What are your visitors thinking? Ideally, they are thinking what you tell them to, and if you’re in the online game to make money, it is in your best interest to encourage them to buy something. Regardless of the type of site you run, converting visitors to do the thing that you want them to do – the thing that you’ve been working so hard to get them to do – is what makes your website successful.

Many websites are designed for the user first, and profitability second, which is perfectly acceptable if you aren’t in it for profit. Twitter remains unmonetized, Bing still isn’t turning a profit, and Digg just recently took serious action to levy their regular losses. Facebook… poor Facebook… isn’t monetized very well, in my opinion, despite their millions of users. I, a small time blogger, certainly have no place telling these well-funded, well-managed organizations how to model their businesses, but if it were me, I’d pay more attention to my typical user’s mindset.

As a DiggDigg user, I’m there to submit, read and comment on trendy, strange, funny and outrageous news. Converting me to a buyer of something is going to be difficult by the very nature of why I’m on Digg. Unless you’re trying to convince me to buy something related to news, you will be hard pressed to make anything off my visit.

As a Twitter user, I’m there to … market my own content (ha)… I mean, communicate with other Twitter users. The content of my communications could be used to gage my interest in various consumables, but to me, the value of Twitter lies in communication. I might buy an iPhone through a link I clicked through on Twitter, not just because iPhones are cool, but because I can use it to Tweet. As a marketer (which the plurality of Twitter users are), I might pay a little extra for some Twitter analytics tools, or more Twitter exposure.

I could go on about Facebook, and how they’ve failed to capitalize on targeting their own Groups and Pages as relevance factors for placing contextual advertisements, but I won’t. Oh wait, I just did. Sorry, it won’t happen again.

Realizing that the vast majority of you are concerned with monetizing your blogs, I would like appeal you to throw in some e-commerce. Why not sell related products from your blog as a way to monetize efficiently, even without a huge reader-base? Running an e-commerce section on your website can also serve to drive traffic to your blog from external comparison shopping engines like Google Product Search, Shopzilla, Price Runner and others. Just a thought. Instead of relying on your users to click on ads or convert on affiliate landing pages, monetize directly and sell your own products. There are many options: books, ebooks (hopefully not crap), CDs, DVDs, hats & T-shirts related to your content, electronics, software or any other product of mutual interest. Bloggers, try not to get so functionally fixed into thinking that traffic and readers are the end-all, be-all. Go for the jugular and monetize directly with some of your own products. Remember, inbound traffic from Google Adwords campaigns or comparison shopping engines means that those visitors are already in a “buy something” mindset, more likely to convert than casual blog readers.