For many people, the most compelling reason for creating a website is to make money with it. Many people earn all their income from websites, and earn a tidy sum at that. If you’ve never made money with a website before, the prospect probably seems daunting. The first question is the biggest: where do I start?
The first thing to say is don’t pay for any get rich quick scheme that promises to reveal the secrets known only to a select few. There are no secrets and the methods used to make money online are very easy to understand. Implementing them, however, is the tricky part!
There are a few main methods that you can make money with a website:
- selling advertising
- displaying pay per click adverts
- selling your own products
- selling products for a third party
- selling membership subscriptions to your site
- selling links
Most people make money online using one or more of the above methods. And most of those people own portfolios of websites – not just one website.
Let’s explore each of these money making methods.
Selling Advertising
If you have a site that gets a lot of visitors, other sites that are in a similar niche to yours would probably benefit from advertising on your site. Doing so gives the other site more exposure and will attract more visitors to it. Marketplaces for buying and selling advertising space can usually be found on webmaster forums. Here are a few:
Selling advertising on your site is as easy as registering as a member on one of the above forums and then creating a thread inviting people to contact you about advertising on your site. If you have a high traffic website, then you may find that other webmasters approach you to ask if they can advertise on your site. This happens frequently with big name websites.
Pay Per Click Advertising
The most popular pay per click advertising is Google Adsense. Adsense displays adverts on your web pages that are related to the content published there. This means that if you have a web page about shoes, Adsense will display adverts related to shoes on that page. Every time a visitor clicks on one of the adverts, you get paid. Lots of people are making lots of money from Adsense.
For example, this website was sold recently in a website auction marketplace. The revenue that the owner claimed the site was making was $3,110 / month.
Selling Your Own Products
If you make your own products you can sell them on your website. You can get as creative as you like regarding those products. Here are the kinds of things that people are currently selling on their websites:
- physical products, for example paintings, art and craft etc
- digital products like video training, intructional ebooks
There are easy to use payment mechanisms available that you can take advantage of that make it very easy to start charging for the products you offer, so incorporating a payment method needn’t be a barrier to entry.
Webmasters also use their websites to market the services they provide. In these cases, the website acts as a “lead generation” tool, but it’s actually the website owner who is making the money. The website itself doesn’t generate any revenue.
Selling Products For A Third Party
Selling products for a third party, otherwise known as affiliate marketing, is a very popular way of making money on the internet. All you have to do is join an affiliate network, and start displaying adverts for merchants’ products on your site. Each time a visitor to your site buys one of those products, you will earn a commission that will be a percentage of the sales price.
Generally speaking fewer people will buy affiliate products from your website than will click on Adsense adverts, but the payouts are higher. For the sake of comparison, many of my sites earn around $0.20 per click from Adsense, whereas other affiliate sites I own generate $20 per product sold.
Selling Membership Subscriptions
If the content on your site is really good, visitors may think it worth paying for access to it. Many website owners charge a monthly subscription fee that lets visitors view their content. Good examples of websites using the subscription model are lynda.com (video tutorials) and Safari Books Online (an online library of technical books).
Your content would have to really be in demand to be able to sell subscriptions for it, though.
Selling Links
Selling links on your website is a little like selling advertising. The difference here is that the people buying links do so to get higher rankings in the search engines. As a general rule, the more inbound links your website has, the higher it will rank. Webmasters know this and are prepared to pay for links that will help their sites rank more highly. The more popular your site, the more you will be able to charge for links you sell.
Brokers such as text-link-ads provide a marketplace where you can register your site so that potential link buyers can make contact with you. You can expect monthly rates of around $30 / month for each link sold. This amount will go up if you have a really popular site.
Get Started Making Money With Your Website
The quickest, and by far the most widely used, method of making money with your website is to place Google Adsense on your website. Once registered and accepted into the Adsense program, all you have to do is place the same piece of code on each page of your site. That code will enable your pages to display “contextual” adverts i.e. adverts related to the content on those pages.
Website Traffic
Success with any of the above methods depends on getting enough traffic and this is the challange that most webmasters fail to meet. It’s not that they don’t understand how to make money, it’s that they just can’t get enough visitors to their website. And it can sometimes be an uphill struggle to get those all important visitors.
Don’t be one of those – learn how to get more traffic!
