Monetizing or Making Money from 404 Pages

I’ll have to admit it, I got a little bored with the translation plugin for wordpress. Whilst I now have over 2,650 pages indexed in Google I’m seeing a drop in rankings for certain terms due to dilution of my ranking power throughout the pages. I’m also for the first time seeing some supplemental results.

Then finally due to the large number of pages, my posts are taking much longer to make the main index because the Google Spiders are busy chewing up all the japanese or italian content that makes no sense.

Don’t get me wrong, I did see a traffic increase of about 200% & I did see an increase in revenue but I think I’ve reached the point now where I’m over it & I want all my main posts in the main index again.

Anyway, since I removed the plugin it’s going to leave me with a heap of pages that don’t exist anymore. This means anyone visiting one of the indexed pages will get thrown a 404 error. I’m going to talk briefly about how you can actually take advantage of these 404’s & generate a bit of extra revenue.

A 404 is an error page that gets shown when a page doesn’t exist. A 403 is similar except it shows up when you don’t have permission to view a certain page or part of a site. MOST people don’t take advantage of these error pages as an additional source of income. This post is going to show you how you can.

Firstly you need to create a 404 page. This can be any of static html page. If you’re using wordpress you’ll notice a file called 404.php in wp-content/themes/default/. That’s your 404 error page.

Simply fill that with any content that you wish, Adsense, other offers, & whenever an error is shown the visitor will get shown that page & potentially earn you some revenue. Placing Adsense on 404 pages used be against the TOS but you’re allowed to now If you are concerned just pop them an email for clarification.

Whilst the above is a fairly simple method you can also add rules in your .htaccess file in the root of your domain to redirect to wherever you wish.

For example I can redirect 403’s & 404’s to to Agloco if I wish by using the following statements:

ErrorDocument 403 http://www.earnersblog.com/url/agloco.php

ErrorDocument 404 http://www.earnersblog.com/url/agloco.php

Now anyone that gets either of those errors is redirected to Agloco & potentially could sign up, how cool would it be getting a signup from someone who was potentially trying a view a part of your site they weren’t supposed to be? The more targeted you are with your redirecting the more conversions you’ll also be able to achieve. I’ll be touching more on this in a later post.

If you didn’t want to monetize the visitor & would prefer to redirect them to the homepage or perhaps your feed signup page you could do that too with the above statements.