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This is the first in a series of tips for Publishers on how to turn their content profitable. As everybody’s turning into an online publisher, the issue is progressively relevant. With millions of sites with original content ranging from entertainment to finance, many get in the way. Even with respectable traffic, most of these sites make little or no money.

The first step towards successfully monetizing content is to analyze visitor traffic. Within traffic statistics, an online publisher must look at certain patterns to see what’s working. Key traffic indicators to pay attention to are :

Site traffic and repeat visitors

The amount of unique visitors is of course the most important statistic to tell you who’s visiting your site, but it tells only part of the story. Important is also the percentage of people who are actually returning, and hence become repeat visitors. If a site has only 10000 visitors, but 9000 are always coming back, it means your content is attractive enough to keep people there.

Page Views

Page Views tell you what part of the content on your site is most popular. If a certain page is getting more views than others, it is an explicit sign which content is of more interest to your viewers. Page Views also tell you which pages are looked at when users just stop by.

The actual time spent on your site ( Stickiness )

Another important statistic is the time users spend on your site. Average time depends on the type of content as well, but if a visitor spends less than a minute on your site, it’s safe to say the person is not enjoying his stay. If a visitor spends a lot of time on your site, however, this can also mean the person isn’t finding what he or she is looking for, due to confusing content or layout for example. Site stickiness is an important and much discussed statistic, and can be interpreted in several ways.

The origin of traffic

One of the most important statistics about site traffic is where it emanated from. Finding out where your traffic comes from is something any online publisher should be doing all the time. The usual places generating incoming traffic are :

Organic search – Your site pops up in a simple search engine result list.
Paid Search – Your site gets listed above or next to the organic search results, because you paid the search engine to do so.
Links from other sites or blogs – Blogs and news sites are becoming more and more prolific. Blog visitors are finding new places to dive into the net, through links in articles or recommendations on the side of their favourite blogs.
Paid banner – People end up at your site after they clicked a banner advertisement you paid to display on a related website.
E-mail – You can also pay for a spot in push newsletters sent to subscribers who deliberately opt-in to receive.

Which method works best can only be defined by trial and error. A publisher has to try a number of combinations of ways to promote his site. It is then up to the publisher to define which means generated which percentage of incoming traffic.