5 Ways to Make Money Online with Your Website

Launching your new website sets you up for what sounds like a thrilling adventure.

That is, until you realize that putting effort into your new site, crafting the perfect blog post, and burying yourself into research isn’t returning on your investment like you wanted it to.

In my previous posts, I’ve always asked fellow freelancers, professionals, and even businesses to treat their website like a virtual storefront. Simply because, websites exist on the world stage.

Anyone can visit your website, just like any customer can walk into a physical storefront.

By taking center stage, websites can become a sustainable source of income, provided that you’re willing to put in your time and effort into developing yours.

But before we dive deeper into making money with your website, we need to crunch some numbers and understand the current state of the internet as it is today:

• There are an estimated 1.11 billion websites.
• 252,000 new websites pop up every day.
• Yet, only 18% are active.

[Source: Siteefy ]

With these numbers, it’s clear that before making any money with a new website, you’re very likely to face stiff competition from other already established industry players whose websites have been active for years.

Setting Up Your Website

Setting up your new website doesn’t have to be difficult when you follow these quick steps.

1. Identify Your Domain and Hosting Provider

Let’s cut to the chase.

WordPress is one of the most recommended website builders of our time.

It’s relatively easy to build your own website with no coding experience on WordPress.

Setting up your WordPress website with Bluehost is much cheaper than doing it directly on WordPress. However, with Bluehost, the process takes a little more time due to integrations.

If you like to have everything done from a single dashboard, simply sign up for WordPress , register your domain name (it’s usually free for a paid subscription for one year), and choose your theme.

If you prefer setting up your WordPress site with Bluehost, check out the video below:

Grow Your Traffic

Making money with a website largely depends on the traffic passing through the website.

The more the traffic, the higher the potential for earning.?

Boosting traffic is arguably one of the biggest obstacles you’ll have to conquer before earning your first dollar through your website.

To grow your traffic:

• Establish your content calendar.
• Study your target audience.
• Publish a blog post often.
• Share your expertise and content via email and social media.

In practice, however, it is much difficult to build a loyal following due to internal and external factors.

Internal factors include your content output capacity, expertise, and experience in your niche. External factors, on the other hand, include factors that are beyond your control, including search engine algorithm updates.

Set Up Your Advertising and Monetization Options

New website owners prefer advertising as their most suitable monetization option.

Ad networks and programs such as Google AdSense and Infolinks have low barriers to entry for new websites.

However, don’t expect to see a fortune in the first month of advertising.

More established blogs can go for Ezoic and Mediavine which pay more per 1,000 views but have a higher traffic threshold for joining publishers.

Affiliate marketing can pay out much more than advertising. To get started, you would need to join an affiliate network.

Popular affiliate marketplaces such as ClickBank have high-paying opportunities for affiliates. However, ClickBank may not work in some countries.

Some great ClickBank alternatives include:

• Impact
• PartnerStack
• AWIN

Many websites combine advertising with affiliate marketing to boost their revenue. Should you opt to go this way, remember that user experience is paramount to your website's success.

Don’t clobber your website with too many ads. 4-5 minimally intrusive and highly relevant ads are good for modest results.

How to Make Money with Your Website

Building a sustainable revenue machine from a website is not for the faint-hearted.

On the bright side, there are several ways to generate a stable income from any website.

1. Advertising with Google AdSense

Since its release in 2003, Google AdSense has enabled publishers (website owners with advertising space to sell) a reliable way to make a stable income.

On average, AdSense publishers can expect commissions of $0.20 to $15 when someone clicks on an ad. AdSense pays an average of up to $3 per click. [Source: CodeFuel ]

Payments are not dependent on one single factor but vary based on the niche and the contents of your site.

Your target region may also influence your actual earnings.

Here’s a tabled estimate of the earnings you can expect from AdSense based on the region and some popular niches, with a website that sees 50,000 monthly page views:

These earnings are estimates based on your website’s content, region, category, and monthly traffic.

Actual earnings vary based on additional factors such as user device, seasons, advertiser demand, ad size, and more.

Advertising with Google AdSense is a numbers game.

More traffic means more potential revenue for your website.

Getting Started with Google AdSense

To start making money on your website with AdSense, you need to register for an account and verify ownership of the site.

Although AdSense has a low barrier to entry, new publishers on the platform must have:

• Decent and sufficient content.
• Good structure and layout.
• Finished and furnished web pages, not incomplete ones.
• Allowed Googlebot to crawl the website.

Thin content (content that has no real value) is highly discouraged. Google prefers valuable content and would love to see more of it before you can get approved to join the AdSense program.

If you’re facing challenges coming up with valuable content for your website, consider hiring a writer.

2. Affiliate Marketing

If you’re obsessed with your niche, then affiliate marketing is one of the ways you can make money with your website.?

All for-profit companies want to push their products and services in front of a particular target market and drive sales.

But due to the nerve-racking competition that they face online, it can be difficult to rise above the noise and reach the intended consumer in an efficient, cost-effective manner.

So, instead, they partner with affiliates, who act as middlemen and deliver the company’s message directly to the target consumer.

The power of affiliate marketing ripples throughout the industry, especially for content creators, bloggers, and website owners:

• 59% of companies use influencers in affiliate marketing.
• 81.2% of affiliate marketers earn more than $20,000 annually.
• Affiliate marketers have an average income of $65,000.

[Sources: Kinsta, Influencer Marketing Hub , Affise , Meetanshi ]

To find success in the first month of affiliate marketing is a far cry from reality.

Successful affiliate marketers often insist that it takes between 3-6 months to make your first dollar with affiliate marketing and months of hard work to make even more.

This does not mean that making your first $100 with affiliate marketing on your website is impossible. However, beginners should set realistic expectations.

Getting Started with Affiliate Marketing

Unlike advertising with Google AdSense, affiliate marketing demands much more effort.

First, affiliates need to identify their niche. It helps if you choose something that you’re passionate about and not always the highest-paying niches ranked on Google.

With your niche in mind;

• Initiate an extensive search for the right keywords. Low competition and long-tail keywords are the best for beginners since they promise a lower barrier to entry and higher returns.
• Find the right products to promote. Ideally, start with products that you’ve personally used since you know a great deal about them.
• Find an affiliate program for your products. Many physical and digital products have an affiliate program that you can sign up for and start promoting.
• Join an affiliate network. Affiliate networks bring advertisers and publishers together. They’re a good source of product promotion opportunities for your website.
• Start blogging. Blogging is one of (if not) the best ways to boost your website’s traffic and promote your affiliate products.

3. Sell Your Services and Expertise Online

Selling your skills and expertise online can never fail if you know how to sell to the right people.?

Selling your expertise can be made possible and even more lucrative if you have a website. Take web designers for instance.?

Web designers have a ton of skills in graphic design, coding experience, SEO, marketing, and more. To get the exposure that they need and reach a larger audience of the right prospects, they build and market their own portfolio websites.

There are many benefits of adopting a similar approach if you’re a professional in your industry.

First of all, establishing your own self-hosted website can help you become more independent with your earnings and with the people that you work with.

What’s more, you have total control over your website property and can add physical and digital products to accompany your services and boost your earnings potential.

To successfully sell your skills and services on your website, you need a professional portfolio (a list of projects you’ve worked on before and the results), as well as some marketing skills.

Selling your services online may look daunting at first. Once you get the hang of things, you can reach your target audience in the following ways:

• Set up a professional portfolio website (very important). Use your professional networking site (preferably LinkedIn) if you're not in a position to publish on a website.
• Establish professional marketing channels, with email and social media leading the pack.
• List your website in your existing online portfolios, e.g. on Medium for writers and bloggers.
• Market your website on social media.
• Reach out to your potential employers directly through their email (cold pitching).

You could also list down your professional services on an attractive landing page in your website for incoming traffic.

4. Selling Physical Products

E-commerce is booming right now!

With over 2 billion people now shopping online, it’s clear why selling your products online has a place in this list as one of the reliable ways to make money with your website. [Source: Tidio ]

What’s more, the benefits of selling physical products online outweigh the benefits of a traditional storefront.

That’s because, selling physical goods online can take several formats that don’t require an upfront investment, storage, or cause shipping nightmares.

Website owners can sell physical merchandise through:

• Amazon Associates Program (allows website owners to sell physical goods and earn a commission).
• Drop shipping, where website owners act as middlemen receiving orders from customers and sending these orders to the company for fulfilment.
• Print-on-demand where website owners can sell branded items and only have to print their designs when an order has been made.
• Setting up an e-commerce store and selling your own merchandise

In essence, selling physical items on your website has no limit to your earnings.

At the end of the day, you can sell virtually any item of your choice and other company’s goods for a profit through your website.

Thankfully, getting started with e-commerce also has a low barrier to entry.

• Study your target audience first and determine what would sell best.
• Choose your products well. Generally, you want to choose high-quality products that will not harm your reputation.
• Choose the right partners and suppliers that deliver on time, are responsive, and value customer relationships long after the purchase.
• Create stunning landing page designs to collect customer data for future direct marketing campaigns.
• Create good content surrounding your products and niche.

When it comes to content creation, focus on writing unbiased review blog posts that highlight the strengths and weaknesses of each product to a fair extent.

Additionally, compare these products once in a while to help your audience make an informed decision. Remember, you want to write honest views to avoid losing the valuable, loyal audience you struggled to build.

5. Selling Ad Space Directly to Advertisers

We’re back to advertising.

But this time, without ad networks or AdSense.

We put selling ad space on the list because on top of providing a stable source of revenue and some degree of control over who you advertise for, selling ad space directly helps you build your website in all the right ways.

A website built for advertising for individual companies will be built to perfection, so it can attract high-paying advertisers and build loyal audiences.

For instance, websites with high-quality traffic can approach high-paying advertisers directly and offer to sell space for ads on their website’s headers, footers, and sidebars.

Here, the advertiser could be willing to pay for that space if the publisher’s websites can bring in more leads.

Most advertisers will scrutinize your website before accepting your offer.?

Some of the things that they look for include:

• Only high-quality content is rewarded.
• Excellent website design and user experience required on all devices.
• High-quality traffic (and a lot of it).
• An overall good publisher reputation.

Selling ad space offers several options, including banner ads, video ads, display ads, native, and text ads.

Starting with selling ad space will be the toughest way to earn from your website compared to other ways we’ve already discussed.

It involves a direct input from you in terms of:

• Finding the best locations for advertising on your website. Depending on its design, you can place ads in the header section, sidebar, within text, and footer.
• Building a loyal, high-quality audience for advertisers. To achieve this, always pick an industry that you’re an expert on or are passionate about.
• Drive more traffic to your website. As discussed earlier, advertising is a numbers game. Websites with massive traffic can claim higher payment from advertisers.

The biggest downside to this approach is that it takes a lot of time and effort to build relationships with companies that advertise within your niche.

On the bright side, once you establish a partnership with an advertiser, you can gain more control over the charges for the ad space you sell on your website.

Summary

Don’t leave money on the table when you have a functional website. As you can see, there are several ways to earn a passive and active income, but all that depends on how much effort you dedicate to your website.