There are plenty of ways to make money from a website. Usually, you can achieve that passively based on the traffic of your website. You can use put ads on your pages, sell products, and promote other people’s products to get results. In every case, you can earn a full-time income in the following ways. If you are a beginner, you can read how to build your own website here.
How To Make Money From A Website:
1. Affiliate Marketing
For many website owners, affiliate marketing is the most profitable way to monetize a website if you don’t have your own product. You can join an affiliate program like this top program and start promoting your links.
There are different ways to use your affiliate links. You can create text links, add banners to your sidebar, or build popup pages with your offers. However, the secret is to promote affiliate offers that are super relevant to your content.
Most of the time, the visitors read your content to learn something and not to make money. An affiliate promotion makes sense when it completes your content. If you teach them something, you can show them a resource that can help them to learn even more things on the same topic.
The products that you promote must be high-quality that add value to your target audience. If you can’t buy them, it’s easy to do your research online and learn what other people say. You don’t want to promote worthless products to your readers because they will never come back.
If it is not possible to find a quality product relevant to your content, you may then consider some of the other options as building a list or putting a few ads on a site. It’s ok to use more than one option.
2. Google AdSense
There are many advertising programs that you can join and put some ads on your site. Google AdSense is the best program in this category. If you browse a few websites on the internet, you will discover that many of them use Google AdSense.
Before you get started with Google AdSense, you need to build a website and get approved from the program. You can join with your Google account and request for approval. Then, you just wait for their response. If you get disapproved, you need to check their rules, add more content, get some traffic, and apply again. You can apply as many times as you want.
When you get approved, you can start earning money with Google AdSense. You get paid for each click on your ads. The earnings per click are from a few cents to a few dollars, depending on your niche.
The earnings per click are very low for some website owners, but they will add up if you have reasonable traffic. You can increase your profits by adding more content to your site.
The benefit of using Google AdSense is that you don’t have to worry about promoting and selling products. Affiliate marketing is a type of selling even if you don’t sell your own products.
3. Sell Ad Space
When you join advertising programs like Google AdSense, they keep a percentage of your earnings. Their commission is fair because they create the ads, find the advertisers, and take care of the payments.
However, there is a solution for those who don’t want to share their profits. You can sell ad space on your website. You need to do all the tasks by yourself like finding advertisers and requesting payments to your PayPal or bank account.
The benefit of this method is that you can earn more money for the same amount of traffic. Usually, it is helpful for a website with a lot of traffic. However, you spend resources and time that you could use to do other tasks like creating content.
4. Sell Your Own Digital Product
A digital product can be a software, ebook, course, and any product that you can sell online. When you have your own product, you set the price and decide about all the parts of your marketing process.
It can work as a replacement for your affiliate offers. By sending the traffic to a product page with a product relevant to your content, you don’t have to share the sale. Instead of a middleman, you become the owner of the product.
However, there is a reason why people love affiliate marketing. They don’t mess with the product creation. The product must add a lot of value to your readers if you want to get sales regularly.
For example, if you create an ebook, you must do research, write an ebook better than most alternatives on the market, and set it at a reasonable price. Once your product is live, you need to handle payments and customer service.
Your own product creates a different path for you. It’s possible to focus on the product and look for improvements or other marketing channels. A great product can create many opportunities. It is not just a way to monetize your website.
5. Accept Donations
You can accept donations for specific types of sites. When you use affiliate links or ads to monetize your content, asking for donations would not make sense for your readers.
Sites that are created for non-profit organizations, school projects, and fundraising projects have more chances to get donations from their visitors.
It does not mean that you can’t go for it if you are an individual who adds value to a specific topic. So, you can give it a try like the other options on this list.
You can begin by adding a donation page on your website. Then, advertise it on your content and sidebar. The donation page must be super simple and explain why you ask for money in a few words.
The last step is to connect your donation page with an account to complete the payments. It is quite easy to use PayPal because you just need to copy-paste a piece of code. Then, you can send the money from your PayPal to your bank account for a small fee.
6. Sell Sponsored Posts
Many brands and companies would like to pay website owners with a big audience for sponsored posts. They want to get more awareness of their brand or products. This option is available once you have already built your traffic or get engagement in your posts.
Sponsored posts tend to be more profitable than paid ads and work for the companies that buy them as well. It’s a win-win situation because you earn more money, and they get attention from your audience.
There are many ways to get started. You can join websites that work as middlemen between brands and website owners. They save you time because they handle payments and other parts of the process.
The other alternative is to find customers by yourself on online marketplaces and freelance platforms. In some cases, you may receive offers for sponsored posts to your email address or contact page of your website.
7. CPA Marketing
CPA marketing is an alternative to affiliate marketing. Instead of earning commissions per sale, you can earn money each time a visitor fills in an email address, create an account, or do any other requested action.
Some CPA networks focus only on these types of offers like MaxBounty and PeerFly. However, you can find programs that combine affiliate marketing and CPA marketing.
The benefit of CPA marketing is that you don’t too put much effort into getting an email address. Convincing someone to make a purchase is a more difficult process and requires more skills. Your conversion rates will go down if you don’t promote a product properly as an affiliate marketer.
For CPA offers, you just need relevant traffic and a nice landing page from the product owner. The visitors may leave an email address to check the next step, even without an intention to buy. The only negative is that you will earn less money for a lead than a sale.
8. Sell Your Website
A website is worth some money on the market, depending on the traffic, the profits, and the niche. Many people build websites from scratch with an intention to sell the website later. It’s a profitable business model because you can sell the site for a significant amount.
You can build a website for a few dollars and start adding content. Through time, the content will get ranked on search engines and get some traffic. The value of a website is the monthly profits x 24. So, if you build a website that makes $100 per month, you can sell it for $2400.
Then, you can repeat the process over and over again for as many websites as you want. An additional way to earn money is by flipping websites. You can buy a website at a fair price, increase the traffic, and sell it at a higher price later.
When you get a website with some traffic, you can add more content, grow a following on social media, build an email, and more. Many companies invest in websites that are built without spammy techniques. They can get the same amount of traffic for years without extra work. If you don’t need the extra cash from the sale, you can keep your sites and earn money passively.
9. Sell Your Services
If you are the writer of the content, you can search for writing jobs as a freelancer and use the website as a sample of your work. You can promote your services if you have created relevant content.
This method can work for several freelance jobs. For example, you can be an SEO expert, sell social media marketing services, web design, lead generation services, and more.
If you already have accounts on sites like Fiverr and Upwork, you can send your potential clients to your site to check your work. It can help you to increase your rates because you can prove your expertise.
10. Create Premium Posts
You don’t have to give everything for free. If you create a great good piece of content with actionable information, you can turn it on a premium post right away. You may allow your visitors to read one-two paragraphs in the beginning and then ask for a payment.
An alternative to this method could be to ask for shares on social media, joining your list, or creating an account on your suggested product. In every case, you can ask something in exchange before you allow them to read your content. Of course, you need the skill to create great content and the confidence to recognize its value.
11. Build An Email List
It is one of the most common ways to get extra value from a website. An email list can help you to promote affiliate products or your own products. However, most advertising programs do not allow ads on your emails.
If you decide to build an email list to sell a product, you need to add an email form on your site or create a landing page.
Most users will not give their email addresses for free, so you need to give some in exchange. You can give them more free content. It can be a short ebook, some training videos, a free sample of a product, or anything else you want.
Once you get an email address, you can start promoting your offers. The subscribers will always be on your list. If they don’t make a purchase on the first email, they may decide to take action later. So, your job is to keep building and managing your email list to grow your profits.
12. Offer Coaching or Consulting Services
If you position yourself as an expert in your niche, you can easily charge other people for your suggestions. Coaching and consulting services are very popular because many people need guidance for important parts of their lives.
These services must be super relevant to your content if you want to get any results. But you can easily build a website that focuses on promoting your coaching business. There are many types of coaches like life coaches, business coaches, writing coaches, financial coaches, and more.
The rates of a coach can vary from a few dollars per hour to hundreds of dollars per hour. It depends on the experience and the available clients, but the potential is really high.
13. Create An Online Store
An online store can be a super profitable option in some niches with many physical products. The process of building a website is the same, and you must find ways to get traffic. The only difference is that you will add a few pages with products and figure out a way to accept payments.
The products of the store do not have to be yours. You can use a dropshipping business model. In this case, you need to find a provider to ship the products to your customers. You can easily scale your profits by sending more traffic to your store.
14. Do Product Reviews
Your target audience is interested in different products of your niche. Publishing product reviews is an easy way to show your expertise and get more traffic. They tend to have less competition than other keywords on search engines and better conversion rates.
It can be a part of an affiliate marketing business model. If you get registered to the affiliate program of a big store with plenty of products like Amazon or eBay, you can add affiliate links on each review. It is possible to build a site that focuses only on reviews.
15. Create A Membership Site
A membership charges the members that want to read the content. Instead of sharing free content to attract new readers, they must pay for it, and you must find other ways to advertise your website.
A website can have many levels of membership. So, it’s possible to have both free and paid members. There are plugins and tools that can help you to handle payments and the users of your website.
You must treat a membership website as a digital product. Instead of a course or an ebook, you sell the membership of your site. You can promote it on social media, make small updates when needed, add more content, and earn passive income.
Conclusion
These were fifteen top ways to make money from a website. All of them can work and generate a full-time income for those who are committed to their sites.
If you don’t have a website yet and just looking for a way to earn money online, it’s quite easy to get started. It will take less than one minute to build your first website with the right tools.
Then, it’s on you to add content and grow your site. A website can generate residual income because each piece of content can earn money for years for work that you did once. Many professional internet marketers make passive income from multiple websites.
For learning the strategy of getting traffic and earning money from a website as an affiliate marketer, you can read about this top training program.