A huge proportion of businesses is now run entirely online. The internet can make setting up a company easier, cheaper and quicker than it ever was before. While some business owners use a website to advertise their products or services, for others their website is their product. Many online entrepreneurs start off running a blog or website for fun and monetize it later on, when they begin attracting enough page views. Although for some, running a monetized website is just a hobby that brings in a bit of extra cash on the side, for others it’s a living. You can use your website to make enough money to live on, and then some, if you go about it the right way. If you like the idea of making a living from running a website, read this guide to monetizing a blog or website to get you started.
Monetizing A Blog or Website
IMAGE CREDIT: EMMA BRABROOK / FLICKR
Affiliate Marketing
Many bloggers and site owners use affiliate marketing to make money. It involves recommending or selling someone’s else’s product on your website, using an affiliate link. When your visitors click on your link and buy the product you recommended, you get a commission from the seller. The fee you receive could be between 30% and 70% of the purchase price of the item, but some say that the average is closer to 15% or 20%. But how do you go about finding products to promote? You can use websites such as Commission Junction and ShareASale to find people looking for promoters. However, you can use other methods, such as looking at the affiliates that your competitors use and contacting them about their affiliate programs.
Pay Per Click Advertising
Another type of advertising you can use is Pay Per Click (PPC), using Google’s AdSense program or a similar system. By registering with the program, you get a code to put on your site that will display relevant adverts. So if your site is about fashion, you should get related banners appearing on your website. Some site builders include easy ways to use AdSense on your site. To get AdSense, you need to register for the service. There are some rules you need to follow to get approved, including having a Google account and appropriate content you can monetize. Once you have ads displayed on your site, you will receive money when someone clicks on one of them. You can make a reasonable amount of money if you have enough visitors clicking on your ads. However, some people might find Google’s ads a bit too intrusive and decide to choose something more subtle.
Sell Ad Space
Instead of using someone else’s ad program, you can also sell your own advertising space. You can dedicate part of the space of your pages to advertising banners or text and create a pricing structure. Base your prices on how large and visible each ad space is. When you first get started, make it clear that space is for sale with placeholders that say, for example “Advertise here from $x per month”. If you get a lot of traffic, this could be an excellent method for making money, and you could charge up to thousands of dollars a month for each space. You can use websites to let businesses know that you’re selling ad space, such as BuySellAds. You can also use Today’s Growth Consultant and other specialist services to help you monetize your site professionally.
Sell Digital Products
Selling a digital product through your site is an excellent way to increase your profits. It often costs much less to sell a digital product, as the cost of production is lower. If you decide to sell an eBook or something similar, you should certainly spend time and possibly money on producing a quality product. Once you’ve created it, it’s easily replicated every time someone downloads it. But because it’s going to be copied over and again, it’s worth taking the time to get it perfect. So, if you’re making an eBook, you should make sure you get the formatting, editing, front cover and everything else correct. Your product should be relevant to the content of your site. You should also have an optimized landing page for your product, and a secure and easy payment system. You might choose to use digital selling websites to help you out.
Donations and Sponsors
Another way to get the money rolling in is to straight out ask people to give it to you. However, you need to make it clear what you’ll be using the money for. For example, you might ask for donations towards hosting costs or the production of new digital products. Many people who work on the internet, running blogs or producing podcasts or videos, release their content for free and ask for money to help them keep going. It can be difficult to make money like this, however. So don’t make it your only source of income. You can use a payment service like PayPal to allow people to donate through PayPal or their credit card.
Sponsored Posts and Reviews
When you have enough visitors to your blog, businesses might be interested in writing sponsored posts for your site. They’ll pay you to host an article on your blog that advertise their product, either outright or by using links in the content. You can also get paid for reviewing people’s products. They might compensate you with money, or they might offer you free products. Check to see if you need to include a disclaimer on review posts, to make it clear that you’re receiving compensation.
Set Up an Online Store
If you don’t mind dealing with sales, you can set up an online store. Even if you sell physical products, you don’t have to handle anything yourself. You could use a service that ships your products for you, such as a t-shirt printing website. You don’t need to manage anything except the website side of it. The service will take a cut of your profits and then send you your share of the money at the end of the month.
Affiliate marketing is the ultimate way to monetize a blog. The only problem is you need to convert visitors into sales. For that, you need to build a proper email list.
Great share btw!