I’ll discuss all the strategies and methods that the most successful
of websites use to generate income. When you are done reading this post,
you will be aware of all the ways a website can make money and you will
be armed with the knowledge and tools necessary to convert your site
into a cash machine.
Before we start, I’d like to reiterate as I have in the past. First
and foremost, provide value to your readership. Making money will be
easy once you’ve created a loyal readership in the right niche. Always
remember if you want to create a cash cow of a site, then you need to
pick an industry that is thriving and you know a lot about this subject
or at least are willing to learn. It also helps if there is less
competition in terms of search engine ranking in that particular niche.
You can use a tool like
SEMRush to help you with that. But enough of that, let’s look at how you can make money online!
If you have created a high/medium traffic site in the right niche,
you’ve hit the jackpot. But we have to dig a bit before we hit gold,
using the right revenue generation model can make an enormous difference
to your revenue numbers.
Generally, site owners make money by
- Selling your own stuff (services, products of their making both digital & non-digital, eBooks and other premium content)
- Advertising & Affiliate Income (selling and promoting services and products made by others)
At the end of it all, it comes down to one of aforementioned two –
You either sell your products and services or you can act as a conduit
for the sale of another’s product or services.
Let’s look at how you can monetize your blog or site.
Sell Advertising Space
You can sell advertising space in the form of banner adverts to
businesses and people. It isn’t quite that simple though, you get paid
differently by different advertisers.
CPM – Pay Per Impression Advertising
Your website receives revenue as and when you generate impressions
for the sponsor. This rewards a website for every thousand impressions
that it generates. You may get paid anywhere between $1~$7 per thousand
impressions depending on your sponsor’s industry. Most well known CPM
advertising network is
BuySellAds.
PPC – Pay Per Click Advertising
You make pennies every time someone clicks on a banner or link. It
generally works out to a higher amount per click when compared to CPM
but it might depend on your niche.
You can run adverts on your site with of one the many ad networks.
Google AdSense,
The Blogger Network,
Rev Content, Undertone and AdBlade are few of the options available to you.
For those of you who use WordPress as a platform to run their websites, you can try out
BuySellAds. If you’d like a free plugin, check out
Advanced Ads.
Selling advertisements via contextual ad networks is best when you
have a site that covers a large spectrum of subjects. If your site
targets specific niche or keywords, you’ll find that Affiliate Marketing
is probably a better money making strategy for your site.
Also known as CPA or Cost Per Action, Affiliate Marketing is
an extremely profitable way to generate revenue for your website. The
section of Affiliate Marketing goes into a lot of detail, rightly
employed it can make your site very profitable relative to running CPM
or PPC advertisements. It’s also a lot tougher to utilize, so let’s talk
about affiliate marketing.
Affiliate Marketing
As the name might suggest your website acts as an affiliate for someone else’s product or service.
How does affiliate marketing work ?
You promote a certain product on your site, your visitor identifies
the product as an effective solution to his or her necessities and
purchases the product. You get a predetermined percentage or fixed
commission for each purchase made by visitor or reader who passes by
your site to discover the product or service and then makes a purchase
on the affiliate sponsor’s website. This works because the company that
sponsors the affiliate program finds a new customer, your visitor found a
new product and you get a commission. All three parties involved end up
with something they might not have had otherwise. You works as a
middleman between buyer and seller and get paid for doing so.
Affiliate marketing campaigns produce new leads for the sponsor and
generate commissions for your site effectively only when the niche of
the campaign is close to your site’s niche. The further the distance
between your niche and the campaign’s niche, the less effective the
affiliate marketing efforts.
- Tip #1: Keep the niche of any affiliate campaign as
close to your site niche as possible. Ad networks ensure that the right
adverts are displayed on your site with PPC & CPM, but with CPA you
need to find the right affiliate to endorse.
Write honest content/reviews, never go over the top and recommend a
product or service you have not used. It is okay to verify the features
of a product and write a dispassionate review. To give a positive review
for any product, use it first or read extensively about the product,
reviews provided by domain authoritarians who have a history of being
impartial and fair in their assessments (Your eventual aim should be to
make your site in their image). And be informative, add value and try to
help your readers find the best products. If you’ve used the product
better still, be insightful.
- Tip #2: Be honest & informative. And if you
have used the product be insightful. Else you stand to lose your
reader’s trust and you lose revenue.
Write about alternate choices. Never recommend a single product,
always offer choice to the reader. Your site’s business is to inform
your readers.
Aigars
writes about 20~50 themes in our collection roundups, it is to help
provide choice and that’s for free themes. The choices provided should
cover as wide a net as possible, when you expect your reader pay for a
product.
- Tip #3: Present reader with alternate choices.
Doesn’t mean you can not recommend the best choices in your opinion but
try to include as many alternates for your reader as possible.
This is going to be a bit strange, but bear with me! People look
for your opinion, put your reputation on the line by recommending one or
two products above other choices, but only if you can identify them as
the very best options for your readership.
Recommend what’s best for your reader, not yourself. Different
affiliate programs have different commissions, some much more profitable
than others. But these more profitable programs may not necessarily
have the best solutions to your reader’s necessities and problems.
- Tip #4: A small piece of a bigger pie is better than, well you know how it goes!
Disclose affiliate income, always inform your reader that you receive
a commission for products that you recommend. Let your reader know
that, this is how your site generates income to pay for writers, website
development and hosting. I am sure they’ll understand.
- Tip #5: Disclose affiliate marketing on your site on pages where there are affiliate links.
Do not push products on your readers. Stop cramming your content with
multiple links, try to keep it to a minimum. It might turn off someone,
allow for the possibility that your reader is skeptical about someone
who profits from their suggestions. Never allow anyone to ever feel that
you are merely trying to sell them things.
Always attempt to connect with your audience by being informative,
insightful and very importantly helpful. After you’ve described the
problem that you’re attempting to solve which should be one that your
readers can relate to, only then should you proceed to promote a product
as a possible solution. I think subtlety is underrated.
Remember that affiliate marketing can help make a great deal of money
for you, if you target the right niche. Not only should your site be
relatable to that niche but your niche should have sufficient traffic
from the specific niche. Affiliate marketing tends to be very targeted,
it will not work if there is no money in that market to begin with.
Before you decide to run an affiliate marketing campaign on your
site, try reading the about the affiliate programs offered by the ten
biggest players in your industry. Look at their customer numbers and
their commission percentages. See if the numbers make sense and whether
affiliate marketing is right for your site’s niche.
MyThemeShop
offers 70% commission on any new customer you bring to them. We use
their affiliate program on our website and highly recommend it.
In comparison,
Elegant Themes offer a 50% commission and
StudioPress offer a commission of 35%.
If either of them had sales exceeding MyThemeShop by a great extent,
they will make for better affiliate options but given that there isn’t
too much of a difference, you will be better of using all three
affiliate programs. This way you can present your readers with multiple
choices.
Check out for how long the tracking is valid when you bring new
traffic to these sites under affiliate programs. This also known as the
tracking cookie period. Most reasonable affiliates have periods of 60
days or greater. After that any sale made as a result of traffic your
site brought them, doesn’t earn you a commission.
My examples may have been specific to the WordPress niche, because I
am familiar with the WordPress. The commissions vary from sector to
sector as the size of the deals vary. Look at all affiliate programs and
identify the likelihood that they will generate a steady cash flow
which is sustainable and builds over time. And test a few of them out
before you settle on one or two of them.
Bluehost has a great affiliate program for many reasons, rather than boring you with “Why?”. I’d like to talk about
Pat Flynn who
made $424,800 which accounts for about 40% of his site’s revenue in
2014 via BlueHost’s affiliate program and about $670,000 from all
affiliate programs. Now remember his website has multiple sources of
income and apart from his BlueHost affiliate program all his other
income sources are at best $50,000 and not more. I’d recommend that you
have a look at Pat’s site and his income statements, you’ll notice that
despite the diversity in his income sources he makes about 65% of his
income via affiliate programs. This should quite clearly illustrate the
power of affiliate marketing.
A Few Things About Advertising – PPC, CPM and CPA
- Tip #6: Banner adverts are not really your best
option, their click through rates are rather low in comparison to
in-content links. But if you aren’t using all the space on your website,
then perhaps you could add banner advertisements to add to your
revenue.
- Tip #7: Cut out the middleman, many ad networks
take out a chunk of your revenue. Remember direct deals are always
better than going through an intermediary. It’s also a lot harder.
- Tip #8: Never crowd your content out with too many advertisements banners or in text links.
- Tip #9: Use a heat map plugin and try to figure out which parts of your website attract the most attention. Place your adverts appropriately.
- Tip #10: While plain banner adverts (Not based on
PPC, CPM & CPA) pay on a monthly or bi-monthly basis and offer some
security of income, even if your traffic doubles or triples, you still
get paid the same. PPC, CPM & CPA based advertising on the other pay
based on how well your site does and how well it converts traffic into
sales/impressions.
Sell Your Product/Service
Creating a website to generate revenue is primarily based on
projecting yourself and the people who post content on your site as
domain experts. Sometimes it is very easy to prove that you know your
stuff, example would be a WordPress theme developer and writer. Aigars
writes a great deal about themes and he gets a lot of interaction because he is a pretty awesome web developer.
Projecting yourself as a domain expert is crucial as it is what your
site relies on to generate revenue. It is aided by creating products in
that particular niche or in the alternative offering services in the
same niche or even a related niche.
Of course this works both ways web developer turns writer and the otherway around, the same is applicable to any niche.
We publish a great deal of content about WordPress – Caching plugins, Themes, Hosting and so forth.
You can read more about it here. It helps boost credibility and therefore helps with product sales.
- Tip #11: Generating good and most importantly useful content will help project authority and domain expertise and bring more sales.
This is not limited to digital products like themes, it can be
extended to almost any industry for which there is sufficient interest
on the internet. Companies of any niche or sector can sell their own
products via the internet.
- Tip #12: Selling stuff services/products and
generating good content on the same industry/niche/sector brings in more
visitors and as a result more prospective customers to your site.
You may have noticed by now selling products and generating useful content go hand in hand. One aids the other and vice versa.
Whilst selling your own products and services creating an affiliate
program will help sell your product better. You will obtain a greater
reach by sharing a percentage of your product’s price for sale that may
have gone unrealized otherwise.
Some people may be reluctant to share their profits, but what they
fail to realize is that the profits you share would not have been
realized at all had there not been an incentive for your affiliate to
share and recommend your products.
Enable Directories On Your Website
Basically the online version of paid classifieds and an easy way to
make money. The best thing about directories is you have no limit to the
number of companies, businesses or freelancers who can list themselves.
You can charge a flat rate or charge a commission on business your
site directs towards the sponsors. And depending on your blog’s primary
focus, directories are a handy tool to help your users. For real estate
blog, you could create a directory for the real estate agents.
- Tip #13: It can be really helpful feature for your readers, especially in a primarily services based niche or industry.
For WordPress users,
a few handy WordPress themes to help you out. Although, I wouldn’t recommend a directory theme, if that isn’t the crux of your site.
You can use
Business Directory Plugin to add the functionality to your site or get some custom web dev work for your site which is preferable.
Job Boards
This idea is rather similar but the polar opposite of creating a
directory on your site. Job Boards can be an extremely useful source of
site revenue where in the person who posts the job pays a monthly fee
for his or her job posting.
Pro Blogger is an excellent example of a site with a very profitable
job board system. When I checked out their job board, they had about 30
job openings advertised on 4 different pages, which means about 120 job
postings. That translates to roughly $6000 revenue per month. To start
your own job board you can use any of
these WordPress themes and plugins.
- Tip #14: Generating revenue with directories and
job boards is a really smart idea because you have very little work and
you get a lot of revenue. Both methods involve significant web
development work to start off but subsequently it requires very little
effort for its upkeep.
Offer Sponsored Reviews
Websites with reasonable clout and domain authority often receive
requests from small businesses to post reviews of their new products.
You can offer sponsored reviews for a fee. We offer sponsored reviews on
ColorLib. While it is okay to publish content as part of a sponsored
review, you should never offer your opinion for sale. Sponsored reviews
really bring in a good amount of cash for relatively little work.
- Tip #15: Sponsored reviews are a great way to make
money! But please add a sponsored review disclosure whenever possible,
sometimes sponsors make request that you not reveal that it is a
sponsored review. Personally, I feel you should provide a dispassionate
review with a disclosure.
Even if you do not disclose sponsored reviews, most websites will
have a sponsored review section which will indicate to your reader that
you do write sponsored reviews. If you do not disclose sponsored
reviews, may be a few of your readers may get upset. But I guess they
really can not complain much about it, if you are honest in your product
reviews.
On Colorlib, we offer paid reviews at $360.
Not only do we get the benefit of the cash, but sometimes we get our
hands on a product that hasn’t yet hit the market which is an added
benefit. And review content generally tends to be in depth content about
specific products which almost all readers love.
- Tip #16: Sponsored reviews help you get your hand
on products that haven’t yet reached the market yet. Many gaming related
YouTube channels receive access to games as beta testers and some tech
websites are able to get their hands on new laptops and graphic
processing units before, they hit the market. This can offer a
significant edge over your competitors.
Create Premium Content
You can craft content that is very difficult to come by on the
internet and package it for sale. It can be an eBook or an interactive
tutorial/course. You need to provide some free content to entice the
audience into buying your content. Also it helps a great deal, if you
are specific about what the premium content will teach or reveal to the
buyer.
- Tip #17: Premium content will not work, if you offer something that is available for free on the internet.
I’m currently trying my hand at Data Science and I want to learn R. I’ve used
Data Camp,
they have an awesome strategy. You get access to the first part of
their course for free and you’ll need to pay for access to the
subsequent sections.
When it comes to premium content, you can choose either one time
purchase models or recurring subscription models for continued access to
content and support.
- Tip #18: With a sales models for paid content, I
believe a freemium + subscription hybrid model is best for most content.
They have shown tremendous success. In Asia, the freemium App Store
model accounts for 90% of all revenue. Many WordPress plugins &
themehouses work with freemium and subscription models, again they’ve
been very successful.
Write a great book
Most successful blogs and websites are run by good writers and
journalists or web developers, programmers, search engine optimization,
marketing specialists who’ve become good writers. Many highly ranked
websites are run by people with years of experience in their chosen
field. Sometimes a single post is not big enough to convey all the
information you have to offer.
A book on the other hand, is a great channel for delivery of a well
spring of useful information to your readers. After you’ve exhibited
considerable domain/niche expertise and your site receives some traffic,
a book can be a great idea.
eBooks are a useful idea, even if you decide not to monetize them,
but the better thing to do would be to provide limited access and full
access for a small fee.
Useful information is hard to come by and a book preferably borne out
of personal experience sells well. Generally ebooks provide some form
of self – improvement information (How To Get Ask A Woman Out?, Grow
Your Blog By 300% With These 3 Steps) at least many of them do.
- Tip #19: These books offer actionable insight for real people to help themselves personally or professionally.
If you feel providing limited access will perhaps create a
disgruntled readership, then divide the book into multipart series and
offer one of them for free. As I mentioned before the freemium model is
the best way to go when it comes to paid content.
- Tip #20: Apart from all the monetization
incentives, books also help develop and solidify your brand. Make sure
you get just right, it can be a very powerful marketing tool and enable
you to reach a greater audience.
Webinars
Writing useful content for your users is great but webinars are a
powerful tool that uses more than just the sense of vision. Webinars can
help set your site apart from your competitors and you shouldn’t
underestimate how useful it can be for your business.
Webinars are way better than just plain text when it comes to
educating and informing people. Connecting with people is difficult,
reading content and watching webinars are world’s apart.
Host one or two free webinars and teach people something and you can
proceed to sell them the remaining webinars in the series. You can use a
service like
GoToWebinar.
- Tip #21: Try making YouTube videos for practice, perfect your delivery and get it just right for your webinar series.
The same can be said for podcasting as well.
Email Marketing
Building a strong mailing list is always a useful asset to any blog
as it helps build your readership. You do not have to rely entirely on
social media shares and search engine rankings. People will keep
visiting your site long after their first visit, if they sign up for
weekly or monthly newsletters. Most sites with a loyal readership have
fat email lists.
You can employ email marketing to sell products as an affiliate or
you can sell your own products. Either way email marketing is a powerful
tool that will build sustainable revenue and traffic for your site.
- Tip #22: The email list is probably a group of
people with very similar characteristics and demographic features which
is why they’ve subscribed to your site’s blog. You can certainly expect a
better conversion when selling products via emails.
Use
AWeber or
MailChimp to help build your emailing list.
- Tip #23: Using pop ups effectively will increase your subscriber count dramatically in just one or two months.
Final Thoughts
I’ve described in my opinion some of the best revenue generating
solutions for websites and blogs. I can not however make a prediction of
how well each advertising method is going to work. Only you can be the
judge of that. And the only way you can do that, is to try things out!
But before you start advertising, always remember to ask yourself “Am
I really providing something valuable for my reader ?, Is there
something new under the sun in my content ? “. People will trust you and
purchase the products you throw at them, if the answer to the previous
two questions is a resounding “Yes!”.
When it comes to selling your own products and premium content,
always remember to go above and beyond expectations of the reader. I’d
recommend the freemium model for all your premium content. In a freemium
model, you offer a significant chunk of your content for free, but just
enough to entice someone to purchase it. But if it is a digital product
like for example a plugin or any other product that requires continued
assistance, support and updates, then a subscription model is a better
choice.
And as for advertising on behalf of others, via any of the multiple
previously discussed methods. Always ask yourself “Would I buy this
service/product that I am recommending, if I have the same requirements
as my readers?”. It’s far easier to convince someone else to purchase
something, if you are convinced about the quality of product you are
recommending.
Don’t get stuck on any one method of revenue generation, be sure to
try out each of them for a three month period or so. Never more than
three or four at a time and make sure you give each monetization
technique a fair chance, give each its own space.
If you insert all affiliate advertising in the form of in content
links, you can not possibly compare it to a banner that is always on
display on every page of your site. Place all monetization techniques on
almost equal footing and give them a fair trial. It may take a while,
but it’ll be well worth the effort!
You’ll find that no matter how many statistics you read about
advertising, no one can really predict the outcome for your website. You
need to try things out and perfect your ideal hybrid of revenue
generating techniques.
I hope you found the post useful
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