How can you make a profitable website? Websites are the perfect little automated businesses. If you can make one which is profitable, it can generate cash for you and run 24 hours a day, 7 days a week without ever taking a break!
There’s two simple strategies to monetise a website which anyone can use, even without anything of their own to sell. You can either place advertising or sell something, such as an affiliate product. After trying out these two methods I personally found affiliate marketing was the way to go. With advertising, you need a huge amount of traffic to make it profitable and you need it for free.
But with affiliate products, you can choose pretty much any product to sell and some products even pay you recurring commissions. But before you can sell anything from a website, you first need traffic. Without anyone visiting your website, you won’t make any sales, that’s for certain! To get traffic you can either buy it, using paid advertising, or earn it by creating a lot of content and getting your website ranked on the search engines.
The products you choose to sell and the marketing method you pick will have a large say in your next step. With high value digital products which pay more, you can more easily make a profit using paid advertising for traffic. With lower valued products this is more difficult and so you might choose to build your site up organically. See also See best digital products for affiliate marketing and affiliate marketing business models.
How To Make A Profitable Website – Niche Website Building
I’m a big fan of getting traffic to my website for free and although this takes some time and effort, it pays off when that traffic is coming in. Once you start getting free traffic to your website, you can promote products from it and make sales in your sleep! The main strategy I use for getting free traffic is to build a niche website and start blogging. The niche website is built in a specific way in order to optimise the opportunity for free traffic.
Start out by finding a product you want to promote. You can find affiliate products online through platforms such as Clickbank, Amazon, JVZoo and so on. Also just do a search for affiliate program in any area/topic and you’ll find a product. Choose a product you want to promote and which you can fully get behind. This might be a product which is in an area of interest to you personally, which will definitely help when you’re using this strategy.
Once you have found a product, it’s time to build your website. You’re going to be building a blog website and creating a lot of content in it for free traffic. So it’s important to choose a topic you’re comfortable writing about.
How To Make A Profitable Website – Building A Website For Free Traffic
Head over to Google’s free keyword planner and type your main keyword (relating to your product) into the planner. Let’s use the example of a golf training related product. Type “golf training” into the planner (or your own keyword) and you’ll find a bunch of other related keywords which are already being searched for on Google. Dive into the results and pick out a term which has three criteria:
- It’s a potential buyer keyword – i.e. the search intent might lead to a sale
- There’s a nice amount of monthly traffic for it
- There’s not too much competition on Google in the search results for the term
I like the term “golf swing training aids“. It is a potential buyer search term, meaning the search intent will possibly lead to a sale, if you present a suitable product. Next, head over to Google and type your term into the search bar. You should get a number coming up at the top if you’re on a desktop computer. This will give you an idea of the relative competition for the term you have picked.
If you’re a fan of golf, and think you could create an information website on the topic, this could be a good term to choose. There’s relatively little competition on Google and lots of sponsored ads. This means that people are already selling products from this search (or at least very likely doing so).
How To Make A Profitable Website – Buying A Domain Name
The next step once you’ve chosen your keyword is to buy a domain name with your keyword in it. I’ve had a look for this one and the domain is up for sale, even though it has a hefty price tag! You can find domain names on Namecheap.com.
I probably wouldn’t spend so much on this domain as you can pick them up for around $10 or less! If your business is international, you’ll want a .com domain name ideally. However, here’s a .co.uk website which came up in the search results – probably because I’m in the UK. they have built and monetised a website using a similar strategy: https://www.golfswingsystems.co.uk/shop/golf-practice-aids/
With your domain name bought you can buy a hosting for a few dollars a month and point your domain name to it. Once set up start creating content and building out your website. You can find more about this topic here: how to build a niche website.
Buying Traffic For A Compliant Website
There’s another way to make a profitable website which involves paying for traffic. You can build a compliant website which follows the terms and conditions of the advertising platform you’re going to be using. YouTube, Google Adwords, Facebook all offer a means to send huge volume of traffic to a website almost instantly. You’re going to build an authority website which you will use for collecting emails.
An authority website is set up to offer some kind of information giveaway. One of the best ways of doing this is to use Convertri, a landing page builder which helps you build web pages which you can test and measure for lead generation.
Here’s an example of a landing page I’ve built using the software:
Why Build A List?
Most website visitors simply don’t buy from a website on their first visit. This means the larger percentage of your traffic will simply leave without having taken any action. When you’re paying for traffic, that means it’s going to get costly! Building an email list allows a website owner to connect with potential customers multiple times and over a much long time frame. Studies have shown that it takes several touch points before someone will buy something online.
So whether you’re buying traffic or using a niche website to get traffic organically, it’s always a good idea to build an email list of subscribers. You can get access to an autoresponder for free here. Autoresponders are email service providers which let website owners collect emails from their site.
By offering something of value on a website, you can encourage your visitors to opt in to your email newsletter. The autoresponder follows up with an automated series of email messages. Through these messages you can promote your affiliate products on complete autopilot!
Summary
So there’s two methods of generating an income from a website. Ideally with paid advertising, it’s better to have products which pay recurring and high ticket commissions, since this will enable you to recoup your advertising budget much more easily. With the organic method of generating traffic, there’s much more work involved.
You’ll need to build your site up with quality content and get your articles/blog posts ranking on the search engines. This takes time and the effort required will vary according to the other competing websites within your niche. But once you start generating free traffic, you can make sales on autopilot around the clock!
If you’re interested in starting an online business from scratch, and getting help and support, access this training resource.