Is making websites profitable? There’s many ways to make websites profitable yes. Building them can be done for others, or as a side hustle independently. You don’t even need to sell your own products from a website you build either. A business model called affiliate marketing allows anyone to sell other people’s products and services from a website. You can also monetise a website using advertising.
So you can profit from a website without having to touch it ultimately. Websites can be built to generate income around the clock because they operate 24 hours a day, 7 days a week all year round. When you sell affiliate products from a website, it doesn’t matter what timezone you’re in either and you can sell products globally without having to deal with customers or handle products yourself.
Digital products are incredibly popular with website creators and they allow anyone to make a purchase and accept delivery without postage, manufacturing or handling costs. This saving can be passed on to affiliates who promote them. This makes affiliate marketing a lucrative industry for those who learn the strategies to benefit from these online sales.
Is Making Websites Profitable?
Many website creators are also bloggers. They build a website and start blogging to attract an audience to sell their products to. A website without an audience isn’t profitable though and you’ll need build websites for a specific purpose if they are to be profitable.
With all the free website builders now available, it’s becoming more difficult to sell your services as a website builder, (to sell the sites). But that doesn’t mean people don’t still do it. Website building services are still hugely profitable. But making websites to sell other people’s products is a more viable business model. With traffic, websites can generate sales on complete autopilot once they are set up. So you’re probably wondering how to make a website profitable?
There’s a few ways to build websites which can make a profit. Plus, there’s lots of platforms which offer the ability to do this for you, (and charge for the privilege). Platforms such as Shopify offer to give you an instantly built e-commerce store, even if you don’t have any products. But you’ll pay a monthly premium for this, and there’s a problem if you don’t have any visitors.
Is Making Websites Profitable: Traffic
Making websites can be profitable yes. You can sell them, or build them in such a way as to become profitable. An affiliate website is built with the sole purpose to sell affiliate products. But without traffic, it won’t work. You need visitors to come to your website to make it profitable.
There’s around 600 million blogs on the internet at the moment and this number is steeply climbing. This makes it difficult for newcomers to get their slice of free traffic from the search engines.
To do so, you’ll need to create a lot of content on your site, to get traffic for free. The other way of getting visitors it to pay for it using the paid advertising platforms available online such as Google Adwords, Facebook, YouTube etc. But these platforms are costly, so you’ll need something worthwhile to risk your advertising budget on! If you’re selling low value products from a website, it can be prohibitive to do so.
This leaves a couple of main options, other than building sites to flip (sell): organic traffic vs PPC (paid traffic).
Organic Marketing Of A Website
To get free traffic to a website takes some time. You can build a website around certain keywords to attract a specific audience, and you can build content on the site too. See also how to build a niche website. Once your site is attracting traffic, that traffic is free! Therefore anything you make from the site is clear profit! But building free traffic takes time and the “sands” of Google’s search engines results are always shifting!
Blogging is a good strategy to attract free traffic from the search engines. Those visitors can then be monetised with either advertising or affiliate marketing products. See also affiliate marketing vs Google Adsense. Blogging does take some time though. Depending on your topic (and products), it can take months or years to build a site so it is organically profitable. A faster way is using paid marketing. Sending paid traffic to a site is both fast and scalable. But that means quite an investment, and you can lose money while you’re learning how to do it.
Pay Per Click Marketing
Pay per click (paid advertising) is another way you can send targeted traffic to a website and make it profitable. But you’ll need a good monetisation strategy and many affiliate products won’t pay enough to make it worth your while. For example, Amazon has one of the most popular affiliate programs. But Amazon’s affiliate commissions are pretty low; they only pay typically from 1%-10% on their items with many falling into the 1%-5% categories. With such a low commission structure, it can be very difficult to monetise an affiliate website with Amazon products while using paid marketing as your marketing strategy.
However, there are also affiliate products which pay much more. Digital products, for example pay affiliates 30%-40% commission on average on anything they sell. The most profitable digital products offer subscriptions and high ticket sales – giving them recurring commissions and larger than average commissions. With a recurring commission product, you can sell a item and continue to get paid for the lifetime of a customer, which can potentially be for years.