How websites make money is a common question arising nowadays. People all around the world who have a little bit of interest in this field, want to make their websites/blogs earn through it.
Everyone must have a skill and knowledge about his field very well. Like if one would be a teacher, he knows his subject very well. A businessman who owned a physical business of anything must know about his field very well.
So, in my opinion, everyone should have his website or a blog relevant to his field to earn side income, or passive income. A businessman can make an e-commerce website and make his presence online to sell his products. A Teacher can make a blog and share the stuff related to his subject. He can also provide his services of teaching online through the website.
To make a website, you just need to learn some specific skills like (WordPress, SEO, Content Creating) and can establish a proper website. Through a website, you can earn few bucks at the start, which can lead you to a handsome amount with consistent struggle. People are earning thousands of dollars all around the world through their websites.
How Websites Make Money?
There are many ways through which websites make money. In this blog post, I’ll try to cover all of them and will guide you properly. You can choose any of them that suits you well.
1. Advertising (Pay Per Click – Google AdSense)
The first and most common business model is advertising. Almost everyone has seen them. These are small ads, generally used by Google AdSense, on the sides of a website.
The best part of this system is its simplicity.
After signing up, Google will place a simple code on your site that will identify the content on your site and start showing relevant ads. For example, if your site is about pets (dogs and cats), Google AdSense will start showing visitors ads related to cat food, dog training, etc.
You get paid each time someone clicks on the ad. (Yes, it’s that easy!)
Your cut can range from $0.50 to $5 per click. When your website has enough traffic, you can earn hundreds (or even thousands of dollars) every month.
But you need a good number of visitors per month for your website to earn a lot of money from ads.
2. Affiliate Marketing
Affiliate marketing is one of the most popular (not to mention the fastest) ways to make money from your website or blog.
Start by finding a product that you like and recommend. Then, on your website, you endorse the product and promote it to visitors and email subscribers. If the product or service attracts these people, they click on your affiliate link and buy the product (while you get a split in the sales price).
The commission can vary from 30% of the price of the product or service, up to 70%. For example, if the participation is 50% and you promote an ebook that costs $ 100, you will receive $ 50 just for referring the buyer. Pretty good deal, huh?
The most common platform for affiliate marketing is Amazon & Clickbank.
3. Sell Your Digital Products (Like E-Book)
You have the potential to earn more money per sale when you can sell your products directly.
This is because there are no brokers or people between you and the buyer who receive a “share” of the money earned.
This approach seems quite straightforward, as you can simply sell these products directly through your website and get paid immediately. Unfortunately, it is not so simple.
Creating good, well-made, and polished products requires a lot of time and additional resources (such as design, content, etc.). There are many “hidden costs” both in the time invested and in the contractors with whom to collaborate. Selling your products on your website also raises issues like payment, shipping, and tax gateways.
If that still doesn’t seem enough, you’ll also need a well-designed and attractive landing page to ensure your product has a solid conversion rate.
4. Email Marketing
Of all the ways to make money from a website, email marketing is one of the best ways over the years. it helps build a strong brand. Encourage readers to return to your site.
Website traffic can go up or down, but with a mailing list and a good deal, you’re still in business.
Email marketing can generate income in a variety of ways, such as email promotions, which provide free monetized reports (containing affiliate links). I like this method best, and this is where I recommend everyone to start.
Typically, you offer your readers a free e-book or report or access to a video in exchange for the email address. This is known as a lead magnet.
The important thing here is to offer something of value. Ideally, something people would pay for if it wasn’t FREE.
I see many bloggers creating poor quality, poorly produced, and often outdated lead magnets. Don’t be that blogger!
I insist on the need for QUALITY information. Simple Word documents with quality information will always outperform.
5. Sell Advertising Space
Integrating Google AdSense on your website is just one way to earn money from online ads.
Another is to simply sell your own ad space directly to companies that want to sponsor different blogs. You can set a price for each space, for example: “Side banners will cost $XXX per month”.
You can be paid based on the number of visitors you receive. Typically shown as a dollar amount per thousand impressions (or CPM). You can think of this as a CPM of $5. If the site receives 100,000 visits per month, the ad price translates to $500.
The advantage of this approach is that if your site receives a lot of traffic from different sources, the price of your simple banner ad can reach $5,000 per month. The obvious downside is that if your site doesn’t get a lot of traffic, you can’t expect to earn a lot either.
The other common method of selling ad space directly from your website is simple direct pricing. You just name a price (based on what you think it’s worth, relative to what your competition charges) and they pay you upfront at the beginning of each month. This price is also generally a simple flat fee, not tied to a cost per click like AdSense.
Where to sell advertising space?
BuySellAds – The most popular environment for everyone to know you are selling ad space.
6. Write Product Reviews
I know quite a few bloggers who review products on their blogs. It’s great content, and if the product you’re looking for has an affiliate program, you can make money.
You can review anything from software to bikes, cars, hotels, food, anything you can think of and it can be tax-deductible (I think) if you buy something to review.
I want to rate one product per month, not so much so readers are rejected, but enough to offset a large chunk of my income. Doing a small number of reviews means you can choose all the best products and not have to talk about the downsides.
Special Note:
Sometimes, especially when your blog becomes more popular, you will be given free products in the hopes of writing a positive review. If this happens, you must declare that you have received a free sample. Frankly, your reader might as well assume that either way, and I think the best policy is to always be transparent on these matters.
Also, your review must be fair and impartial. Don’t give a bright positive review, well, unless it deserves it!
7. Accept Donations From Visitors
If you don’t have many monthly visits, but you have a strong and involved community? Just ask your readers to donate!
Accepting exclusive gifts is not a quick route to wealth, but it can help cover short-term expenses if people like what you have to say and want to support your trip.
For example, PayPal offers small donation buttons that only take about ten minutes to add to your site. These buttons provide a quick way to recover what you want to spend on good web hosting, creating new products, research, and all other costs to keep your blog active and healthy.
How to configure donation buttons?
How to accept donations on your website
8. Sell Services
Selling services is a very popular technique that people use to make money from a website, and that’s usually the reason they started a blog. They want to attract more customers, so they need to get traffic and the blog is great for that.
The easiest way to start selling your services on your blog is to create a new WordPress page named services. Here you can enter information about what you are offering, testimonials, and a Buy Now button.
To receive payments, your two best options are PayPal or Stripe.
9. Sell Sponsored Posts
One of the most common ways to earn more money from your website is by increasing the number of visitors.
After working hard to generate regular traffic to your website with an engaged community, there are several ways to monetize your hard work.
For example, many companies go out of their way to find blogs that include their sponsored content. “Native advertising” like this works well because it aligns with the main content on your site and is considered relevant and transparent.
You can also rate a company’s products in an “infomercial” that includes content and an advertisement. For example, if your site is about the latest iOS games for iPhone and iPad, the creator of one of these ads will LOVE to review and show your app to their fans.
When done right, you can create a win-win scenario. However, poorly done, with irrelevant or inauthentic site content, can erode all the goodwill of the reader that you worked so hard to create.
10. Make Leads For Other Companies
Companies thrive on new potential customers who come to your door to ask questions about their products or services.
No wonder they’re always looking for creative ways to find new sources of leads to help them grow.
For example:
Let’s say you have a website on how to teach math skills. Your reader’s information (such as email address or phone number) would be of great value to several online schools looking to sell their courses to enthusiastic and proactive students.
You connect the dots; be a matchmaker presenting two parts that can benefit from each other. Although this sounds like affiliate marketing works, in this case, it doesn’t matter whether your reader ends up buying your product or not. At the moment, they are just looking for an introduction.
Where can I find these offers?
11. Add A Job Board
It works like this:
People who want to hire someone will post a place on their board and readers will request the place. This is a great method of monetizing a website that I have seen done on many authority sites.
On the other hand, I have seen smaller blogs that try to do this and completely fail because it is competitive and if you cannot send anyone to sign up, there is no reason for them to post a job. Jobs can be anything from writers to coaches.
As for what software to use, I recommend checking out Fiverr. They have a selection of freelancers who specialize in building job sites.
When it comes to marketing your job board, you’ll want to use some of your ad space to promote the job board for readers to see and apply for jobs.
Covers a low price upfront so you can attract a lot of customers and when they get apps and clients they will be happy to come back.
Problogger is a fantastic example of a job board.
Ask yourself, can I create a job board for my niche?
If you can, you can become a great source of income.
12. Set Up An E-Commerce Site (Needs Hard Work)
Sites don’t have to be just content. They can focus on tools or products as an online store.
Be careful:
There are hundreds of thousands of e-commerce sites or online stores. Make sure yours fills a unique niche with a detailed strategy and the latest marketing techniques to make you stand out from the crowd.
13. Offer A Membership OR Premium Content
This technique has become increasingly popular in recent years.
The idea is that people come to your site because they want to read your content. They love it and want more. So, you are offering them even better content, for a price.
Your first step should be figuring out what to offer. Next, you’ll want to go ahead and create a subscription area for them to log in and see the information you are selling.
After setting it up, you need to focus on marketing. For the best results, I recommend focusing on email marketing and adding an ad to the bottom of each page, stating that if they liked what they read so far, they should take a look at your even higher paid content.
Another option would be to post an affiliate program on your members’ site. This will not only increase sales but will also generate even more traffic.
For billing, payment pages, upsell pages, and affiliate program software, I recommend using SamCart.
If you want someone else to create your membership site, you can hire someone to do it on Fiverr.
14. Offer Live Training & Workshops
In addition to selling advice and services, you can also use your blog to sell live training, workshops, and seminars.
People read your blog, but I would not be surprised if more than 80% did not act on what you say. Having a workshop means they are learning from you and implementing with you. It is a great deal for some people and they are willing to pay high prices for it.
Not only do you make money from the price of admission, but you can also make money selling workshops and follow-up brains. If you bring speakers, you will also receive 50% of everything they make if they sell on stage at the end. Another thing to consider is registering the event and then selling it as a product on your blog.
Organizing an event is scary, but not very difficult. Call a hotel, book a conference room, now that you have an appointment, write a blog post and send it to everyone on your mailing list on this page. Mention your event everywhere and keep pushing!
Other than that, all you have to do is create your slides and show them off. Some of my friends even hire people to take care of everything for them, so they don’t have to worry about the event side.
15. Sell Your Website – The Best Way To Make Money Online
My favorite of all of the above and also the highest-paid.
Turning your blog into an authority blog or website will net you one of the biggest prizes of all time.
Typically, sites sell for 12-24 months of revenue, however, if your site is old, has something unique, or has authority in your industry, you can expect the numbers you want. I’ve seen blogs with over 200 years of income and they weren’t even making $100,000 a year.
Work hard and it will be worth it.
It is important to remember that if you were to sell your website for 2 years of income and earn $5,000 per month you would receive $120,000. Earning this amount may take 6 or 7 years due to expenses and taxes. You should also take into account the time it took to build your business. If it took two years and sold for $120,000, it would be like earning $60,000 more per year.
Where can I sell my website?
Lots of people use Flippa.com. With over 200,000 buyers looking to buy your website or business online, Flippa.com is the right place for both buyer and seller.
Flippa is suitable for small sites that generate less than $100,000 per year in profit, although they handle larger transactions.
However, if you have a more profitable online business, we recommend that you use a website broker; The personal touch can go a long way in extracting maximum value from the site.
A closing word
Keep in mind that it can be a good idea to combine multiple methods and turn them into a monetization strategy. Choose them carefully and put the perfect monetization strategy to work for you.
If you know of any other ways to monetize websites let me know in the comment section. We will add you to the list and credit your name below.
What should be your most favorite method to monetize your website in the future, and when you’re going to do it?
Great man.. Nice article..