The two most frequent reasons to start your website are business promotion on one hand, and a hobby of some kind on the other. The first type of website is aimed at helping entrepreneurs or companies promote their business and products and thus increase their incomes. And the other type isn’t narrowly focused on earning but on personal, usually artistic, expression.
However, a website made out of a hobby doesn’t have to stay in this realm. We can often witness that the happiest people are those who have been able to transform their beloved leisure interests into a profitable business or a career.
Traffic means more money for any site. As long as it’s qualified. The more longtail queries drive traffic to your site, the more educated and lower down the funnel (closer to purchase) the visitors will be. You can achieve this by expanding your website content with more long-tail targeting via asking and answering questions. By wrapping them into Schema code they can show on the search results.
Any website owner interested in monetizing their website can do it with some effort and a few good tips. So here are the top seven ways of making your website more profitable regardless of its purpose.
“Pay-Per-Click” Advertisements
This method is among the easiest ones to manage. You only apply to AdSense, and Google manages the rest. Namely, it will set a code to your website which will make sure that your visitors see relevant ads. So, depending on your industry and narrow focus, your visitors will see related advertisements.
A hairdresser’s customers will see hair product ads, and a dentist’s clients will see dental hygiene promotional material. And when any of the visitors click the ad, you get a certain amount of money.
In other words, you’ll have a passive income as long as you have frequent visitors.
Sell Ad Space
This implies selling your ad space directly to a party interested in acquiring a channel for online promotion.
This type of ad space selling involves charges depending on the number of impressions rather than clicks. In other words, you will determine the cost of an impression, and then receive the payment for all people who visited your website and thus saw the advertisement.
To find your future client, you will look for companies or entrepreneurs who are interested in sponsoring blogs or websites.
Sell a Service or a Product
When you start your e-commerce website, the primary purpose is to sell a product or service. But you can also use it to create your own products.
This is the path that might be easiest for artists, craftspeople, tutors, and everyone else who has something specific to offer. Or if you are a technology-oriented person, then perhaps brainstorming several web scraping project ideas, and reselling such services can be extremely profitable. It is also among the most profitable ways to sell your product since there are no third parties to cut into your profit on the account of distribution.
A somewhat difficult part here will be handling the design of your product and the landing page of your website so as to make them look attractive and reliable, so you might want to hire a UI design consultant.
Sell Sponsored Posts
Another method common among influencers is selling sponsored posts. This is when a company contacts you with a proposition for you to create content that would promote their product or service.
It’s up to you to decide who you promote. So, be selective of who you work with.
Bear in mind that you should accept writing only for the products or companies that are related to your field. However, here you’ll be paid per post, not per reaction the post has produced.
Affiliate Marketing
This type of marketing is what most of the popular influencers, bloggers, and vloggers use to earn through their content.
The first step to starting an affiliate campaign is to choose a product that you are satisfied with and that you would like to promote. At this stage you should arrange the type of offer you’ll run, i.e. will the company pay the promotion costs per click or per acquisition (CPC and CPA respectively).
Then comes the content. It should be engaging and interesting, but also contain a link towards the purchase page on the company’s site. It might look too aggressive to you, but don’t worry, the audience is already accustomed to this form of marketing thanks to the numerous influencers across the web.
Lead Generation
Lead generation means finding potential customers for companies in your field that you collaborate with. So, again, targeting customers and companies is crucial since this is practically a matching game and if you don’t have the right profiles on both sides you won’t get the desired results.
Firstly, you’ll connect to the companies that are searching for this form of cooperation. Then, you need to create attractive content that will invite your visitors to take action towards your goal.
A call to action button will then lead them to a form where they’d leave their contact info thus making it available to your partner company.
These contact details can then be utilized by the company to contact the prospective customers directly and offer them their product. If done properly, this method can produce numerous new clients both for you and your partner.
Flip Websites
This isn’t a method strictly linked to the virtual world. For example, this way of handling sales of real estate is quite popular. You’d buy an older house or a flat, renovate it, and then sell it for a significantly larger price.
The same goes for websites. You buy a domain, create a website, do some optimization, gather followers, and then sell it when it’s fully built for a noticeable profit.
But before those websites are ready to be flipped, you will need to create a coming soon/under maintenance page for each of them so that you can keep everything under wraps until it’s ready to be seen by the public. To make that happen, you can use a tool like Coming Soon & Maintenance Mode.
This plugin will come with a drag-and-drop builder and 170+ themes which will enable you to get everything done in a couple of minutes. But that is not all, you will also have the possibility of using images directly from Depositphotos, best-in-class SEO setup, autoresponder and emailing services, and many other features that will make your coming soon/under maintenance pages effective and one-of-a-kind!
Conclusion
There are some monetization methods that require more time and effort, and those that need less work. Depending on your goals and resources you’ll find on our list the most suitable approach for you.
In case you plan to focus on earning solely through your website, you should consider going for the most demanding methods since they will be also the most effective. Either way, you have an interesting and rewarding job ahead of you. Enjoy!
