5 Ways to Earn Money From a Website

Having a website is cool and all, but if you cannot monetize, there is no point in investing money and time into the project. Most entrepreneurs are very enthusiastic when they start their first site. It gives them a feeling of proprietorship, a feeling that they’re running a business.

Unfortunately, many website owners quickly realize that earning money from such a project is very hard. First off, you have to find a monetization method that would be optimal for your site. After that, you need to ensure that you get enough traffic. Lastly, the website owner needs to find a way to convert at a high rate. 

If you wish to create a new website, here are 5 ways to earn money off of it.

1.   Selling products

The majority of website owners focus on selling products. This is one of the most lucrative methods of earning money online, and it is predicated on your ability to gain web traffic.

Like with all other methods on the list, you need to get a lot of website visitors. Furthermore, this traffic needs to be highly targeted. There is no point in driving traffic for traffic’s sake. Instead, these should be qualified leads who can benefit from the products and services that you’re selling.  

A lot of web companies do not have products themselves. Instead, when they receive an order, they redirect it to a manufacturer in China or some other country. The item can be shipped to the US or Europe, where it can be sold at a high margin.

2.   Banners and ads

Banners and ads are a great solution for businesses that don’t have a direction. Even if all your other plans go to waste, you can always find a company that would love to post these ads on your blog. Similar to the previous method, you need to have enough web traffic to be interesting to advertisers.

Perhaps the biggest issue with banners and ads is that they can ruin the appearance of your blog. So much so that some owners don’t even want to put them as they lose more from posting ads than they would get from the main business activity.

For example, if you’re selling products and these banners are so annoying that they’re ruining click-through rate, it is better to simply remove them and earn extra profits from selling.

3.   Affiliate marketing

Affiliate marketing comes in different shapes and forms. Among others, banners can be regarded as a form of affiliate marketing (depending on the deal that you struck with an advertiser).

You can post various links to your website that would give you affiliate profits. For example, you can create an article with “Top 10 night creams,” and whenever a person goes to an advertised product page, you can get a fraction of the earnings.

It is relatively easy to become an affiliate. All you need is a certain amount of traffic, and most companies will cooperate with you. However, it is much better if you focus on just a few companies. Getting affiliate profits from various sources can get messy, increasing the administrative work.

4.   Guest blogs

One of the oldest and still most popular ways of earning money is through guest blogging. To be precise, you’re not actually getting money for hosting an article. Instead, you’re making a profit for linking to a specific website.

Basically, hyperlinks are one of the most important factors for Google’s algorithm when it’s determining the relevancy of a page. Getting as many links as possible is important for boosting your optimization efforts. However, as a website owner, you probably shouldn’t link out to just about anything. There are some situations where linking to certain domains can be detrimental to your own site.

Anyway, if you decide to implement this method of earning, you can expect from $50 per guest article and upward. Certain websites charge several hundred dollars for this service, so it’s nothing to scoff at.

5.   Selling a website

If you ultimately decide that you have had enough of web business, you can go ahead and sell the domain. Depending on its quality, all the links you’ve acquired over time, as well as the domain name, you can make quite a profit.

Ideally, you should hire a domain brokerage company for this task. These organizations can significantly increase your profits. They specialize in selling and buying domains, so they know how much your website would be worth to a potential buyer.