Passive Monetization Options For Public Domain Content

From:
The Desk of Damien Dupont

Before I started selling eBooks online, I used to think how expensive they were compared to print books. I would think "For $17 I can get a hardcopy print book, yet people are selling eBooks for $17, $27, $37 or more!?? What a rip off! (or a gravy train, depending which side of the transaction you're on)".

And then I started selling a few myself, and I began to realize why they are priced as they are. I thought they would be passive profit makers. After all, nothing to ship, fully automated and downloadable, right? Wrong! I found that the more downloadable products that I sold, the more time I was spending each day answering emails, be they pre or post-sale questions, or people losing the download page, or asking for a refund. If you are selling your own product, be it a downloadable ebook or software, or a physically shipped item, you are going to find that the more you sell, the more time you will spend in order processing and in answering emails.

I came to a point a couple of years ago where I was spending up to 3 or 4 hours a day just answering emails and doing customer service. This impacted significantly on my ability to focus time on putting in place new websites and income streams, and it also made me a slave to my PC. I couldn't take a proper break, and on my trip to Thailand in 2008, I spent 2-3 hours each day in an Internet Café. When I got to France (same trip), I had to decide which family members I was going to spend the most time with based on who was Internet connected (yes... some of my cousins were still not online in 2008... not even dial-up!). That's certainly not the freedom I had dreamed of when I started out online in 2003.

So you have a choice... hire a customer service person or change your business model. Owing to the variety of ebooks and software that I was selling, the former wasn't going to be easy for me. Only I really knew the answers to many of the questions and issues, so creating training material for a support person would have been a big task. So instead, I've modified my business model. If I want to take a break somewhere, I still have to take my laptop and hook up to WiFi or find an Internet Café daily, but my 'customer support' time commitment is less than it was, and I hope to reduce it further.

If you've read the previous articles in this auto-responder series (this is article eight in the series), you'll note that each page has Google AdSense ads inserted as well as my affiliate links to the products I talk about in the case studies. This is part of my shift towards more passive income. Most marketers wouldn't dream of doing this in an auto-responder series who's main purpose is to sell the product at hand, because it dilutes the primary focus. But it's a question of priorities, and for me, passive income has become a priority.

The greater the number of web-pages that I get online with my AdSense and affiliate links in them, the greater the percentage of my income that I generate on auto-pilot. And the public domain is an unparalleled source of free quality content for this purpose.

Developing passive profits with public domain content is the focus of Module 6 of the Public Domain How To course, and in this module Russell Brunson delves into topics such as:

My preview/review article on this module turned out longer than I had planned, so I have split it into two separate articles. For starters, let's look at our options for...

Passive Forms of Monetization

There are three main categories of passive income streams which you can embed within content pages on the web:

1. Contextual Pay-per-Click ads: This is the easiest form of monetization because all you need to do is drop some code into your webpage for ads to automatically display that will be relevant to the context (topic) of your webpage.

Google AdSense is the most common example of contextual ads. Yahoo! Publisher Network (YPN) is another, and then there are a plethora of smaller players like AdBrite, Chitika and Kontera amongst many others.

AdSense, YPN and Chitika will display ad blocks of different sizes (which you choose) at the locations on your page where you place the ad code. AdBrite and Kontera allow for inline page links, in that they will hyperlink certain words within the text on your webpage, and when a visitor mouses-over the hyperlink, an ad will appear that you will get paid on if the visitor decides to click it.

Google AdSense has remained number one however as it generally offers the highest level of payout per click and is available in many countries. YPN is (at the time of writing) still only accepting publishers in a few countries outside the U.S., namely Canada and the UK, and they are quite picky about which applicants/websites they accept into the network.

If you're outside of the U.S., and depending on your country of residence and where most of your web-traffic comes from, the smaller players can be not so good an option due to the limited number of ads available, or their non-availability in your country.

Advantages of Contextual ads: Ease of implementation. Set & forget. No need to update your ad code.

Disadvantages of Contextual ads: Besides the limitations mentioned above if you are not U.S. based, the main disadvantage is reliance on a single source for your income. Google can close your account at their discretion, and will provide no other explanation than refer you to their terms of service if you contact them to ask "Why?". Whilst this is not a common occurrence, this has and does happen to a small percentage of publishers.

2. CPA (Cost Per Action) advertising networks: Again there are a plethora of companies with a wide variety of advertisers in each network which you can select CPA ads from. As at 2010, some of the main CPA networks are CJ.com (Commission Junction), Azoogle Ads, and LinkShare amongst others.

As the name implies, with Cost Per Action ads you will get paid if the visitor performs a specific action after clicking the ad, such as submitting their details into a lead capture webform, or purchasing a product.

Advantages of CPA ads: Because advertisers only pay when a pre-defined action is performed (as opposed to paying per click), there is a much lower incidence of fraud, and so it is unlikely you will ever suffer an account closure. One exception is if you have little activity on your account. I believe CJ will close your account if no sale or lead capture has occurred over a six month period, and some other networks may have similar policies.

Disadvantages of CPA ads: Implementing CPA ads on your webpages takes more work than contextual ads, because you have to find advertisers with offers that are relevant to your content, apply to their program, and once approved implement the code for that advertiser on your webpage (as opposed to contextual ads where the code is always the same).

Further, unlike contextual ppc ads, advertisers within a CPA network will often at some point drop out of the network, change their terms of service, or cease their ad campaign, which necessitates you going back to your webpage to update code with another advertiser.

So whilst CPA ads can provide passive income from the standpoint that you won't have to do any customer service for money to be deposited into your account each month, my experience is that they are not an ideal passive income form due to the need to revisit your pages to update code and advertisers over time. If you have a lot of content pages, this becomes difficult to manage and you may just have to accept that over time you'll have pages out there with dead links on them.

3. Affiliate Networks: Whereas the CPA networks mainly provide an affiliate marketplace for corporate customers, affiliate networks like ClickBank and PayDotCom (amongst others) provide a market place and affiliate tracking for products from individuals and small businesses, although there is some cross-over with sites like ClixGalore that cater to both.

ClickBank is the largest affiliate marketplace, with an extremely wide variety of downloadable products that you can promote and earn anywhere from 25% to 75% of the purchase price as a commission. ClickBank have a good reputation and are very reliable, but their market place only offers downloadable ebooks or software on a pay per sale basis.

PayDotCom cater to both downloadable as well as physically shipped products, but unlike ClickBank, they are not a merchant and will not process the customer's credit card. This means PayDotCom works solely with PayPal, and whereas ClickBank pay you for all your affiliate sales, with PayDotCom it is the individual merchants who are responsible for paying your affiliate commissions. This does make for a somewhat less affiliate friendly and less hands-free option, as sometimes you will have to contact the vendor to prompt them to pay you your commissions. And in one case in my experience, the vendor never did answer or pay me (although I did report him to PayDotCom who then suspended his account).

Advantages of affiliate networks: Ease of use & wide variety of programs available to promote that cater to all kinds of niches. High percentage payouts, typically 40% to 60% of sale price, but up to 75%. Unlike CPA networks, generally no need to "apply" to promote a program. Just grab your affiliate link and start promoting.

Disadvantages of affiliate networks: Need to update your links if/when the product you're promoting becomes discontinued or switches to a different payment processor. Whereas CPA Networks will generally send you an email to notify you when a program you are promoting becomes inactive, with affiliate networks you generally receive no notification.

As the number of affiliate programs that you are promoting increases, it becomes difficult to keep checking that they all remain active (unless you're super organized!), so you can expect that some of your affiliate links will die over time.

Of course being organized is not too difficult. For example, you can create a single webpage on your hard-drive and each time you start to promote a new program, add the link to your page including a note of where you are using it. Then, it will just be a matter of, once a month or so, clicking on all the affiliate links in your webpage to see if they are all still working. I wish I'd thought of this seven years ago!

The above article is my introduction to the subject matter covered in Module 6 (Developing Passive Profits) of Russell Brunson's Public Domain How To course. The second article is a preview of the topics Russell covers in module 6, and can be found here: How To Create Passive Profits From Public Domain Content.

There are a further five modules covering the remainder of Russell Brunson's Public Domain How To system, more than 11 hours of audio content in all, accompanied by transcripts and a workbook. For a preview of the content contained within all six modules of Public Domain How To, subscribe to our e-course below.

Warmly,

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