Are you planning to build a website but not sure how to monetize it?
Perhaps you have been getting several proposals from different website developers but you are wondering how you can justify the cost of your website development.
I have been asked many times by my clients & prospectives questions like:
“How can I make money online?”
“How can I monetize my website?”
“How to make money from my blog?”
“What are the different ways to make money through a website or blog?”
“Do I need to invest a lot in order to make money online?”
If you too have similar questions in your mind, this blog post may help you.
Here, I have shared the 9 most common & proven methods to monetize your website.
Please note that like any other successful business, all of these methods require consistent work to be done on your website and none of them is a shortcut to make money online.
#1 Selling products
The most popular web monetization method is to sell products online. You can hire a web developer and get your online store setup to add products & sell them online.
With the help of an e-commerce website, you can sell both physical & digital products.
Physical products can be anything like a camera, shoes, apparel, electronic items, fashion accessories, and lot more.
You can also sell digital products like downloadable software, ebooks, PDFs, music, videos, etc.
#2 Selling services
If you are good at anything, really anything, you can make money by providing your services online.
There are a number of services that you can offer on your website or blog to make money however below are some of the most popular services:
- Graphic designing/web designing
- Content writing
- Human resources fulfillment
- Financial consultancy
- Production & management consultancy
- Photography
- Legal services
- Yoga
- Tuition
- Wellness coaching
- Accounting
- Translation
If you don’t want to invest huge money on building an e-commerce website, you can consider creating a blog and upload your products to sell online.
You can also hire an independent website developer who can help you to create your website at an affordable cost.
#3 Affiliate marketing
What is affiliate marketing?
Selling someone else’s products or services and getting a commission on each sale is known as affiliate marketing.
The best thing with affiliate marketing is that you don’t need to invest money in stocking your own products.
You can just build a website and upload products from different merchants’ websites and send traffic to their website so that you can get the commission on each sale that your merchant makes through your referral link.
So you just need to think about your website development cost. You don’t need any inventory, expertise or anything else. All you need is a website and different ways to get traffic on it.
#4 Selling ad space
Selling ad spaces on your online assets like a website or a blog is yet another popular & traditional method to make money online.
But in order to earn money by selling ad spaces requires a good amount of traffic on your website or blog.
If your website is new with no or low traffic on it, you may not be able to attract publishers or companies who would be willing to pay you for showcasing their ads on your website.
The key here is to build a website and then work out on different marketing activities to get a good amount of traffic on it.
You may consider any or all of the below mentioned online marketing activities to get traffic on your website:
- Search engine optimization (SEO)
- Search engine marketing (SEM or PPC)
- Social media marketing
- Email marketing
#5 Selling sponsored posts
If you have a content-rich website or blog with lots of traffic every month, you can also invite other bloggers to publish their write-ups on your website and pay you on a weekly/monthly basis or per-blog basis.
Since linking your webpages to external websites can affect your SEO, you can add nofollow attributes to each link that you send to other bloggers or websites.
This way you can earn money through your website and at the same time you do not lose your SEO rankings.
#6 Accepting donations
You can also consider accepting donations from your website visitors if you work for a social cause or do research & provide useful material for free.
Integrating a donation form with your website is as easy as a few clicks. PayPal provides different ways for you to add a donation button on your website in just a few minutes.
You don’t even need any web designer to do this job. You can do it all yourself.
#7 Selling leads
Collecting & selling leads is another popular method to make money through your website. All you need is a website and some companies to tie up with so that you can collect leads from your website visitors and sell those leads to these companies.
For example, if your website or blog provides useful information & tips on real estate investment, you can tie up with some real estate agents to send them the leads that you will collect from your website.
One important thing to take care of while selling leads is that you must disclose while collecting the leads from your audience that you will share their details with your associates.
#8 Subscription-based content
If you provide useful data on your website that may help your visitors to achieve their goals, you can encourage them to subscribe to your website on a recurring payment basis so that they can receive this information as and when you publish them.
If your website has been developed using WordPress, you can use any of the free plugins available for newsletter subscription. It’s as easy as installing a plugin & setting some configurations.
However, if you need some customizations in the format or design of your newsletter widget, you may need to hire a web developer to do this job for you.
#9 Dropshipping
Dropshipping is another great way to make money through your website without investing any money on product manufacturing, procuring, or stock maintenance.
To sell products via dropshipping, all you need is an e-commerce website, preferably integrated with a 3rd party e-commerce platforms such as Aliexpress or eBay.
How dropshipping works?
- You set up an e-commerce store.
- You upload or import the products from other e-commerce platforms
- You sell the products on your online store & receive money from your customers.
- You place the order with the respective supplier on your chosen e-commerce platform and they arrange for the delivery to your customer, without mentioning their brand name.
Benefits of dropshipping
- No inventory is required.
- It provides you the ability to sell a wide range of products.
- It allows you to expand without any huge investment.
- It allows you to work from anywhere & anytime.
So what are you waiting for? Hire a dropshipping web developer and set up an e-commerce website.
Recommended Post: 5 Things to know while building a dropshipping website