There are as many reasons to have a website as there are websites
Perhaps you have a website to chronicle your child’s soccer team. Perhaps you have a website to promote your restaurant. Perhaps you have a website to announce your church’s services.
Whatever the purpose of your website, just the fact that you have a website gives you the opportunity to generate revenue – if you want to…
And what you generate the revenue for is just a varied as why you have a website in the first place.
Perhaps you just want to make enough money to pay for the cost of the website, or perhaps you want to use the money to support a team, for donations, or for your church kitty.
Then again perhaps you want to use the website as a means to supplement your income. Or even as a means to generate your main income.
However you choose to spend the money you generate from your website, the bottom line is that there are a number of ways you can us it to earn income.
What are some of the ways you can earn income from your website?
- Advertising
- Affiliate & Referral Marketing
- Selling Products
- Selling Your Services / Training / Membership
- Donations
1) Advertising
Advertising is probably the simplest way to generate income from your website. And the easiest way to add advertising by far is to use Google Adsense on your page.
The nice thing about Google Adsense is that Google already knows what your website is about, and therefore they can automatically place ads on it that complement your website.
For example, if you have a website about movie reviews, Google will figure out that people who visit your site are probably into movies and may display ads for local cinemas, or trailers for movies.
If you already have a Google account, such as a gmail account or a Google+ account, then you are half way to having a Google Adsense account. Select the Business tools from your Google account and you will see a link to sign up for Adsense.
To include Adsense on your web page you just add the code to the page where you want the ads to appear (if you are using WebDwarf, SiteSpinner or SiteSpinner Pro, you can find out how to add code to your pages in the Tutorials here).
There are a number of other services including Yahoo/Bing, SiteScout to name a few. Each use a different method. Some place ads in locations you choose on your site. Some put banner adds up, and some create links from words or phrases in your text.
Some websites make a lot of money off advertising. However, you have to have a lot of traffic, and it has to be targeted traffic. That is. if you have a website about zombie movies, and your website generates hundreds of thousands of visitors a month (and that is a lot), then there is a pretty good chance that ads for zombie paraphernalia will generate considerable income for you.
For websites with a smaller amount of traffic don’t expect to earn a fortune with ads.
2) Affiliate & Referral Marketing
With Affiliate Marketing you make a commission on a sale of a product or service that is referred from our website.
Unlike Ads where you are trying to get people to simply click a link or an image, with Affiliate marketing you are trying to make a sale of another company’s product or service.
If you manage to sell the other company’s product, then the company gives you a commission on the sale.
Affiliate Marketing works best when the product you are promoting is a good fit with the topic of your website.
For example, we develop and sell website design software. We do not offer web hosting as that is not our expertise and so it makes sense for us to partner with a web hosting company, as anyone who uses our products will need to host their website somewhere.
Keep in mind that if you are going to promote a product by another company you need to do your due diligence and ensure that the company is reputable, because if people are not happy with them, then they will also not be happy with you.
We chose Bluehost as our partner because they have such a great track record and we feel good about promoting them. On top of that, they offer a discount to our customers. This works as a win-win for Bluehost, us, and our customers.
Think of a product or service that would be a good fit for your company then check out their website, or approach them directly to find out if they have and affiliate program.
There are also a number of Affiliate networks you can sign up with and then pick and choose which products or services you want to promote to your website visitors. Some of the more popular you know doubt have heard of are Amazon and eBay.
3) Selling A Product
This might seem a bit obvious, but if you have a product, your website is the place you should be selling it.
Our SiteSpinner Pro Website Design Software
That does not mean that if you are an oil company that you should be selling oil on your website.
However, if you have a church, you could be selling raffle tickets. Girl Guide Cookies are a great fit for a Girl Guides website.
When I was Executive Producer for Scholastic, the largest children’s book publisher in the world, the Web was a not fully understood by the higher management. If you did not get a scholastic book through school you could get it through your local book store, and then through Amazon, but Scholastic would not sell books through their website.
Don’t make the mistake of letting someone else make money off one of your products.
4) Selling Your Services / Training / Membership
Do you have valuable content that people cannot get from somewhere else? Then creating a membership section of your website might work for you.
You can create a section of your website that only paying members have access to.
There are a number of different models for this. You could offer free useful content, but then offer more in-depth content behind your pay wall.
You could have a Forum that only paid visitors have access to
You could have an online course that has a set amount of time, or one that is open ended.
Of all the means of generating revenue from your website, having content that produces recurring revenue produces the greatest amount of income.
Having said that, you need to have a track record to make this successful. There are a multitude of Gurus on the web who tout subscriptions as a means of generating revenue from a relatively small amount of work. This might be true if, say you are a Doctor, then perhaps it is not that difficult to set up a subscription service for doctors. But the time to become a doctor is where the work is.
If you are service company then your main goal may be to promote and sell your services via your website. But keep in mind that if you want to set up a subscription service to teach people how to climb Mount Everest, then you had better have climbed Mount Everest yourself.
Are you good at something? Has anyone ever asked you for help with something or advice on something? If you answered yes to any of these, then you can be selling that service on your website.
5) Donations
One of the most direct ways of generating revenue from your website is to ask for donations.
Think of Wikipedia that generates all its revenue through donations.
Whatever it is you are offering, giving your ‘thing’ away and asking for a donation is a valid and common form of generating revenue.
You don’t have to be a large site. Radio Paradise, a website that streams commercial-free music, supports itself purely from donations.
The easiest way to accept donations from your website is to set up a PayPal account. If the person donating does not have a Paypal account, they can still use a credit card or debit card to make a donation.
Conclusion
Keep in mind that you do not have to use a single method to monetize your website. A novelist may sell products (her books), sell services (how to write books), accept donations, and have Affiliate links in her site to purchase book related paraphernalia, and still include Google Adsense.
Adding every means possible may be a bit over the top for some websites, but mixing and matching ways to generate income is valid and accepted on for many sites. Just be sure to not over do it.
Question:
Which of the above ways to monetize your website make the most money?
