Monetizing Websites Related To Mobile Phones and Apps

I got an email from Mohan who runs a website related to mobile phones and applications. Mohan says he does not have much experience with websites and would like to know how he can monetize his website which is related to Mobile Phones and applications. The first thing I checked is the website’s traffic. Alexa says that the 70% of the website traffic is from India while 12.8% is from the US and 2.4% from UK. Now before everyone starts bashing me on how bad Alexa ranking is, let me tell you that Alexa might not be 100% correct but its data makes lot of sense. Using this data and planning advertising for your website can help you. You can always check your site visitors with other stats programs and compare it with Alexa. Your geographic traffic information showed on Alexa would be correct most of the times.

The first tip I would give to Mohan is to increase the website’s US and UK traffic. People in the US and UK convert a lot better than any other countries in terms of purchasing stuff online. More traffic from these countries means more revenue.

Below are the Advertising Options For a Mobile Phones Website:

ebay Partner Network – The biggest revenue generating ads for this site can be eBay. eBay has its partner network called EPN (eBay Partner Network) and using eBay ads can work very well on such websites. There are lot of plugins available which can display eBay ads on a wordpress blogs and PHPBay Pro is the best among all of them. The best thing about PHPBay Pro is that you can display eBay listings as per the visitors country. So if a person is from US he would get to see eBay listings in the US. Similarly, someone visiting from India would see listings from eBay India.  EPN is not as good as it was before but testing it with a site like this is highly recommended. Previously, eBay used to pay publishers for sales generated but now they have started paying for clicks. The pay per click income increases with the quality of customers referred. Quality is determined in terms of their activity on eBay, kind of shopping they do etc.

Amazon Associates - Generating money from Amazon Affiliate Program can be the second best option for this website. The commission on Amazon sales is less but it increases with the number of sales generated. Lot of people are comfortable shopping on websites like eBay and Amazon and hence these options should always be tried first. Not many people get success with eBay and Amazon but the ones who are successful with such programs, never look at any other programs as their commissions are huge.

CPA Ads – There are tons of CPA networks out there and I would recommend Mohan to sign up with at least 2-3 of them. These networks have lots of ringtones, quiz, free mobile phones offer which pay around $0.50 to $15 per lead. The zip and email submit offers do very well in the mobile phones market.

Email Marketing – One of the better options of making money with such websites is collecting email addresses of people and then sending them relevant offers. Mohan can sign up for AWeber Trial and see how it works out for him. I am sure that lot of people will sign up to receive new offers and information about cell phones and its applications. Email Marketing is a very good resource of income for such websites.

Sales via Dealers – Mohan can tie up with a local Mobile Phone dealer and sell mobile phones across the country. I have a close friend who does this with great success. The process is pretty simple but requires some backend work. This is how it works:

1. Take a list of Cell Phones and its prices from a local dealer.
2. Mohan can take care of the shipping or the dealer can do it for him.
3. List Cell Phones with prices (along with your profit) on the websites and take online orders.
4. Keep your margin and pay off the dealer.

These are the basic things to do. Mohan can also use this method to do arbitrage on eBay. This is how it works:

1. Get a list of Cell Phone rates as displayed on eBay.
2. Add shipping cost to that rate along with commission and display it on the website.
3. Once an order is placed through your website, buy the product from eBay and ship it to the buyer. Mohan can add his website name, remove the sellers name etc. before shipping it to his customer.

There are lot of other things to make sales offline and earn money. Stocking and buying phones in bulk from China is a very good option if you are planning to make it really big and long term.

Lets help Mohan by recommending some good options if you know. As you can see, I am not recommending any PPC options here. I am not a big fan of PPC ads like AdSense, AdBrite etc. Why do I say this? Because I love making Dollars and not Pennies.

If you have any questions or want to get your site reviewed for free then please send me the details using the contact form.