5 Tips to Monetize Your Website

Earning your very first dollar of revenue from your website is a milestone that all budding online entrepreneurs look forward to achieving. The initial amount isn’t too important, it’s the fact that you have created a website or business and it has made you money! Your hard work is starting to pay off and you are seeing validation and a monetary reward from this! So how to get to a point where your website is earning revenue? Below we discuss several tips to monetize your website and to start building revenue.

For some of you, you may have had a plan from day one how you want to monetize your website and may have starting earning income very early on in your online journey. For others, you may have started your blog or website as a hobby and it’s now getting popular enough that you want to start earning money from this. So how to do this?

Below I’ve listed 5 ways in which you can monetize your website. Some ways will work better on some websites than others (for people looking at starting a website or business I would suggest you plan out at the start how you intend to monetize your website) however those with enough traffic or subscribers should be able to get some ideas from the examples below. For those just starting their online journey I would map out how you aim to monetize your website very early on in the piece when you are putting together your online goals or finding/testing your idea.

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Advertising

There are plenty of ways to make money advertising on your website. Whether it’s banner ads, ads from a YouTube channel or even sponsorship for your email list, this is an easy way of making some additional revenue. The more traffic your site receives, the better your chances are of earning advertising revenue. The question you should be asking is whether you want to go down this route. Sure, the money would be great, but having ads posted all over your website (such as banner ads) can take away from the user experience and turn people away from your website. If your website is a high traffic website, then this may be a viable option. If you are building a brand, then this may not be the best revenue stream to be chasing.

If you choose the advertising route, be sure where you want to place these ads. Make sure they don’t ruin the aesthetics of your site, they are tasteful and they are aligned to your brand and not off-putting to the reader.

For the above reason you may want to avoid banner ads and look at other types of advertising revenue such as YouTube ads and sponsorship or other advertising such as sponsorship through a podcast.

If you have a YouTube account with a nice following (or if you are looking to set a YouTube channel up), you could (if you aren’t already) earn a nice revenue stream from this.

For example, if you have subscriber numbers like Lilly Singh’s YouTube account, to the young kid who earns plenty from playing with toys, there’s a good chance you are earning over 7 figures in advertising revenue. Even someone with a subscriber level of several thousand could be earning several hundred per month revenue from YouTube ads. You could also offer paid shout outs for products which can also be quite lucrative if you have the viewers and subscribers.

If you have you have a large email subscription list or if you are looking at creating a podcast, sponsorship then becomes a viable option. Let’s say you are working in the fitness niche you may be able to reach out to sports apparel or supplement companies to sponsor your email list or your podcast. Again, these add a nice little revenue stream to your site.

Sponsored Content

Sponsored content, either through a paid post or a sponsored ad or shout out on your videos or social media channels is another great way of earning income.

For example, if your blog or website is based on the beauty or makeup niche and you have sufficient subscribers or readers you may be able to approach (or be approached) by makeup companies who would like a sponsored post or a sponsored link to your followers about a certain beauty product that your viewers would be open to purchasing. I’m sure you are familiar with famous people being paid large amounts of money to send out a paid notification to their subscribers about a certain product. This can be a very lucrative revenue stream if you have the followers and subscribers.

Affiliate marketing

Affiliate marketing essentially means that you are getting paid a commission on any product that someone buys using an affiliate link on a product or service recommendation by you.

Examples of affiliate marketing you could incorporate into your website include: create a product comparison post, send an affiliate link to your social media followers, create a product comparison video with affiliate links.

This form of monetization can also be quite lucrative, again if you have the subscribers, viewers or followers. You could also follow the lead of others and create a website based on affiliate products.

Membership section

Your content might be that good that subscribers are willing to pay a monthly fee to get access to new or exclusive content.

For example, you might have an email list of over 2,000 and a portion of this might be interested in your idea of a membership site. So, you create a sales plan and offer this to your subscriber and find that 50 of your subscribers are keen to sign up. Let say you have a monthly membership fee of US $29.95 this adds another $1,497.50 per month to your revenue.

If this is something you would like to investigate further, make sure that you can scale the content creation and time used for this extra content, however this is a great little addition to your sites revenue. Now the true value is in the scaling of your members. The same amount of time and effort per week goes into creating this exclusive content, however if your membership numbers keep climbing, this can be quite lucrative.

Sell products or services

For those of you who have created a lot of great content and have many subscribers and readers, product creation can be a sensational revenue stream to your website.

You might be able to create a product that can help drill down into a specific issue or problem in your niche or several of your subscribers might have requested further information about a certain topic within your niche which you might be able to create a course about.

Selling products can help you connect more deeply with your email list, it’s a great way to offer more value to your readers and subscribers and most importantly it’s a scalable way of providing great revenue.

Aside from courses you could offer other products such as an e book. The great thing about revenue from products is that this can be evergreen and can be continually launched (after relevant updates), providing a constant source of revenue. You don’t even need to create your product, you could look at selling other products that you think is suitable and relevant to your niche.

This form of monetization works well if you have a carefully targeting and managed email list. A cultured email list can have great conversion rates particularly if the product you are selling is highly suited to your email list.

Hopefully this post give you some ideas. If you are only beginning your online journey then go through all of the above tips to monetize your website to see which works for you and pick one to try first. If you already are monetizing your site then hopefully you got some additional ideas.

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