8 Ways to Make Money with Your Website

Many people will ask me what I do for business and how it is that I spend most my time enjoying being at home or traveling on the likes of wine and tourism trips internationally – This I can put down to how I have mastered monetising the websites that I run and how I have invested time to build a healthy client base.

Firstly it is not a quick fix or easy solution to making money from a website, especially if you are starting from scratch. You will require patience, be able to accept mistakes and pick yourself up and start again, deal with slow streams of income (so you may not be able to leave your 9-5 job just yet) and ultimately stick at things and dedicate plenty of time and effort… This all may sound a mountain to climb, but it is a peak very much worth reaching as once you have a website that makes you more money that what you can earn working full time then the rewards are amazing both financially and to your lifestyle and those around you. It is also important to have some knowledge on SEO, link building is important. Check out this guide to ethical SEO techniques.

So let us look at the ways in which your website can start earning you money. We are taking things here from a point that you have your own website, have built yourself an audience and you are ready to now start making money, if you want to read up on ways to build a busy website then read here:

1. Affiliate Marketing. This is quite possibly the most common way people make money from their websites and the audiences they have built. Usually, you will advertise a product / service on your website, ideally relevant to the topic of your website, and click throughs and purchases from the ads you display you will gain a commission from. Affiliate marketing can include links on blogs, banners, tweets and links in videos on YouTube etc.
2. Google Adsense. I have used this for many years on some of my website and it is a simple to use, pay per click style, that runs from your unique ID code on your website so that you can monitor your clicks on banners and the money you earn from each click. You will generally need to have a lot of traffic to make decent money with Adsense from Google, but it is a great bonus route to choose to bolster your monthly income and Google will do most of the work by showcasing banner ads it believes browsers to your website wishes to engage with.
3. Sponsored Blogs. Another popular route these days due to the increased importance of content marketing online is sponsored blogs. If you have a blogging website with a lot of traffic then it is likely you will be on the radar of content marketing companies looking to share sponsored blog posts with you and your audiences. You will be asked to share on your website a sponsored blog with live links on from any topic such as online casinos to makeup and prices you will receive can vary from just £10 to £100’s. Sometimes you are asked to write the blog piece yourself which you can then charge a bit more for or the company will give you a blog to simply copy and paste on to your website.
4. Selling Banner Advertising Space. Another simple route to making money with your website. If you have lots of traffic and that traffic is target then there will be businesses out there wanting to get in front of them and if you have advertisement spaces on your website you then have banner placements to sell – Just like a newspaper or magazine will sell ad space, make sure your website enables you to add banner placements. I have any anything between £50 to £1,000 per month paid for banners on my websites, obviously the higher the banner is placed on the website or the bigger the banner is then the more you can charge!
5. Email lists. Usually many websites forget this trick and that is to build subscribers thus build your target audience. Each website you have should have an easy to see and use subscription button for browsers who wish to receive your newsletters and updates. By building subscribers you are building an audience so that you can then market out the fact you can do email marketing for clients which many companies choose as their most important route to new business. Depending on how target your email list is you can charge anything between £100 to £10,000’s to email your database on behalf of your clients. It pays to get a good email marketing software so you can easily manage your email database once it starts to grow so that you can both send more professional looking emails and you know how has deleted themselves from your emails, bounced, marked as spam etc.
6. Sell your own products! Of course, it is a big reason for many people to build their websites… They want to sell their products / services! A website is a great lead generation tool and if you clearly mark what you do on your website and it is easy for browsers to make a purchase / enquiry then your website can start earning you money. E-Commerce is usually the route to go down here especially for selling products, many softwares / plug-ins offer great solutions for this enabling you to have your very own live store online taking instant payments and managing all the admin for you so that you only have to package your items and send them off to the buyer! You can also look at selling tickets this way, e-books, training videos etc. You can look at giving away valuable information to tempt in readers / viewers and then sell the premium content which is also a popular way to monetise your website and attracting in target audiences.
7. Donations. If you have a great website that people love then it is likely people will want to support you. Let us say you have a website based on collecting rare sci-fi memorabilia and you share your expertise by blogging and reporting on hard to find items globally so do not really have a revenue source built in to the website, then you can simply add a ‘Make a Donation’ button to your website so to keep it running for people to enjoy – The likes of PayPal have options for this so people can donate securely.
8. Selling your website. You may not want to explore this route just yet, but if you start building big audiences, big email subscription databases, good monthly income then your website has a value and will be of interest to investors. Say for instance you have a website that gets 50,000 hits monthly, has 10,000 subscribers and takes around £2,000 revenue monthly then you can be looking at anything between 10 to 20 times your monthly revenue as it’s value plus a bit on top maybe for the database (even more if you have built strong audiences on social media). Do not forget though that once it is sold then it is sold and you have lost that monthly income! Though, if as per the example given you may have approx £30,000 in your pocket (based on 15 x monthly revenue valuation) so you can simply invest in building a new website and building something bigger based on your past skills and knowledge.