Wondering how to monetise a website? There’s a few ways you can make money from a website. Many business owners use a website to attract more customers to their business. Or, if you have a product of your own to sell, you can sell more of it from a website.
But what if you don’t have a product or a business to sell? That’s ok too because you can sell other people’s products from a website, a business known as affiliate marketing. You can also sell advertising space from a website using many programs which offer the ability to place ads.
Once your website is doing well you can also offer other marketers advertising space on your site too. You can offer up sponsored posts to other content marketers who are looking for exposure and backlinks.
You can even place an e-commerce store on your website which sells products through drop shipping (similar to affiliate marketing). Depending on your traffic flow and the type of website you have and your topic, you can earn a fair amount from any of these strategies.
How To Monetise A Website – Affiliate Marketing
Affiliate marketing is one of the most popular ways website owners make money from their content. With affiliate marketing, websites can earn through referrals. So by placing a banner advert on your site, you can refer customers to other people’s products and services. When you make a sale through your unique referral link, you earn a percentage of the revenue from the sale. Affiliate links can be placed in the copy too linking people to relevant products according to your content (and visitors).
With affiliate marketing you’ll need to find products and services which are suitable for your audience. So if your website is about SCUBA diving for example, you can promote SCUBA diving gear from it. So long as you offer something relevant to the content, you can be on to a winner with affiliate marketing.
Affiliates also use email marketing to get people to make purchases from an email list. On a website, a visitor often will leave within a few minutes. If you can get their email address, you can follow up with them via email. This gives you a greater chance of making money from your visitors over the longer term. See also the power of email marketing.
How To Monetise A Website: Google Adsense
Google’s Adsense program is one of the most popular ways you can monetise a website with advertising. By joining the program and placing some code on your website, you can instantly have advertising revenue from clicks on those ads made by your visitors. You only get a small revenue from each advertising click though; so you’ll need a lot of traffic to make even a small regular amount from using ads.
Adsense can be used in combination with other revenue generating methods through, such as affiliate marketing. There’s also other similar platforms to Google Adsense which operate a similar methodology. Here’s a few competitors to Google’s Adsense program:
- Media.net
- PropellerAds
- Amazon Native Shopping Ads
- Adversal
- Sovrn //Commerce (Formerly VigLink)
- Skimlinks
How To Monetise A Website: Sell Ad Space Directly To Marketers
This is perhaps a little more tricky than simply placing Google Adsense on your site and waiting for the money to come in. But if you’re a more established website, you can earn more from this strategy than using third party platforms such as Adsense.
When selling space directly, publishers promote a retailer’s product or service on their site so they stand to receive 100 percent of the advertising revenue. You can also set your own pricing and remain in control over decisions on how to charge buyers and which payment method is most desirable.
How do you find people who would like to advertise on your website? First, create an “Advertise here” landing page with your terms and conditions. You can also check similar blogs in your niche and see what brands sponsor those platforms. Contact those brands directly and offer a partnership on your terms. You may also check the forums or chatrooms where website publishers share details and provide useful tips on how to advertise directly.
Although this may be more work than using a platform such as Adsense, it can potentially be a lot more lucrative too, if you’re prepared to do the heavy lifting upfront.
Sponsored Posts
Sponsored posts are articles that a blogger or website owner is paid to publish on their own sites by companies, businesses, and brands related to that site’s niche or topic.
A good source of sponsors for beginners to build up a portfolio and some experience is local businesses. Identify businesses in your niche who are located near you.
Once you have some experience under your belt, look at partnering with marketing and PR agencies. Once you have formed a good relationship with one or two of them and have provided a top notch service, you should get more work from them in the future.
You can also use sponsorship market sites such as:
These companies are basically “middlemen” who provide the companies who want more publicity if you want to solely focus on writing the content rather than scouring for sponsors yourself.
Ecommerce Stores
A website can be monetised quite easily with an e-commerce store too. Shopify is a good place to start if you want to create a simple plug-and-play e-commerce store which either works with affiliate marketing or drop shipping. You can even use API plugins which connect your store directly to the distributor so that when a purchase is made, the order is automatically started from the wholesalers.
See also affiliate marketing vs drop shipping.
An e-commerce store may or may not be suitable depending on your website traffic. Ideally choose a monetisation strategy which suits your audience.
