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How to Monetize Your Website

website-monetize

How to monetize your website is one of the most often questions. You want your effort to give you something in return. In this post, we will show you how.

How to monetize a website you own is maybe one of the most often questions. Everyone wants to make money, especially people who dedicate their time to creating interesting websites. At some point, you want your effort to give you something in return. In this post, we will show you some ways how to achieve that.

However, there are some things you need to keep in mind. There is no such thing as fast money or easy money when it comes to online earnings. You will need to dedicate full time, take things seriously, and don’t assume it will bring you a fortune overnight. It happened, but rarely. It is better to stay grounded with your expectations. But also, don’t lose hope if it’s going slow.

There is one crucial thing, and that is your website traffic. Without it, you won’t be able to monetize your website. There are multiple factors on which the number of people who visit your website depends on, but this is a theme we will not write about in this post. Instead, let’s check what you can do when your website is ready to earn some money for you.


Pay Per Click Ads

Google adsense overview

PPC is known advertising model through which website owners can earn money every time a user clicks on an advertisement. The most popular tool is Google AdSense, but due to very strict policies and troubles with getting approved, website owners are often seeking other solutions. Some of them are:

  • Media.net – one of the largest contextual networks
  • PropellerAds – a huge network that offers banners, sponsored links, and push notifications
  • Adversal – a platform that allows you to get your ads set up in a few minutes
  • Sovrn/Commerce – by converting regular product links into affiliate links, you can generate passive revenue from clicks
  • Skimlinks – automates affiliation of your commerce content
  • Monumetric – a full-service ad revenue partner
  • Infolinks – global platform that strives to deliver brand messages to users
  • Yllix Inc. – a network including popunder ads, mobile redirects, sliders, layer ads, and full-page ads, and with great pay rates
  • Evadav –  a network centering on push notifications, but also providing many ad options, including banners, video sliders, and native ads
  • RevContent – offers a great pay rate for clicks, and you can also profit from their referral program
  • Adsterra – offers great advertising options for both publishers and advertisers
  • SHE Media – specializes to monetize blogs and websites pointed at a female audience
  • AdRecover – partners with AdBlock providers to bypass ad blockers
  • MadAdsMedia – offers great rates and high-quality traffic by CPC, CPM, CPA, and CPL, making it one of the most varied alternatives
  • BuySellAdss – a platform that sells advertising space on your website for you

Placing ads on your blog or website is usually not complicated. Most of the networks offer help, like tutorials, forums, etc. When your website meets the criteria you need to apply. After you are approved, place the ads on your website and wait for the clicks.


Selling Ad Space

Selling Ad Space

Selling a free space directly to advertisers on your website takes a little more time and effort. But it will maximize the earnings. This space can usually be a link, banner, or a pop-up. The big plus is that you can determine the price you want.

But, to successfully monetize your website this way, traffic won’t be enough – you will also need to have a high conversion rate. You will be paid by the advertiser for the users that click ads or visit your website, so you have to prove it’s worthy. Prepare the data you need to show before you start sending proposals, and start your search. Let the potential advertisers know why they should collaborate with you.


Affiliate Marketing

Affiliate Marketing

You can read all about the CPA (cost per action) affiliate marketing model in our post CPA Marketing for Beginners, so we’ll say just a few words about it here.

Using affiliate marketing to monetize your website asks for a lot of skill in analyzing and promoting (different) products. That means you are earning commissions only when a customer buys a product. Some marketers say that this is the easiest way to earn money because you don’t need to have your products. All that you sell is from the companies you affiliate with. But it is not that easy as may seem. Again, you need to have high traffic and conversion rates to succeed, and sometimes to even get approved from such companies.


Donations

Donations

This method is mostly used if you want to monetize your creative content, such as photos, videos, music, graphic designs, etc. If you are really good at what you do, your users are more willing to donate for your products.

Pixabay overview

Your request for donations should be polite. You probably heard about Pixabay, right? It’s one of the most popular websites where you can get some free photos. Here is how they do it:

As you can see, there is no pressure. A donation button appears after you downloaded your photo, so the timing and positioning are what matters here. When placing your button (or link) be sure that your visitors will find it easily. Not all of your visitors will be willing to donate, but if you have a lot of traffic, this could bring you decent earnings.


Sponsoring Content

Sponsoring Content

This method is very similar to social media influencers, but it is presented on websites. It is basically a collaboration between the website owner and a brand. A brand pays to the owner to create unique content for them and publish it on their website. This content can be a sale announcement, offer, blog post, review, etc. It can be completely written, photographed, or filmed by you, or the brand can already give you created content they want.

To monetize this way you need to have high online influence. Determine how many posts you will sponsor each month (or week) and stick to the theme of your website as much as you can. Don’t accept everything they offer to you just because you want to earn, because that way it will lose its sense.


Selling your Products and Services

Selling your Products and Services

One could say that a website owner who is already selling something got the point. But some people are running successful blogs/websites and yet they don’t take full advantage of it. Maybe they don’t know how to sell their products or services, or they don’t want to (and that’s ok) but if you are reading this post there is a present interest for it.

Creating an eCommerce store is not so difficult anymore with the help of tools and plugins available. If you run a website by yourself, you will easily learn how to create this also. It takes some time, but there are plenty of tutorials online.

Here are some ideas of what you could sell:

  • ebooks – If you are a blog owner, this could be especially interesting to you. At some point, you can put your posts together in an ebook. Or write a completely new one, you already proved that you know how to write. You should put it for download in various formats. .pdf, .mobi and .epub are the most common.
  • Printables – If you have designing skills, you could create things like planners, cheat sheets, invitations, etc. They should be designed to be easily filled in and printed.
  • Online courses – During the recent lockdown, online courses had increased in popularity like never before. And it seems to be staying that way. Courses can be texts, audio, and/or video, although the video is the most effective form.
  • Memberships – You can choose for your website to have a protected content that requires a user to login to access. That way content is available to only those users who have paid a membership fee.
  • Products – These could be anything from books and t-shirts to art.

Membership

Membership

We already mention this as a way of selling your services, but membership access is a valuable way to monetize your website, so we’ll say a few more words about it here. The most common method for blogs or news sites is to charge members for accessing specific content. You should offer something to awake interest in users, and also have high-quality content that is worth paying.

You can charge monthly or annually, separately sell individual content, or have a one-time charge for access. It depends on your content and your website preferences.


Monetizing your blog or website takes time, work, and also traffic (which is connected with the first two). It may seem easy as we are surrounded by bloggers and influencers, but all of them had a lot of hard work before they started to earn decent money. And they still do, after breaking that barrier. So, be prepared to fight with everything that comes to you.

AlexisKestler

Written by Alexis Kestler

A female web designer and programmer - Now is a 36-year IT professional with over 15 years of experience living in NorCal. I enjoy keeping my feet wet in the world of technology through reading, working, and researching topics that pique my interest.