Overture and check out their keyword selector tool in the resource centre if you want to see just what it is that people are searching for.

I suggested to Alan that he look at which words which people were searching for. Although he is happy to buy traffic for the site, using the pay per click engines (e.g. Adwords and Overture). This makes it easy to get a top search engine ranking for particular words or phrases (known as keywords) but can prove an expensive way of getting traffic.

Improving his "natural" search engine rankings, so that people found his site when typing in the keywords, would reduce Alan's costs and increase his profit margins considerably.

This is relatively easy to do, and in fact I ran this for Alan myself using Wordtracker. This is a handy piece of software which allows you to look at the supply and demand of particular keywords and spot gaps in the market, also known as niches.

In this case, just one of the keywords which came up as in high demand but low supply was "pain management with acupuncture". Alan would do well to either use these keywords as part of his homepage or to create a new page with this title and heading, together with suitable webcopy.

By putting these keywords at the beginning and end of a new page of copy, very soon this will start to get ranked well by the search engines and receive visitors who arrive for free!

One other easy suggestion for Alan to implement, since he is also a writer, is to write a couple of articles on the subject of natural healing and acupuncture and to submit them to a few of the Article Directories, such as Ezine Articles and iSnare. This is a effective and natural way to get traffic to your site with minimum effort.

Watch out for your profit margins Alan - they'll be going way up - just as you implement these few simple changes!