Making money from a website can be one of the best ways to make money. Your website does the work and you make sales automatically 24 hours a day! Well, that’s the dream anyway. But before this can happen you need to put the hours in on your website. There’s two basic ways to generate income from a website; from advertising or from referral marketing. If you have your own products or business you can promote it from your website too, of course. But without your own products or service to offer, the best ways are through referral marketing and advertising.

Referral marketing lets you earn money from referring customers to other people’s products and services. Affiliate marketing and drop shipping are two examples of this. Or you can place advertising on your website and earn from clicks made by your visitors. Google’s Adsense program is the most popular program to offer this service.

With advertising through clickable adverts, you only make tiny amounts for each click. So you’ll need to build traffic to your site organically. This takes a lot of work and time. Alternatively you can use affiliate marketing and promote products and services from your website. This can work much quicker, especially if you use high ticket affiliate products and recurring income affiliate programs. But let’s start by looking at traffic which is the number one roadblock for anyone looking to making money from a website.

Making Money From A Website – Traffic Generation

To make money from a website you need people to visit your site. Without regular visitors to your website you’ll never make any money from it. If you choose to go the affiliate marketing route, your visitors will need to be engaged with your content and you’ll need to offer products or services which are well aligned with your content. Otherwise visitors won’t be interested in buying from you. With advertising placements you can write about pretty much anything. Adverts will reflect your content and show according to your visitors searches and the content you provide.

The two main types of attaining website traffic are paid and free. With paid traffic you can turn it on much like a tap. But you’ll need to monetise your website with products. You can’t earn from advertising revenue while paying for advertising because you simply won’t earn enough to make it work. So if you’re thinking of using paid marketing, you’ll need to use products which pay well. See affiliate marketing business models. With a good recurring income from affiliate products, and a range of high value offerings, it’s much easier to use paid marketing and make a profit from your site, especially when using paid marketing to promote it.

With lower value affiliate products, or if you use only advertising to monetise, it can be more difficult because paid traffic is more out of reach.

Making Money From A Website – Email Marketing

One of the best strategies when making money from a website is to use email marketing. With email marketing, you can obtain your website visitors email address in exchange for something you give away on your site. This gives you a number of advantages:

• You can extend the time period with which a website visitor might make a purchasing decision
• You can build trust and offer value to your email subscribers
• It gives you control over your traffic – once you build a list you can contact your list without paying for the traffic.

On a website, someone only has a small “window” of opportunity to make a buying decision. When they leave they are gone forever! But once on an email list, this is extended to days, weeks and even months and years. See also the power of email marketing.

A Google Compliant Website vs. a blog

A Google compliant website is one which has been approved for use with paid marketing. If you go down the organic route and become a blogger, this isn’t so important. But if you decide to use paid marketing platforms: YouTube, Facebook, Adwords etc., you’ll need a compliant site. Each advertising platform has it’s own rules and regulations regarding compliance. In general, you’ll need to show your site is authentic and you comply to the GDPR, data protection and privacy rules. This generally means using a privacy policy, GDPR pop up and stating your disclaimer on your website. Check with the platform you’re going to be using for the full terms and conditions.

If you get this wrong it can mean an advertising platform will suspend your account and you won’t be able to advertise with them. So it’s worth crossing your t’s and dotting your i’s!

With a blog website, compliance isn’t so important although it will still have an effect. On a blog website, your traffic comes organically from Google and other search engines. SEO – search engine optimisation is more important if your traffic is coming from the search engines for free. Site speed is also an important factor in either case but particularly with an organic blog. Slow site speed will considerable impact your SEO. You can get plugins to help with site speed and other aspects of helping with organic traffic. See best free blog plugins for WordPress.

Fast Vs. Slow

To make money from a website is a great achievement. It can mean time and financial freedom. But there are fast ways of doing this and much slower ways. As you would expect, the fastest route is much more expensive. See fastest legit way to make money online. With this route you would use a high ticket sales funnel and paid marketing to run traffic directly to a landing page. From there you collect subscriber’s information and promote products through your email list.

This technique requires some testing and measuring but once you are at a positive return, you can scale up by increasing your advertising budget. With a global reach and digital products, the sky is the limit! But make sure you’re profitable before increasing your advertising budget. Once a $100 advertising spend produces $200, you’re in a great position to increase your budget and double your money each time. You’ll also need to invest in a high value product range in order to maximise your revenue potential. See SFM digital business system to learn more.

A slower route might involve a different method. If a high ticket product range is out of reach, you can build up your traffic more slowly by using organic traffic methods which are much cheaper or free. See 22 ways to promote affiliate products. Free marketing strategies typically take much longer to take effect than paid traffic. Plus they are often less scalable. But over time, if you put the effort in, you can build a digital footprint of content which keeps generating you sales for years to come.

If you choose your affiliate products wisely, and use subscription affiliate programs, you’ll keep getting paid even years after making the sale!

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