The web has given us so many benefits (and it has its disadvantages but that is for another discussion), one of them being able building your own online business by creating websites and monetising them through various ways.
Making money online is more than possible,however,with the internet full of get rich quick schemes,people fall under the false belief that making money online is easy. It is not,however,with hard work,consistency and a never give up attitude,it is more than possible.
So even if you do not see success straight away, do not give up, keep working at it and try different methods of monetisation and see what works.
One of the reasons people fail at making money with a website is because they get discouraged by early results and give up too quickly.
There are multiple ways to monetise your website or even other people’s website, in this article I will provide 10 methods of ways to make money online. Some are easier than others but all of them will require you to put in the time and effort to make them a success.
Now I’m not saying you will become as rich as Jack Dorsey Or even Mark Zuckerberg but done right and with consistency, some of these methods can be very financially rewarding.
1.Affiliate marketing
This is my favourite way to monetise websites and blogs and how I monetise my own websites (including this one).
Affiliate marketing is one of the best ways to start an online business,it doesn’t require much investment to get started and is a very popular method for people who are looking to make money online.
One of the biggest affiliate networks is Amazons associate programme, it is an affiliate network that most people join first because it is easy to get accepted into the programme.
Since Amazon sells nearly everything under the sun, your choice on what niche to choose is near limitless, some of the best places to search on Amazon for untapped niches is in sub-categories.
However,if Amazon doesn’t have anything that interests you as an affiliate marketer (highly unlikely but still possible),there are plenty more places you can find good affiliate programmes.
You can easily search for affiliate programmes in your niche by searching for the product/service + affiliate programme.
For example, if you want to find affiliate programmes for web hosting (really lucrative niche) just google ‘web hosting affiliate programmes.
Or you can join one of the many affiliate networks and search their database, there are so many but these are the ones I have joined.
There are a variety of ways to promote affiliate products on your website, you can write a review of the product/service, you can write up a list of top selling items in the category your product is in and promote yours as the number 1.
Most affiliate offers also have banner ads that can be placed on your website, but these need to be placed in strategic places for maximum conversion. Read more on banner ad placement here.
Pros
Many offers have high compensation rates
Not much investment required
Easily scalable
Promote almost anything
Cons
Earnings fluctuate
Many affiliate networks allow junk products to be promoted
Vendors can close their programme without notice.
2.Google AdSense
When I first considered monetising my website with Google AdSense, I received a lot of bad advice.
Basically, I was told, it’s not worth it because it’s based on CPC advertisement (Cost Per Click) and that the CPC rates were usually low.
It’s why I never applied but later I found out that if done correctly, monetising your website through Google AdSense can be very fruitful.
So, what is CPC advertising? Well, they are ads that are placed on your website and whenever someone visits your site and clicks on them, you get paid a certain amount.
The ads come in a variety of formats and the pay rates vary but according to Search Engine Land you get 68% of the revenue that Google makes from advertisers and 32% is kept by Google.
How much you earn also depends upon the niche you are in, the volume of traffic you receive daily, visitor behaviour and demographics as well as many other factors.
Niches that do well in Google AdSense are Technology, Insurance, Internet marketing, web hosting, relationships, and health.
So, if you are in any of these niches and are not monetising with Google AdSense you should think of doing so.
One of the best courses for making money with AdSense is from Chris Lee who runs the popular blog rankxl.
His training, Niche Site Course, focuses on monetising your websites with AdSense and it takes you through from niche selection to getting high powered backlinks.
Read a thorough review of Niche Site Course
Pros
Easy way to monetise
Good source of passive income
Cons
Hard to get accepted
Need good traffic volume
Many niches are not worth it
3.Infolinks
Getting approved for Google AdSense is getting harder so it’s always good to have alternatives just in case you do not get approved.
One of the best alternatives to Google AdSense is infolinks, this ad network isn’t hard to get approved with and it has pretty good CPC.
The other good thing about Infolinks is that it doesn’t need ad space, I t highlights certain keywords within your article and whenever a visitor hovers over it, an ad is displayed.
Although one of the drawbacks with these kinds of advertisements is that a lot of people find them annoying and sometimes the ad isn’t relevant to the article.
As well as in inText ads, Infolinks can also deliver inSearch ads, inFrame ads and inTag ads.
The approval process isn’t long and usually, people get approved within 72 hours.
To get ads running on your site doesn’t take long as well, you just need to paste a piece of HTML code on your site and iInfolinks technology will do the rest.
Pros
Earn 70% revenue
Easy to get approved
Ad integration isn’t difficult to implement
Multiple payments methods including PayPal and Payoneer.
Cons
Ad relevancy
Makes website look Spammy
User experience is diminished.
4.Sell Ad space
Google AdSense and Infolinks are just one way of monetising your website through advertisements.
You can also sell ad space on your site to many advertising networks who want to buy ad space for their clients.
There are two methods to getting paid when selling your own ad space.
The first is having a fixed monthly price, you get paid upfront and the ad is displayed on your site for an agreed upon period.
The other is getting paid per one thousand impressions or CPM (Cost-Per-Mille), ad networks pay a certain amount for thousand impressions your website receives.
So as you may conclude, you really need a good volume of traffic to make some decent money from this method.
One of the best networks to sell your ad space is BuySellAds. There are others but BuySellAds is the top network to chek out if you want a huge variety of publishers to work with.
Pros.
You know how much you can make
Easy to monetise
Can scale up as you increase traffic to your site
Cons
Need some serious traffic for it to be worthwhile
5.Sponsored Content
You may or may not have noticed sponsored content on many news sites, they sort of blend in with the whole website and sometimes it’s difficult to notice that they are sponsored content.
These posts usually have a disclaimer at the top that it is a sponsored content.
Another type of sponsored content you may not have noticed is called native ads, these are usually placed at the end of an article and usually look like natural links to other parts of the website.
Getting sponsored content or native ads is tough because you do need large amounts of traffic and have relevant content so these types of monetisation models will not work on low traffic websites.
Pros
Good payout
Lots of networks offering sponsored content
Cons
Need huge amount of traffic
6. Membership/subscription
Membership sites are a great way to monetise your website, as long as you offer great products or services, membership sites can thrive and even bring a 6-7 figure income.
Creating your own online training course can also be very lucrative, websites like Udemy, Cousera and Skillshare amongst many other uses this model to generate income.
Or you can Create your own software and allow access to it for a monthly fee, there are so many ways you can make money with this model. Just need to think outside the box and offer what no one else is offering.
Pros
Can be scaled to 6-7 figure salary
Strict control over what is offered
Name your own price
Cons
Needs a lot of effort to get started
Sites must be constantly updated to keep content fresh
May have to deal with a lot of disgruntled customers
7.Ecommerce
Ecommerce is growing at an exponential rate and the growth is set to continue as more and more people do their shopping online.
Luckily despite its growth, it still represents a small fraction of the overall retail sales and so there is still plenty of opportunities for people to carve out a good income from this industry.
The hardest part of starting an ecommerce business is finding a winning product that you can scale and grow your business with.
I have written an article on ways to come up with niche ideas for ecommerce.
One of the most popular ways to start an eCommerce business is through dropshipping,dropshipping is an eCommerce fulfilment method in which store owners do not handle any of the inventory they sell. Instead,the packing and delivery is carried out by the supplier.This method saves the store owner a lot of money,the drawback is that the profit margins are usually (not always) much smaller than the traditional method of running an eCommerce business.
If you are interested in starting a dropshipping business,be sure to check out Alidropship,they are a company that have developed a WordPress plugin that makes running a dropshipping business much easier.
Pros
Growing industry
Highly scalable
Lots of products to choose from
Cons
Can be frustrating finding a winning product
A more hands-on approach than other methods mentioned on this list
Finding reputable suppliers can be tough
8.Build an email list
You may have come across the term ‘the money is in the list’, what this refers to is an email list.
It’s common knowledge that as soon as you enter the world of online business, you will enter into multiple email lists.
Some may give a lot of benefits, for example, I am on the list of several SEO gurus like Brian Dean, Neil Patel, and Glen Allsopp, these lot provide a lot of value in their emails and website.
This is the kind of email list you should look to build within your website. Provide a ton of value and your visitors will want to buy from you whatever you pitch to them later on.
This is a long-term approach, as you will need to grow your email list well into the thousands to monetise it properly.
There are marketers who simply build an email list just to sell to their customers, now I’m not saying that is bad. It’s the way these marketers go about doing it that isn’t to my liking.
They constantly bombard your email account with offer after offer, now this too wouldn’t be so bad (although I personally despise it) if they offered products that were not just about how to make money online.
How are their customers supposed to take action on one product, when they constantly being bombarded with several offers a day? Totally unethical.
Anyway, enough with my rant, building an email list can hugely profitable, but just remember not to confuse your customers with rubbish products promising them the world.
If making money online through email marketing is something that interests you,I highly recommend a product called Cover Commissions. This is a done for you email marketing system that is perfect for newbies.
Pros
Easy to build
Highly scalable
Extremely profitable
Cons
Can take a long time to build a list that can be monetised properly
Writing emails with tons of value can be time-consuming
Promoting rubbish products to your list can affect your reputation.
9.Provide a service
There are many services that you can provide through your website, services that are high in demand and ones that make a great business to run.
Providing digital services like SEO and web design are very lucrative and can even be done if have no expertise in either of those areas. How? You can become a reseller, websites like seoreseller and the Hoth will give you wholesale prices for their services and all you have to do is resell them at your own price.
Of course, you will have to go out and find clients but the hard part is taken care of so essentially you have one thing to do which is find clients and retain them.
Pros
Easy to set up
Very profitable
Many more options other than just web design and SEO services (graphic design, logo design, social media services etc)
Cons
Initial difficulty in finding clients
10. Flip Websites
Flipping websites is extremely profitable,you can sell a website for 12-18 times its monthly revenue.
So, say you have a website doing $500pm, with the right broker, you can get anywhere between $6-$8000 for that site.
Even if you have a few websites doing $100pm selling them at 12-18 times the monthly profit is still very profitable.
For more on website flipping read this post by one of the leading brokers for buying and selling websites.
Summary
I have just listed 10 ways of monetising your website, there are many others which I have not mentioned but which can be just as lucrative.
The web has given us so many benefits and making money off it is one that we should take advantage of.
I think the biggest key is to improve traffic and I do believe like any other business that this takes time. Like getting healthy, everyone wants the easy way out instead of working from the ground up. I may need to look into your other suggestions in the future. Which ones have you used and were successful in the past?
Hi
Thanks for stopping by and commenting, I am using affiliate marketing as my main method of monetisation. But I am looking to diversify. You are right about traffic, you can have all the content in the world but it won’t matter if there is no traffic coming in.I have out together a list of awesome guides about traffic generation. Here check it out, it may interest you.
All the best
I love the fact that you can monetise a website in so many different ways. I created a website few months ago, so I’m still in a process of building my traffic. I’m wondering whether it’s a good idea to start creating my email list now, or wait till my website is more established and I have more value to offer to my readers? Would you recommend creating some freebie first, say for example an ebook? I really struggle at the moment to understand what is the best way to go about creating an email list and would love it, if you could shed some more light on it.
Thank you, Zuzana
Hi Zuzana
I think the best time is once you have established a decent amount of traffic, what you offer is really up to you, people will give you their email as long as they think the offer has any value to it. It could be an ebook, a cheat sheet, PDF report. For a step by step guide, it would be best to check out the blog of some of the well known autoresponders like Aweber, GetResponse and Mailchimp.
All the best
Hi there! I just read your article on ways to make money with a website and thought I would just drop you a quick comment to share my thoughts. On looking through your list of ways to monetize your site, I realized that I’ve tried several of these!
Affiliate marketing has to be the best way to make money in my opinion. However, I did start off trying to make money with Google Adsense. What a waste of time that was! It took me months of trying to make very little money with Adsense. I guess it would be ok if you had tons of traffic going to your site, but it didn’t work for me.
The second best way to make money for me was selling ad space. You can certainly make a lot more money by selling ad blocks than you can by letting Google occupy the area.
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