How to make money from your website – Discover the best ways to monetize your website or blog
If you truly want to make money as a marketer there is one thing that should be tattooed into your brain, and it’s this little phrase – “I only make money when I sell something”. As obvious as this may sound, it’s often forgotten by most beginner marketers. They either don’t know how to sell or they focus to much on irrelevant matters. If you are one of those marketers, then pay attention and read this post, as I’m about to share 5 highly profitable ways to make money from your website.
A lot of new affiliate marketers spend month after month trying to gain trust and credibility with their followers. They deliver content daily in an attempt to whip out the competition. They do everything what they’re supposed to do, but often they forget the most crucial part of being a marketer, and that is selling products and services.
They fail to keep ‘selling’ at the forefront of their minds and end up failing miserably at it. They are the proud owners of a website bulked out with content, but which are about as useful as an anorexia patient at a pie eating contest.
The only way to avoid this pitfall is to monetize your website efficiently. You need to sell your stuff over and over again to become profitable. It’s the only way to go if you want a thriving online business.
As you may know, there are several ways to monetize your website, all with varying degrees of efficacy. But in the end it all boils down to one thing, people have to buy something in order to see some money flowing into that darned PayPal account of yours.
And that’s exactly what I’m about to share in this blog post. I’ll show you 5 ways to make money from your website. Even better, if you implement these strategies you’ll be pulling in profits from your website on complete autopilot.
Imagine if you had a website selling products and services all making you money 24 hours a day. That’s what I call a money-making machine!
Now, it’s nice to think about, but even nicer to actually accomplish.
So without further ado…let’s get started!
1. Selling products as an affiliate
This is by far the easiest way to monetize your website because all you’ll be doing is selling other people’s products and collect a commission if you managed to make a sale.
You don’t have to deal with technical issues or unsatisfied customers. Your main goal is to create persuasive product reviews and pre-sell these products in your review. The sales page of the vendor will take care of the selling on your behalf.
There are several platforms that allow affiliates to promote products. The most common ones are:
You can find an overview of the best affiliate platforms over HERE
Once you’ve created your account on these platforms, it’s just a matter of adding your affiliate links into your blog posts. Just keep in mind to only review products that are RELEVANT to your niche.
There must be congruence with your niche and the products you’re recommending. You wouldn’t want to promote a cream to cure adult acne on a crafts blog just because the cream pays out a high commission.
Ideally, you should promote a mix of both tangible and digital products. It’ll also be wise to promote products on different platforms. This will ensure that all your eggs are not in one basket.
Far too many bloggers rely solely on Amazon Associates (with its piss poor commission rates). Then they cry and weep when Amazon decides to boot them out of the platform. Sadly, this happens more often than you might think. To make it even worse, the affiliates are not even given a reason as to why they were banned from the platform!
Always remember, never bet on one horse! Diversify!
2. Sell your own digital products
This is a highly lucrative way to make money from your website. You will need to learn some basic skills such as setting up a sales page, funnel, etc. You’ll also need to create a product and have good sales copy so that your sales conversions are high.
All this may seem like a lot of work… and it is… but the rewards are great.
You could do a lot of it yourself by using page builders such as Thrive Architect, Builderall or Beaver Builder. These types of software will help you immensely because they’re relatively simple and intuitive to use.
The truth is that you don’t need to do it all. The good news is that you can easily outsource all the technical parts of the process to freelancers on sites like Freelancer or People Per Hour, and focus on the things that you are good at.
While they are creating your funnel, you can put all your time and effort in creating your product. When it’s all completed, you just put the moving parts together and you’ll have a product to sell on your website.
After all, with all the content you’re posting and the trust that you’ve built, it’ll be much easier to sell a product created by you than by someone else, because your followers like and know you.
When you’re creating and selling your own products, you’ll have a lot more flexibility and be in control of:
- Price of the product
- Recurring fee or a one-time fee
- The depth of the sales funnel (upgrades, down sells, etc.)
- What the product will be about
- Customer service
It’s more work, but it’s also more freedom from a business standpoint… and exponentially more profit, if you’re good at it.
3. Selling tangible products
This way to make money from your website is very similar to the previous one, but instead of selling downloadable products you’re now focusing on physical products.
You’ll need a store with a shopping cart that calculates shipping and so on. This is slightly more complicated because you’ll need to fulfill the orders.
You might want to start with selling print-on-demand products or drop-shipping because these are both relatively hands-off processes. You will need to decide if you’re going to be maintaining inventory and mailing the products yourself, or if you’re going to use third party services such as Tee Spring or Fulfillment By Amazon (FBA).
You need to do some research on this as there are many options to choose from. Pick the method that suits your business. The main thing you must absolutely avoid is making lots of sales but the post office has become your second home.
4. Email marketing
Yep, here we are, good old email marketing. It appears that no marketing article can ever be complete without paying homage to email marketing, and that’s because it remains to be the most effective way to promote your offers. Unlike social media marketing which can be blocked by your audience, most people open and read their emails. You want to show up in their inbox…to sell!
Yes! Don’t forget the selling… but always remember to deliver engaging and valuable content in your emails. You’ll have to find the right balance between promotional emails and providing value for your subscribers. But first things first, you need to build a list from your website.
The easiest way to do this will be to use a software like Popt-In to display opt in forms, pop ups, floating bars and so on. This is a fantastic software that most marketers will benefit from.
Another excellent plugin is Post Gopher. Post Gopher allows your visitors to download your blog posts as PDF files which they can read later, in exchange for their email address.
Now it’s just a matter of connecting your opt in form to a reliable auto-responder platform like Getresponse and you’re good to go. Getresponse is one of the best and most trusted auto-responders in the business. They have been around for many years and they’ll provide all the tools you’ll ever need under one hood.
All the praises to Getresponse aside, just make sure that you have a way to collect emails on your website and you have an auto-responder sequence in place to nurture the people on your list. Do remember to promote your own products and affiliate products in your emails.
Why? Because you need to sell, sell, sell! That’s why!
More tips to convert your website visitors into subscribers can be found over HERE
5. Sell your own services
I saved this strategy for last because it has one drawback. As long as you’re providing a service which requires your direct involvement, you’ll be trading your time for money. You might not be aware of it, but providing services actually limits your earning potential, unless you have special commission arrangements in place with the people who hire you.
Common examples of services are content writing, copy-writing, graphic design, website development, video creation and voice over tasks. Most of these tasks take hours to complete and could quickly become very tiresome. You might be able to make a good amount of money, but ultimately, it’s still a job and not passive. But it’s your decision if you want to trade time for money .
A perfect alternative could be to provide software as a service and still make a hefty chunk of change without much involvement.
Or you could become a middleman and use service arbitrage to sell services that others deliver. You’ll charge a higher rate and hire a cheaper freelancer to do the job for you. You’ll then deliver that job to the person who hired you and you’ll pocket the difference.
Of course, you’ll need to ensure that the freelancer did a good job before delivering the work, so that your reputation is intact. Arbitrage is one of the oldest strategies to create an income for yourself. It’s perfectly legal and some people are making thousands by just applying this simple strategy.
As it goes, I did create some free training on service arbitrage a while ago, you can check it out over HERE
All of the above methods are really ALL you ever need to make six figures from your websites. You just need to implement 2 or 3 of them and you’ll definitely see some mind-blowing results over the next couple of months. Start working on them today, as you now have all the knowledge to make money from your website…
and remember to… SELL SELL SELL!
