If you want to make money online, you probably will do it by owning your own website. Most of all, I believe your success will be determined by how well you monetize your website. By that, I am referring to how much money you make per visitor on average.

If you do not gain enough revenue per visitor, it will not be worth the costs it takes you to run your website and attract visitors. If you gain enough revenue per visitor, then you will easily be able to make your website even more and more successful by continuing to invest more and more in gaining visitors.

In other words, you will only be successful if you can make more money per visitor than you spend on marketing per visitor.

Measuring how much you make per visitor is not that hard. If you are selling products, then it will depend on your conversion rates. For example, if you sell a $10.00 product, which 1 in 10 of your visitors purchase (giving you a conversion rate of 10%), then you will be making $1.00 per visitor on average (minus the cost per visitor it takes you to run your website). Thus, as long as you spend less than $1.00 on marketing per visitor on average, you would make money.

You will incur some basic costs, such as web hosting and content-generation. Those costs will be less per visitor when you have more visitors. Nonetheless, mainly your cost per visitor will be determined by how much you spend on advertising or special marketing campaigns in comparison to how much visitors they bring in.

The better your website or product is, the more effective advertising will be.

Monetization is perhaps the biggest variable. You simply will not be able to afford to market or advertise your website if it is not monetized well.

If you are selling products, you can help monetize your website better by having more popular products and by having a more effective sales-pitch. The best way to find better products and sales-pitches is to test different ones. If you monetize your website by publishing ads on them, then your click-through-rates will probably be the biggest factor in how well your website is monetized. But other factors come into play such as how much your advertisers pay you and the quality of your traffic.

I think the best way to improve your monetization is to make your website better. This influences everything else greatly. A better website will make your promotion more effective by getting people to stay on your website longer, come back more often, tell other people, etc. Generally, the goodness of a website is measured in how informative, resourceful and/or entertaining it is.

Consider this website, for example; you are here because this very blog post is informative and helpful. If you find it as useful as I believe it is, then you are much more likely to read other posts, to subscribe to my RSS feed, and to bookmark this website.

What do you think?