Running a website continually consumes your time, effort, patience, and money. Monetizing your website is the only way left besides selling your products/services to ensure that you get payback for what you’ve invested in it.
Making money out of your website is no longer an unachievable goal. If you look around, you’ll see a lot of bloggers and influencers making money from the internet. Most of you reading this article must be already having a website and running it considerably well. In this article, we’ll be discussing 11 smarts ways to help you monetize your website. Read on to find them out.
Before you start, we just want you to know that we have got an expert team of web developers to help you out if you need any assistance.
1. Affiliate Marketing
One easy and quick way to monetize your website or blog is to do affiliate marketing. For every referral you make to another business, you’ll be able to earn a commission. The process is simple, you provide companies/brands with a space to promote their products and in turn, they give you a percentage of their sales income.
The key aspect to consider in affiliate marketing is to promote products that your viewers would be interested in based on the content they’re used to seeing on your page. Find a product that you as a company/brand relate to and would prefer to endorse. And do not promote anything to everything without testing the product or checking its reviews just for the sake of marketing.
For example, if your website deals with educational content, your page visitors would expect to see an e-learning course being affiliate marketed over a gadget ad. Similarly, if a fashion blogger’s website endorses a particular product, the page visitors are most likely to buy that product through the link provided on the website.
2. Sell Digital Products
The one approach to monetize websites without involving any middle man in between you and the buyer (that’s taking a ‘cut’ from the money earned) is to sell your own resources such as ebooks, audiobooks, PDF guides, courses, and more.
Create ebooks and audiobooks that are foolproof, use proper and effective language, transcribe them to audio if possible, design a cover for it, and more. Ensuring these will turn your resources worth the money. And once this is done, attach them with a price tag.
One advantage of selling such resources is that it doesn’t require you to invest time in continuous content creation work. Once you’ve created the content, the only effort you need put in is for promoting it to your audience and new readers. Since it’s a one-time investment, you’ll need to invest both time and money to make it worth monetizing.
Another bonus point about selling such resources is that you don’t need to ship any products or keep track of your inventory, instead just upload the files to your site and then sell.
If you find it difficult to create content or if you lack time to curate content, you can always go for repurposing your old content. For example, you can combine some of your best blog posts and combine them into an ebook or an audiobook.
Start selling online courses. If you have expertise in a topic, and if you’re fairly comfortable in front of a camera, creating an online course can be done effortlessly. Or if the skill you offer to teach has a high potential to be monetized, and if you’re not confident about pulling it off nicely, hire a person who can get this work done for you. Since this is a recurring source of income, you’ll not regret paying a narrator (and that too once for recording the entire course).
3. PPC Advertising using AdSense
Google AdSense allows websites to tap into Google’s immense advertising network so that other advertisers can run ads on their website. The process is simple, place a simple code on your website after you sign up. This code will identify the content of your site and start displaying relevant advertisements. For example, if your website deals with baking & its recipes, Google AdSense will start showing your visitors ads for baking supplies such as baking molds & tins, different types of flours, and more.
Also, AdSense chooses ads based on the browsing history of the person on your site. For example, suppose a person visited Amazon, an Amazon ad might be automatically displayed to that person.
If you consider affiliate marketing, it can consume a good amount of time. Using a pay-per-click ad saves you from hunting for products to promote, ways to promote them, and answer questions from your audience about them. In this approach, the actual sale doesn’t necessarily have to happen, instead, you’ll receive a return when people click on an ad. And all you have to ensure is to have a website with enough traffic.
Such PPC advertising saves your time and effort from seeking out specific ads that relate to your website since these third party companies do all of that work for you. You need to consider Google’s terms of service, you shouldn’t break it by persuading your readers to click on the link just to boost your income. You may check out their terms of service to ensure if it fits your website since Google will close your account if you’re not following their guidelines.
4. Sell on Ad Space
Like the way, Google’s AdSense proved beneficial while monetizing websites, you can make money from online advertisements by directly selling your own ad space to companies looking to sponsor different blogs. You can also be specific by fixing a price for each space, for example, charging $30 for a sidebar banner ad.
One big advantage of using ad space is that you get paid depending on the number of visitors you get. Imagine if your site gets a ton of traffic from different sources, your simple banner ad could fetch you a whole lot of money.
Consider making a presentation to the advertisers upfront so that they know if your site is appropriate for what they’re trying to sell. Conduct surveys and questionnaires amongst the people who access your site to get more specific information about your traffic. You can use this data and approach your advertisers, along with your traffic statistics, and the content of your site. This helps advertisers who need information about the demographics of the people who come to your site. While you make the presentation, remember to include information on how exactly their ads will be displayed on your page. Also, craft it such that it meets the expectations of the specific client you hope to obtain.
5. Accept Donations
Accepting donations from your readers is no shame. Your website could be consistently coming up with quality content but may not be driving a ton of traffic. You can ask your small, but, at the same time, strong and engaged audience to support you.
Be honest with your website content consumers, tell them about the tremendous effort you’ve put in to present them with quality content, the time, money, and resources involved. And ask them to donate if they still want to see you survive in the internet midst of the competition thrown to you by similar content creators.
You require money for a good web hosting, new product creation, research, and more for maintaining an active blog without compromising on quality. These donations may not always bring you money instantly, but you can still count on this as a small source of income to run your website. You can place buttons for recurring sponsorship and one-off donations. You can include such buttons on your website to call your readers to take action. Companies like PayPal offer donation buttons that can be set up on websites with ease.
6. Publish Sponsored Posts and Product Reviews
Once you’ve optimized your website traffic with a highly engaged community, you can start publishing sponsored posts and product reviews. You can publish a post on a relevant topic with a link to the sponsor website (advertorials). For example, if your website talks about buildings and architecture, a building development company could approach you to talk about them, their upcoming projects, and ask people to contact them if they’re in search of such developers.
You may review one of the sponsor’s products in your article (sponsored reviews) on your website. For example, if your website discusses the latest technologies, you can post a review on gadgets offered by a particular company and get paid for it. Or you could even include their content in your email newsletter (newsletter sponsorship). These are a few of the sources that could help you easily monetize your website, provided you ask their consent prior, and start working on the ways to do it.
All you need to remember while publishing such content is to disclose the advertising relationship you share with the sponsors and mark all such content as “sponsored”. By doing this, you’re being honest with your website viewers, which will help you maintain them even if something goes wrong with the sponsored product.
It is ideal to feature sponsored content that relates to the niche your website is dealing with. Otherwise, it would look more unrealistic and will make your page visitors think that your website is more of an advertising board than a normal website.
7. Paid Email List
It is obvious that you’d have worked hard curating your newsletter and creating content for it. Now, you can ask your readers to support you for your effort. And most of them will be willing to do that. Your readers/subscribers know how valuable the content you provide is and that is the reason why they keep coming back to you.
You can start by converting strangers who visit your site for the first time into passionate followers, constantly serve them compelling & up-to-date content, and later ask them to convert to a paid reader. Although this is a long term strategy, it is one of the best methods to profitably grow your blog into a full-fledged, money-making enterprise.
Always remember to build relationships with your followers, by offering them valuable information instead of spamming them with unsolicited offers. Also, ensure that your paid email newsletter content is protected from public sharing using services like Revue or Substack.
8. Paid Membership Website
Starting a paid membership website is another smart way of generating income from your website. If you have an established website with a dedicated follower base, you can create a membership site that contains additional, valuable, and premium content. This is a reliable source of income since people are willing to pay for the extra value you provide.
Monetization can be done for private forums, discussion boards, members directory, masterminds, special discounts, and more. If your website is an educational website, you can add price tags to a bundle of courses, webinars, podcasts, and other educational resources. Similarly, if you see a potential in the resources you offer to the public, go ahead and make some money out of it.
You can add a membership portal to your business website by using plugins like MemberMouse. These plugins help to add gated content and members-only areas instantly.
Depending on the type of website, you can decide whether to charge monthly or yearly. But it is ideal to provide your website readers with a monthly plan so that they can gauge the difference between the paid and unpaid websites, and further choose the paid version for the future too.
Finally, remember to constantly create content that is useful and engaging to your paid website members, otherwise, they won’t be choosing you any further. Moreover, they pay you for your excellence and you will need to keep up with their expectations.
9. Generate Leads for Businesses
Leads are the ultimate aim of running any business. Businesses are always on the run for creative sources to collect leads for their products and services. In this approach, you act as an affiliate between two parties by trying to get leads for the company instead of persuading people to purchase it.
For example, suppose that your website revolves around easy math tricks and aptitude skills, you can collect the website users’ email address or phone number. This information collected by you can be turned to great value for different online schools who’re looking to sell their courses to eager, proactive students.
It is a fairly easy and smart approach to make money out of your website since you get paid per lead, and not per purchase. Similar to affiliate marketing, this also requires you to be honest and consistent in figuring out a way to incorporate lead links into your blog or email list even if your blog isn’t related to the affiliate product.
10. Set Up eCommerce Site, Dropshipping Store
Sometimes it’s hard to run websites that solely focus on content. And you don’t have to limit to just content, instead set up an eCommerce store to sell tools or products you offer.
Running an eCommerce website is one great way to monetize your website. Also, a successful eCommerce store doesn’t happen overnight, continuous effort and hard work are required to run an online store up-to-date. Since there are plenty of online stores already in business, you will need to identify a unique niche with a detailed strategy and the latest marketing techniques to stand out from others.
Use the help of any content management systems like Shopify or WooCommerce to effectively create and manage an eCommerce website. Or if you want any help in creating and running an eCommerce website, we’ve got a team of eCommerce experts to help you do it.
Although running an eCommerce business is a well-established approach to monetizing websites, a lot of you may not be ready to deal with the headache of inventory management, fulfillment, and shipping. And drop shipping is a method that saves you from these.
When you run a dropshipping store, your supplier keeps the stocks instead of you. Even completing the task of packaging the product with care to shipping it to the customer on time lies in the hands of the supplier. And you’d be the one working hard behind to keep those orders coming. To do your job perfectly, ensure that you set up a nice eCommerce storefront, rely on legit suppliers, and provide good customer service promptly. Additionally, invest in pay-per-click ads to promote your products, and further try out other ways to grow your store traffic.
11. Sell/Flip Websites
If you feel that you’re done with your website and want to try out something else, go ahead and sell your website! Yes, you heard it right. You can easily find buyers for your website if it managed to sell a few products or included advertising on it. You could charge a hefty price depending on the type of website, the worth of each ad space in it, the traffic it generated, and more.
Buyers look into factors like niche, monetization model, monthly revenue to expenses ratio, traffic, SEO metrics, conversions, and more. So, if you have expertise in building websites, incorporating affiliate marketing activity, ad space, memberships, eCommerce, or drop shipping in it, you can sell it and gain a lot of money out of it.
You can use websites like Flippa and We Buy Websites that make it easy to auction the website which you want to sell. If you have a Shopify online store, you can directly find a buyer in the Shopify exchange that connects website buyers and sellers.
The drawback of flipping websites is that you may not get what you think the site is worth, and the money you recoup gets influenced by factors like site traffic and ad possibilities irrespective of the work you’ve put in to set it up.
Conclusion
Your audience is the key to monetizing your website. Consider them, take good care of them, and most importantly, do not annoy them. You need to find ways to grow your readership and establish your reputation online.
Maintain your website in good condition, identify and fix broken links, page speed issues, website traffic concerns, user interface issues, and more.
In this article, we just discussed a few of the ways to effectively monetize your website. And you don’t have to try them all at once. Instead, try them one by one as your website expands.
If you still require any professional help, feel free to connect with us. We have a team of expert web developers to assist you.
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