What is Monetization?
Internet Marketing Dictionary | Monetizing Your Site

Monetization is the process of turning your web traffic into cash. It includes generating income from direct sales, from advertising systems like AdSense, from affiliate sales or simply by getting people on your website to telephone or fax you and place orders.

Pure internet marketers tend to focus on automated systems of monetization so that once they have set things up, the money gets generated without further effort or work. You can do this quite readily provided you have acquired the skills necessary to generate targeted web traffic.

To maximise the monetization potential of any website requires a degree of testing because changes to systems and web page copy will have an impact on your average visitor value. If you start to measure the value of your traffic and identify where you lose people during a purchase process using Google Analytics for example, you can start to optimize the monetization capability of your website.

Classic ways of boosting monetization are to introduce autoresponders to generate repeat visitors, introducing and testing new web copy, offering downsells to people who reject offers and upsells to people who accept offers and buy from you. Autoresponders also allow you to increase your backend sales which are those you make to people who have bought from you in the past.