14 Ways To Actually Make Money
From a Website!
Recently I have spoken about what makes me money and what I think will be making me money in the future. What works for me in one niche, may not work in another. I get several emails every week from readers asking me how do I make money from my website? What should I be doing? The answer is, it depends. It depends how big your site is, how new it is, what niche you are in, what your goals are etc. Today’s post should answer your questions about what monetiziation technique is best for you.
Over the years I have tried dozens, if not hundreds of ideas and ways to make money from my websites. Some worked and some failed, it is important that if you try something and it doesn’t work, don’t just give up. The main reason I see people fail with a business online, isn’t because their idea or website is bad but because they give up too soon. Great things often take time. Here’ s a great saying for you…
Fall seven times, stand up eight - Japanese Proverb
Good luck and I hope you enjoy this post.
Ways To Monetize Your Websites
Advertising
The most popular form of making money from a website is by placing ads on it. We all know what it is, but it can make you money in different ways, such as Paid Per Click, Paid Per 1000 Views or Paid Per Time Frame. The most common form of advertising is Google Adsense which is paid per click, however a lot of people know what Adsense is in some industry’s so perhaps in those markets the other two may be more profitable.
If you want to sell advertising I recommend either complete site domination with Google Adsense, placement is important, where you put it on the site can be the difference between $10 a day and a $100. If you have more traffic or depending on your industry I recommend you sell a small amount of advertising at the highest price possible.
Benefits:
- Often guaranteed income
- Little effort to monetize
- Great way to connect with others in your industry.
Drawbacks:
- Takes away from user experience.
- If you set a set price per month, you can’t make any more even if you double you traffic.
- Advertisers come and go, you have to spend time editing, adding, deleting and finding more advertisers.
Job Boards
This works like so: people looking to hire someone will post a job on your board and readers will apply for the job. This is a great method of monetizing a website which I have seen done by a lot of authority websites. On the other hand, I have seen smaller blogs try to do this and completely fail because it’s competitive and if you can’t send them anyone to apply, it’s pointless for them to post a job. Jobs can be anything from, writers to trainers. If your looking for a example of a Job Board, check out Probloggers.
There are a whole load of different Job Board plugins and software. In the past I have used Jobpress with WordPress and it worked well. You will want to use some of your advertising space to promote the job board so that readers will see it and apply for jobs. Charge low at the beginning for a listing so you can attract a lot of customers and if they get applications they will be happy to return.
Benefits:
- Completely hands of, you don’t have to do anything.
- Adds to credibility
Drawbacks:
- Doesn’t work for small blogs
- Very competitive at times.
Selling Services
Selling services is a very popular technique people use to make money from a website and is often the reason for them building a blog in the first place. They want to get more clients, to do that they need to get traffic and blogs are great for that! A nice example of someone selling services is Underground Wellness.
The easiest way to start selling advertising on your blog is to create a new page within WordPress and call it services. Here you can put in the information about your service, testimonials and a buy now button. For sites earning less then $10,000 a month, I recommend using Paypal buy buttons as a payment gateway, this is very straight forward to set up and makes life easy for the customer.
Benefits:
- High converting, they see your blog and want more!
- Highly profitable.
- Easy to deliver.
- Low refunds.
Drawbacks:
- Exchanging time for money.
- Customers are always right (which we know isn’t true).
- Can be periods of time where you have no customers!
Email Marketing
This is one of my favourite things to talk about because it’s just so powerful. Building a email list can make you a lot of money, help build a solid brand and of course help readers come back to your site, time after time. Email marketing can be seen to make you money in a few different ways, such as direct email promotions, to deliver free reports that are monetized and my favourite, to drive traffic back to your site where you make money from other methods. Last year I quadrupled my subscribers by adding Popup Domination to my blog, which is a WordPress plugin I developed myself. To see an example of Email Marketing: Check out my squeeze page.
As I said before, I have spoken about email marketing a lot, the first thing you need to do is register an Aweber account, personally I would say you should also pick up Popup Domination, not because I own it but because it’s the best thing for email marketing. About 85% of my subscribers sign up via it, 10% from my squeeze page and 5% from other optins. Who ever tells me that I should take down my lightbox popup because they don’t like it, that’s the reason why I delete your email, it greatly benefits my business!
Benefits:
- Very direct way to market.
- One email can make you thousands.
- Easy & Simple.
Drawbacks:
- Promotions can have a negative effect on readers.
- Always require new leads.
- Subscribers come and go a lot.
Review Products
I know quite a few people who review products on their blogs, it makes great content and if the product you are reviewing has an affiliate program, can make you a lot of money. You can review anything from software, to bikes, cars, hotels, holidays, food, anything you could think of and it’s all tax deductible (I believe) if you buy something to review. Check this post out about How To Start a Review Blog.
I personally want to review one product a month, it’s not so many that readers will be turned of but enough that it will make up a high proportion of my income. Doing small amount of reviews means you can pick all the best products and don’t have to speak about negative ones.
Benefits:
- Great source of income.
- Converts higher then banner ads and email promotions.
- Free products sent to you to review.
- Connect with industry leaders.
- Get noticed as a top affiliate.
Drawbacks:
- You can’t always say nice things.
- If you say bad things, don’t expect to work with that person.
- Products become irrelevant quickly in some industry’s.
Affiliate Marketing
Another hot topic here on IncomeDiary, it works very well. In my experience it works best when paired up with email marketing or reviews, placing advertising banners promoting affiliates products do convert well but can be hit and miss sometimes. Over the last year I have done a lot of research into affiliate marketing and put all my findings on Site Profit Domination, make sure to check it out!
There are so many ways to go about finding a product for your site, it often depends on your industry. For a fitness blog, I would go to Clickbank, find a product about six pack abs and grab an advertising banner from their resources area and put it up on my website. You could also do a blog post such as, 7 Ways To Get Six Pack Abs, then at the end, promote the product.
Benefits:
- Can earn you big bucks!
- Can get high conversions if your promotions are done right.
Drawbacks:
- Earnings are not guaranteed, can earn $100 one month, $1000 the next.
- Great products can have crap converting sales pages.
- Great converting sales pages can have crap products.
- Not always the best of resources to promote.
Membership Site & Premium Content
This technique I have seen become more and more popular over the last couple of years. Premium content is paid for in a special members area, typically there is free content which attracts readers and then they realize they need more and will pay for it. PSDtuts have a great example of this, readers come to see free tutorials on how to do something in Photoshop, then they tell them they have to become Plus members to get the photoshop files and see even more advanced tutorials.
Your first step should be to work out what your going to offer. Then, you want to create a membership area for them to login and see the information your selling, I spoken about this in detail here. Next, I would do 3 things, email my mailing list and do a blog post about the membership, then create an advert for the bottom of every post which says something like, Liked this? Your love my membership site then, click here to find out more.
Benefits:
- Continuity income, keep making money, month after month.
- Can be set and forget, if you time release.
- Affiliates will send you traffic!
- Can be a huge earner, it accounts for over $90k a month for Tutsplus.
Drawbacks:
- Can be a lot of work to set up.
- Regular work to release more content.
Sell Your Own Products
Something I’m experimenting more and more with and I’m not sure if it’s just me.. but it seems like the world has gone crazy about making products, they are everywhere which has educated the market so that they know they have to purchase content now. The simple version of creating a product is as followed, create a 30+ page word document about something, turn it into a PDF and sell it.
You can find out more about creating a product and selling it online by reading this article. Personally I think your first steps would be to ask your audience what they want to know more about, create a product around that and sell it! If your goal at the beginning is to make only a small amount of money, say you expect to make no more then $1000 from selling it the first month or two then I recommend you go with using PayPal like with selling services. Once you grow your business and you are selling more, a great choice is to use Clickbank who handle all the orders and allow you to have affiliates.
Benefits:
- Affiliates send you traffic, build your business.
- Because of affiliates, you have a passive income.
- Great for building your brand and authority.
- Big Money Earner.
Drawbacks:
- Time consuming to setup.
Paid Directory Listings
This isn’t very common but I believe it should be. I see it as a smart way to sell advertising, you see instead of putting adverts on your sidebar, you have a directory on your blog where you link to different company’s and websites in your industry and charge a premium for the listing. If you charged a monthly fee, so for example, say you had 1000 people listed in your directory and charged $7 a month, you would earn $7000 a month in continuity. In some ways, this is actually beneficial to the reader, say you have a website about becoming a model, in the directory could be a section for photographers, where photographers pay to list their services. Models will come and look for the right person to take pictures of them for their portfolio, helpful and profitable.
Just like a job board, I would add adverts to my blog, promoting the directory to make sure customers are happy with the number of people seeing their ad and the traffic they get. To start with, I would even advertise on other sites to get people to list in your directory, as well as reaching out to people and company’s to buy a listing.
Benefits:
- Highly profitable.
- Useful to readers.
- Makes you stand out as your doing something different.
- Nearly guaranteed income.
Drawback:
- Costs to setup.
- Smaller sites may not work so well.
Host Webinars
Although I tried this year and didn’t have good results, I think that was down to promoting other peoples products instead of my own. People get on webinars to hear you speak, not someone else to do a sales pitch. What you do is set up a free webinar that you reply once a week where you teach them something and then at the end you sell them into 4 more webinars. Once you complete the webinar series, you now have a product that you can sell as a home study course
Start by buying GoToWebinar, personally I would host a free webinar and not sell anything on your first one so that you can get in some practice with the software and talking live with people. Lewis Howes talks about webinars in a recent interview we did together.
Benefits:
- High priced, low amount of customers, so low support.
- Readers want to connect with you.
- Highly beneficial to those who buy.
- Great way to teach.
Drawbacks:
- If your doing live webinars, your exchanging time for money.
- Investment for software.
- People have to turn up at a specific time, hard for different time zones.
Write Tutorials
Another thing I don’t see often, but I love to do! Content is what everyone is after, that’s why they come to your website, so create content which includes them buying something so that when they do buy, they buy via an affiliate link, so when they do buy, you make money!
What I do to create a tutorial is start with the product, find one that you are using and you get a lot out of, it of course needs an affiliate program. Then do a tutorial about doing something using that tool, so for example it could be a post about Photography and take a specific type of photo but you need this lens to do it.
Benefits:
- Makes great content.
- Good for search engines.
- Profitable long term.
- Quick to produce.
Drawbacks:
- Finding enough products that have affiliate programs.
- Some people may not be interested because they don’t yet have the product.
Publishing a Book Because Of Your Blog
A lot of people want to write a book, however they have no audience. A blog can bring you branding, can help you connect with other people in your industry, help you understand what people like to read about, more importantly what people don’t like. All this can help you write a book that can become profitable. A lot of people don’t consider a book because you only get a couple dollars a book but that’s not just what you earn. Publishing a book can allow you to then launch a product because people always want more, also a more exciting prospect is being paid to speak. If you are published, your automatically seen as an expect, it doesn’t matter if you never sell more then a dozen books, this means you can charge to speak and charge a lot more for consulting.
There is so many different ways to go about publishing a book, most choose self publish but if your blog is successful, either they will find you or in my case, a friend connected me with his published and told me I should write a book. Someone in your industry who blogs, will also have published a book, help them and they will help you.
Benefits:
- Authority.
- Long term earnings.
- Increase your charge for consulting.
- Paid to speak at events.
Drawbacks:
- Timely or expensive if you have a ghostwriter.
- Doesn’t make you a lot of money on it’s own.
Live Training and Workshops
Just like selling consulting and services, you could also use your blog to sell live training, workshops and seminars. People read your blog but I wouldn’t be surprised if over 80% don’t act on what you say. Having a workshop means they learn from you and implement with you, this is a very attractive offer to some people and they are willing to pay high prices to do it. You don’t just make money from the price of the ticket but you can also make money from selling follow up workshops and masterminds. If you bring in speakers, then you also collect 50% of everything they make if they sell from stage at the end. Another thing to consider is recording the event and then selling that as a product on your blog.
Putting on an event is a daunting thing, however it really isn’t to hard. Ring up a hotel, book a conference room, now you have a date, write a blog post and send everyone on your mailing list to that page. Mention your event every where and keep hustling! Apart from that, all you NEED to do is create your slides and turn up. Some of my friends even hire people to run everything for them so they don’t have to worry about the event side of things themselves.
Benefits:
- Can make you a lot of money.
- Can be made into a product.
- People will invite you to speak at their events so that you can sell yours.
- Makes you an authority.
Drawbacks:
- Time consuming.
- Selling can sometimes be hard.
- Stressful for first timers and often the pros.
Sell Your Website
Definitely my favorite of all the above and also the one that pays the most. Selling your website can make you very wealthy, or it could be just a nice retirement fund, what ever it is, it can be a great way to get a large lump sum of cash. Typical websites sell for 12 – 24 months revenue, however if your site is old, has something unique about it or is the authority in your industry then you can expect any figure you want. I have seen some blogs go for over 200 years revenue and it didn’t even make $100,000 a year. Work hard and it will pay off. It is important to remember if you sold your site for 2 years revenue and it made $5000 a month, you would get $120,000. To earn that amount of money it could take you 6 or 7 years because of expenses and taxes. Also you have to consider how long it took you to build your business, if it took you a year to build your blog and it’s now worth $120,000 and you made $60,000 this last year. That I would say would be a very profitable year! If you currently haven’t got a blog to sell, consider using my done for you service to get a blog made for you, check out Blog Creation Domination!
If you’re already at the stage where you can sell a website then head over to Flippa, this site allows webmasters to sell websites and allow people to come bid and ask questions. I have sold a few sites there before, some for 5 figure sums.
Benefits:
- Large amount of cash.
- Can be sold within a month.
- Enough money not to work for years.
Drawbacks:
- You no longer have a website.
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