While navigating on the internet, you will find lots of different advertisements and offers on most of the websites you visit. By clicking or purchasing products or services through ads, someone will earn a commission. You can also make money easily by building and maintaining a website.
In this article I will talk about the possibilities to monetize your website in multiple ways. Whatever you are running a hobby blog or you want to make a living online by managing one or multiple websites, you can generate income.
Some of the following strategies involve a lot of work and time while others are relative passive money makers. Choose the strategy that fits you the best.
Make money through affiliate marketing
Affiliate marketing is one of the most popular strategies that are used for website monetization. Most of big companies offer affiliate programs, through their own website or trough affiliate networks, so there are many products and services you can advertise.
By signing up to an affiliate program, you will get all the advertising materials you need to promote or recommend that specific product. When someone buys through your affiliate link, you will receive a commission.
Depending on what affiliate program you chose, the commissions can vary a lot: for digital products you can receive up to 70% while for services you can get even more. Selling goods is not as profitable, these will pay you around 4%-10% of the purchase amount.
How to find products to promote?
Amazon Associates – through this program you will be able to advertise and recommend products from amazon.com website and earn a commission of up to 10%
Commission Junction – is a huge affiliate network where you can choose from many different companies and products.
ShareASale – is also a big affiliate network, it is a good alternative to the above mentioned CJ.
PPC a good strategy for passive income
Google, one of the largest companies in the world makes money from PPC (pay per click) advertisement. Google Adsense is the platform that provides the advertisement materials and can be used by both published and advertisers.
To make money using Adsense, you will need to sign up as a publisher, while you will be providing the content and Google will provide with the relevant ads. The system is simple: lots of publishers sing up to this program and buy advertisement; publishers will place a code to their website, where these ads will be displayed through the Adsense program. When a website user clicks on the ads, you will be credited for that click. You can receive around $0.3-$10 per click, depending on the niche of your site. A website with high traffic can make hundreds or even thousands a month.
Please keep in mind that Adsense have very strict terms of service: it is very hard to be accepted, it is forbidden to click the ads on your own site, content should be unique and high quality and lot of other restrictions. Make sure you read their TOS carefully and you are up to date with the latest changes. Although it is hard to get started with Adsense, it is one of the best ways to passively generate very good income from your website.
Sell advertisement space on your website
To make some quick cash, you can sell banner space in the unused areas of your website. The amount of payment you can get for a banner highly depends on traffic of your website. For this you will get paid up front and the contracts are usually made for 30 days.
To find advertisers you can join different ad networks such as BuySellAds, or you can do some self-promotion on your own website, and expect to be contacted by your visitors who want to buy your ad space.
This strategy can bring you quick money, but it can be tedious if advertisers don’t renew their contract and you have to always find new ones.
Create and sell your own product
Selling your products online through your site is a good way to make money. The best thing about this strategy is that you can keep the whole profit; there is no affiliate network or middle man who will take a cut. You don’t need to join any programs and wait for approval, and don’t have to wait for payments; you will get paid as soon as someone buys your product.
This strategy may look very simple, but in fact requires a lot of pre-work. First you will have to create a good product that has potential. Many online marketers create eBooks, and sell them for couple of bucks, other create various digital products such as desktop applications, website templates, design mockups, etc. Create a product that you have some sort of experience or knowledge about, be enthusiastic while advertising it, offer free copies to website owners and ask for a review. By offering free samples of your products can quickly increase your sales.
Collect donations through your website
Setting up a PayPal donation button on your site is very easy. Collecting donations from readers is hard, though. People are willing to donate, but they need to know how the money will be spent. Tell your story, explain why you need those donations, and offer something in exchange to your donors.
For instance, you can create a website which offers free downloadable products: you can ask website users to help you continue to run the website, create new products, upgrade hosting plan to offer better performance, etc.
If you are a musician, or an artist you can sign up to Patreon.com and collect donations through this site. Keep in mind that they will take a commission on you, but in exchange they offer a very good and secure platform to set goals and collect payments.
Lead generation
Generating leads to a company is another very popular way to make some quick money online. In short, you send visitors through a tracking link to a company, and you will get paid for every user who signs up to that campaign. Users will not purchase any product or service just yet; they will only submit their contact info such as name, phone number and email address trough a form.
The insurance niche is a very profitable lead generation market. For example if you are running a website or a blog about cars, you can easily advertise a car insurance company and send them leads.
Accept sponsored articles from relevant companies
If your website receives a good amount of traffic, you can seek for advertisers who are willing to pay you for writing a promotional article and advertise their products or services on your site.
Beside direct payment, you can accept free products which you will review. For instance, you are running a tech related blog; you can ask a company to send you a free smart phone to review. This is a win-win situation: you got a smart phone for free and they got a review and will constantly receive traffic for your website.
Once your site has an established group of readers, you have to be gentle and do not annoy them with constant product reviews and promotions. Also try to keep the sponsored content relevant to your website niche.
Create a web shop and sell online
If you are already have a store and want to increase your sales, an online store could be helpful in this process. Creating and managing an ecommerce website is not an easy task, but if you have the resources to do it right, you can open new doors in front of your business. There are thousands of online stores, but only few of them make big money, so it is crucial to have a long term plan in brand building, marketing and choice of products. A web-shop involves a lot more budget and knowledge than a simple website, so plan accordingly.
Build an Email List and send out offers
Having a subscription form on your website, offering something unique to your readers can be a good way to start building your email list. Once you have a good number of people in your database, you can send out different offers.
Please keep in mind that overdoing it can lead to negative effects: for instance, you are sending out multiple emails daily with same offers can force your users to unsubscribe or mark you as spam. Certainly you don’t want this to happen, so find the golden way to do it properly.
Sell your website to someone
Finally, if your website is making a good amount of cash on a monthly basis, but you don’t have to time or the resource to manage or to scale it, you should consider selling it. Usually websites can be sold for 10-20 times more than the monthly income. So if you are making $200 from AdSense, you could sell your site for $4000.
Selling a website is not as hard, you just have to find the right people to sell to. You can do public auctions on websites such as Flippa.com or open a thread on a popular webmaster forum such as v7.com. You can also hire a broker, who will find you clients in exchange of a certain percentage. My favorite website brokerage company is Latonas.com, check them out with confidence.
Other options to make money from your site
Certainly the list could continue, however I consider that these are the most profitable and easiest ways to make a steady income online with the help of your site. You can offer service, consultation, advertise your offline business and get clients through your site, such in the case of a photography website, open a membership program or just do what others are doing, usually this works very well.
Hope you found the right strategy to start with, now go and make some money. If you are looking to build a website quickly at an affordable rate, I highly recommend iPage web hosting provider. They offer high quality hosting as well different tools to make a professional website yourself.
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