Monetizing websites and/or youtube / SEO

[TaintedAndDelish]

I've been thinking about taking a shot at setting up some websites for ad revenue. I tried a few in the past and quickly realized how little traffic you can get when you post something that nobody is interested in. It's humbling to say the least. Anyway, I'm up for trying it again, but this time I'm planning on throwing a little money at it if needed and putting in a little more elbow grease. I have the time to develop and write content, but don't want to waste time on something that turns out to be unproductive.

I have a ton of questions about doing this, and am hoping/suspecting that there may be others on E who do this and do it fairly well.  Any advice ya'll have would be greatly appreciated. Also, I'm posting a bunch of questions below to help crack the ice.

Thanks,
Taint

Questions:

* Is there still money to be made in monetized websites and youtube, or has the increased use of ad blockers destroyed this game?

* How do you get started? Getting that first one way link ( from another site to yours ) seems to be a bit of a pain in the ass. At least, it used to be that there was a link count or something like that ( page count?)  associated with each page as a part of google's scoring system.

* Has anyone found that pages on personal, paid for domains score higher than pages on public domains like blogspot.com or other sites that basically offer free hosting?

* As for learning search engine optimization, I've watched most of the videos by Matt Cutts ( a few years ago, that is ). I'm wondering if there are any other known good resources for learning SEO. ( There's a lot of web pages out there claiming to be able to teach you SEO, but I'm looking for credible sources )

[AmberStarfire]

I can't answer most of your questions because I don't even know how you would monetize Youtube, but there's something I've noticed people doing the last few days.

I've been advertising my books all over the place trying to sell copies, and I've noticed that on some of the large Facebook groups, people will link to the likes of Fiverr.com. I just paid for a gig to list my book (a pinned post with links) at the top of a Facebook group with 112k or more people. It may be a waste of money as I post in a lot of groups already, but that seems to be a type of service people offer for promotions. Others go around posting in lots of groups in exchange for a fee or mass email people (which I wouldn't want).

There are some people who advertise on fiverr to list a link/banner ad on their site (which has so many hits per month) but I've checked out some of their sites and the last one was mostly advertising. It was flashing on the screen and everything. Some people generate false hits/page views on their site to get that 'highly viewed' number I think, because I've seen someone advertising that (on Elliquiy in the commissions thread).

I've heard if one was to set up a Facebook e-book page, especially a generic one, people can sign up very (crazily) quickly. Combine it with twitter, and you might make money off it.

[Oniya]

I can't answer most of your questions because I don't even know how you would monetize Youtube, but there's something I've noticed people doing the last few days.

Monetizing YouTube videos usually means allowing companies to run 'commercials' before (and sometimes during) the video.  Presumably, the account owner gets a small amount of money for every ad that is played through.  (This is why I will let the ads play out 99.9% of the time.  The 0.1% is for the '30 minute "ad" on a 6 minute video' situation, or certain ads that I find particularly distasteful, like that vapid ad campaign for Poise pads.)

More and more YouTubers/livestreamers are also incorporating Patreon, which is a donation system where fans can contribute either one-time or subscription-type donations to support 'content creation'.  Elliquiy uses Patreon as one of its revenue sources, if you wanted another example.

[TaintedAndDelish]

Part of the contract for advertising with adwords ( youtube's ad service ) is that you don't disclose how much they pay. The amount varies also depending on what demographic your content appeals to and whether or not your content/audience is appealing advertisers.

I found a few sources that discussed setting up your user profile on high quality sites ( like Pinterest, Facebook, Twitter, etc ) so that it points to your website, then interacting with that site heavily ( ie. liking, pinning, friending etc.. ). The idea is to more links from sites like these pointing to your website.

Anyway, there are lots of opinions and get rich resources on line who's credibility is questionable.  I suppose a big part of this is just experimenting and seeing what works.