How to make money from websites

How can you make money from websites?

Make money from websites by building them yourself or hiring someone to build a website for you. Monetize your website through display ads, affiliate marketing, sponsored posts, memberships, eCommerce, or selling it for profit. Focus on driving traffic to your website, because without traffic you won’t make money.

Imagine, being able to create a passive income website. Your website makes more money than your 9-5 job and with less effort on your part.

Making money from websites is possible if you know what you’re doing.

Luckily for you, I’m going to break down the basic steps for making money from websites. I’ll show you some of the best strategies for websites and how much you could make. With enough hard work, you could be making passive income from your website.

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How to make money from websites

In order to make money from websites, you can either build a website yourself or hire out the work. Your website is going to need traffic in order to succeed regardless of monetization method. Monetize your site through display ads, selling products, sponsorships, memberships, eCommerce, or selling it for profit.

Building a website takes either time or money. Luckily for you, building a website is easier than it’s ever been. YouTube has been my best resource for learning about websites and it’s completely free.

The basic steps for creating a website includes choosing monetization, determining your niche, getting traffic, reviewing analytics, and increasing your monetization. Follow the steps and you can build profitable websites.

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Choose monetization strategy

Monetization is the ultimate goal for website creators. At the end of the day, you’re building a website that you can make money from. Luckily for you, there are plenty of ways to monetize a website including display ads, selling products, memberships, and selling websites for profit.

Display Advertising

Display advertising is the easiest and most passive form of earning money with websites. Simply produce the best content, get visitors, and earn for ad impressions. You’ll need an ad network to place ads on your website.

You can increase your ad earnings by doing the following:

• Write advertiser friendly content. Content needs to be focused on products or use keywords that buyers would bid on. Avoid diary style blog posts which have no buyer intent.
• Join a premium ad network. Premium ad networks like Ezoic can earn you more per website visitor.
• Target American audiences. More advertising dollars are spent in the United States than any other country. Therefore, you need to target American if you want the highest ad revenue.
• Avoid controversy. Most advertisers don’t want to spend money on websites that slam brands. Instead, they would rather spend their money on websites that promote brands in a positive light.

Affiliate Marketing

Affiliate marketing is the process of selling products for companies in exchange for a commission. Casually link to products on your website content and earn when someone buys the product. Common ways of promoting products include review posts or having a favorites page. 

Review posts review the product and help someone walk through the purchasing decision. Ideally, you should write a good review such that people want to buy the product after reading. You can link to the review posts on other articles across your website.

Favorites pages have a long list of resources that your audience might find interesting. Some of these resources can be affiliate products.

You don’t have to be salesy when it comes to selling affiliate products. Simply give your visitors 2-3 sentences on why the product would benefit them.

Sponsored Content

Brands are willing to pay you to produce content around their product. The more website visitors you have, the more desirable it is to advertise sponsored content on your site.

For example, you might have a dog blog that gets 100,000 visitors every month. Dog food manufacturers might reach out to you to write a review of their newest line of dog food. You write an unbiased opinion about the dog food and get paid when you publish the article.

Companies like Izea exist to help content creators get matched up with major brands.

Sponsored content works best for established websites. You can earn more money having 1,000,000 website visitors per month than if you had 10,000.

Membership Website

Membership websites can be difficult to pull off, but very profitable. A successful membership website provides content you can’t find anywhere else. You receive monthly income for providing the best content available.

The amount of money you can charge depends on how much value you’re providing. The more value you provide someone, the more you can charge.

For example, a meal plan website might be able to charge $5 per month. However, a stock picking website with a good success rate might be able to charge a couple hundred dollars.

Sell your products

Just like affiliate marketing, you can make money selling your own products. Determine what your audience is interested in and create a paid product. Promote your product by sending an email, adding a product page, using your sidebar, etc.

eCommerce

ECommerce websites are profitable if you can work the logistics. You will need to source products, get customers, and ship products. The best eCommerce stores have consumable goods which can lead to repeat business.

Sourcing products is one of the hardest parts about starting an eCommerce website. You could use a dropshipping supplier or attend a tradeshow to find suppliers.

Depending on your strategy, you’ll need to store products. Most individuals can start out in their home or purchase a storage unit.

Flip or sell websites for profit

Some people are really good about boosting website performance. You could purchase a website, improve it, and then sell it for profit. Other people create websites with the intention of selling them from the start.

Determine your niche

Your website niche is going to be what your website is about. Are you going to talk about personal finance, fitness, pokemon cards, shoes, or the best vehicles for purchase?

For example, your website could be about cars. You might discuss topics like which SUV is the best or if you should buy a Toyota or Honda. Some car websites talk about new cars and others talk about car maintenance.

You want to make sure your website has a ‘theme.’ Website visitors don’t want to come to your website for a cake recipe and then see articles for fishing equipment.

Instead, it’s much easier to boost your website traffic by talking about similar topics. Your website visitor might come for a cake recipe and stay longer for cupcake tips.

Get website traffic

Website traffic is important if you want to grow your business. The more website visitors you have, the more income potential you have. Get website traffic from search engine optimization, social media, or paid advertising.

Review website analytics

Website analytics can tell you how your website is performing and what’s working. Find the content or traffic sources that are working and keep doing it! Analytics will help you make informed decisions.

For example, you might have a blog and you’re focusing on Search Engine Optimization and Pinterest. SEO might bring you 1,000 visitors from an article and Pinterest might bring in very little. Therefore, you should focus more on SEO and spend less time on Pinterest.

Increase monetization or traffic

At some point you will have an established website which has visitors and makes money. Your next step is to either increase traffic or improve monetization to grow your revenue. Small tweaks to your website can make big changes to your income.

For example, you might have a website bringing in 100,000 pageviews and $3k in income through ads. You might add an affiliate product to your sidebar which boosts your income to $4k per month.

Alternatively, you can boost your website traffic to earn more money. Either way, to keep growing you need to get more visitors or add monetization.

How much money can you make from a website?

Websites should be able to make about $1,000 for every 30,000 pageviews. Earning $1,000 for every 30k pageviews is done through a combination of ad revenue, product sales, or sponsored content.

Which type of website is most profitable?

The most profitable websites are the websites that provide the most value to website visitors. Money is exchanged for value, so your website needs to be helpful, insightful, and of good quality. However, websites which sell digital products can easily be one of the most profitable.

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Summary: How to make money from websites

As you can see, there is money to be made from websites. You can make money through display ads, affiliate marketing, eCommerce, selling products, memberships, or selling sites for profit.

First, you need to determine your monetization strategy and your niche.You will then need to drive traffic to your website, because more traffic means more money. Review your analytics to see what’s working and what isn’t. Do more of the things that are working!

Most websites can make $1k for every 30k pageviews. However, the most profitable websites are the ones that produce value to visitors. Selling products is one of the best ways to make the most amount of money through websites.