Wondering how to earn from a website? Websites are great money making machines! If you can get them to work you’ll have a passive income source. Plus you can work on your site from anywhere. All you need is a laptop and an internet connection. But how do you turn a basic website into a cash generator? In this article I’m going to cover some of the best ways you can do this with or without paid advertising.
One of the biggest hurdles to making your website profitable is traffic. Simply throwing a website up doesn’t mean anyone will see it. A website without a marketing strategy is not going to attract any visitors whatsoever. It’s a little like opening a newsagents in the middle of the desert. No shoppers equals no profits. Not all visitors are going to make your shop profitable either and many of your website visitors will never buy from you. You also need the right kind of visitors so you can make your online virtual shop profitable.
How To Earn From A Website – Monetisation
Let’s start with how to monetise your website. Businesses can use a website to find new customers. But without a business or product to sell of your own, what do you do to turn visitors into cash? There’s two main ways you can do this when you have nothing to sell: advertising and affiliate marketing.
With advertising, you place ads on your site. When visitors click on them, you earn tiny amounts in advertising revenue. Google Adsense is one of the best known places where anyone can use ads to make money from their website content.
Although you only earn tiny amounts from each click, with enough traffic to your site, and many clicks, this can add up. Plus, this is passive income once you’ve got it running properly.
The other strategy is to sell something from your site using affiliate marketing. Affiliates sell other people’s products online for a share of the profit. Anyone can become an affiliate by joining an affiliate program and promoting their affiliate link on their website. See also affiliate marketing vs Google Adsense.
How To Earn From A Website – Traffic
Setting up your monetisation strategy on a website is really the easy part. It can be done within a few hours. Simply place your affiliate banners on your site, or place the advertising code to allow adverts to show. The main factor in earning from a website isn’t the monetisation factor, although that’s an important part of it. The real issue which many would-be online marketers fail with is getting traffic to their site.
There’s many ways to attract visitors to your website including blogging, PPC (pay per click advertising), back linking, SEO (Search engine optimisation), use of social media, email marketing and so on. Unless you get the right kind of visitors coming to your site in large enough numbers, you won’t make much from it. So even with a well monetised site, it will just sit there and not earn any money!
There’s two types of traffic too. One of them is the kind that buys your products and the other will never buy. You want the former!
How To Earn From A Website – Knowing Your Audience
Since advertising on a website pays so little, it’s well worth putting something on your site which you can sell. Choose an affiliate product which aligns with your website topic.
Once you’ve picked a product to sell, and there’s thousands of affiliate programs to choose from, you can learn about your target audience or customer avatar. What is the customer avatar? Your customer avatar is the “perfect customer”. They are the type of person who loves what you’re selling and will keep buying from you, time and time again.
With a website you have access to an international audience, assuming you can attract them to your website. So it’s important to identify those specific online visitors who are most likely to buy from you.
Otherwise you’ll waste a lot of time and resources attracting the wrong people who will never buy. Once you have done this, getting that segment of the online marketplace to visit your website becomes easier. If you don’t first identify those people, you’ll be spending money/time attracting anyone and everyone to your website.
How To Earn From A Website – Content Creation & SEO
Search Engine Optimisation (SEO) is one of the best ways you can get people to visit your website at very low cost. However, it can also be a huge challenge getting your content seen on the search engines such as Google, Bing, Duckduckgo.com and so on. See also how to build a niche website.
Creating content to attract your target audience can take a lot of time and effort, and traffic is never guaranteed from the search engines. In a competitive niche, it’ll take much longer to get noticed. There’s over 600 million blogs on the internet so there’s a lot of noise. To stand out expect to create a lot of content over several months or years. See how long does it take to make money blogging.
Paid marketing is a much faster way to get visitors to your blog. However, you risk capital trying to turn that traffic into sales. So if you’re going to run ads, it’s better to send traffic to a sales funnel instead, where you can follow up with email marketing.
Email Marketing
Most website owners use email marketing to help them sell affiliate products. On a website, there’s a form or popup which leads to a freebie giveaway. Once you sign up to it, you join an email list. Affiliates market their products to their list of subscribers. An email list is a powerful way to turn a normal looking website into a money generating tool. On a website, most visitors stick around only for a few minutes. But once on an email list, the marketer can send out automated messages for an unlimited time period.
I’ve sold products to my email list even years after a subscriber has joined it. This just wouldn’t be possible from a website alone. On a list you can also build greater trust through delivering value driven messages designed to help subscribers with a specific problem. Join my email list for more information on building an online business from scratch.
PPC – Pay Per Click Advertising
With PPC – pay per click advertising, you spend money to send traffic to a website. Ideally you’ll earn more money back from selling your affiliate products than you spend in advertising budget. This can be tricky because much of the traffic you send to a website will leave without having taken any action. So to get around this problem, marketers use PPC advertising to send people directly to a landing page where they collect the visitor’s email address.
Now that visitor is an email subscriber and there’s a far greater chance they will eventually become a customer and buy one of your affiliate products.
Landing pages are a good idea because you can test and measure the response of the visitors. By cross testing different designs, you can optimise for maximum efficiency to lower the cost of obtaining a subscriber.
A landing page works well to get people on your email list because there’s fewer options for them them once they arrive on the page. On a website, there’s more options. The visitor can look around and browse your site. So they are less likely to take the action you want them to if you send them to a website, rather than a landing page.
High Earning Affiliate Products
Not all affiliate products are alike. Many affiliates will head straight to Amazon, since it’s a well-known affiliate site. But Amazon’s affiliate commission rates are pretty low and you’ll only earn a single commission from a sale. You can earn much more if you decide to sell digital products and those which carry subscription payments and high value. Subscription affiliate products can give you recurring payments. So each sale gives you a monthly income, not just a single commission.
High ticket affiliate marketing products pay much larger than average commission, so they are a good choice if you’re going to use PPC advertising, since you can more easily recoup your ad budget and make a profit.
Learn more about starting your own online business from scratch here and learn how to earn from a website.