Now it's time to make all your hard work pay off!
Depending on your niche, you have a variety of options to explore for making your site earn money. It's a good idea to test and track the strategies you try, so you'll know which are the most profitable for you.
One approach to avoid is stuffing your site with a visual overload of display ads, banners, AdSense, etc. That doesn't give people the impression of a high-quality authority site, and it isn't usually a very effective earning strategy.
Instead, focus on a tasteful amount of monetization that's tightly targeted to the content of your site.
Also, some of the most profitable ways to monetize your Authority Site are memberships, selling advertising space, and creating your own products.
The more choices you give people, the less likely they are to choose any of them.
Your visitors want you to gently guide them to the next logical step, not confuse them with choices.
So if you want visitors to click on your monetization (affiliate links, AdSense, infoproducts, or whatever), don't present them with a smorgasbord of options to choose from.
For example, in a skiing article, don't present your reader with five different affiliate links for various pairs of skis and expect them to visit each link, compare all the skis on their own, choose one, and then buy it through your affiliate link.
Instead, you should evaluate all of the skis ahead of time for your readers, and choose the one best pair of skis for the content of your article. Then link to just that one product in your article. Explain to your readers why that's the best pair of skis. Assist your visitors by giving them an obvious solution - a sense of “the research is already done for you, this is the best option, and here's why.” You'll have a much better conversion rate.
Or if AdSense is your main monetization for the page, don't offer all kinds of other product links. When faced with too many things to look at and choose from, visitors simply opt out of choosing anything by clicking on the “back” button.
Simplify things for your visitors. Make their lives easier. Gently guide them to the next action.
On each page of your site, decide what's the single most important thing for your visitor to do (sign up for your newsletter, download a free PDF, click on AdSense, go to your ebook sales page, or whatever), and make that the obvious next step for them to take - with no decision-making required!