Are you looking for more ways to make money while you are stuck at home during this lock-down?
Do you have a blog or website that is just lying idle and not making you any money?
Do you have any special talent or skills that you are not using to your advantage?
Here are 51 ways for you to monetize your website, pick the ones that you can relate to and if you sincerely apply these tips to your own site, you might be able to give up your regular full time job sometime soon.
Not got a website yet? Do you have content, know what you want but have no idea how to set up a website? Look out my in-depth article on “How to build a WordPress Site from Scratch” coming soon!
Disclosure: Some links in this post may be affiliate links, so we may earn commission by referring you to a service. It will make no difference to the price that you will pay, it just supports this site and will enable me to send my readers exclusive offers as soon as they are available.
Let’s get started with my 51 ways (they are listed in no particular order) that you can monetize your website!
1. Affiliate Marketing
Contents of this Post
As an affiliate you earn a commission when a visitor buys a product or a service that you are promoting on your site. There are tons of affiliate networks that you can join and sign up for the products you want to promote. You can also sign up on sites of individual companies who have their own affiliate program.
Affiliate networks are platforms that connect companies, called ‘merchants’ with site owners or affiliates, called ‘publishers’. The publishers or affiliates sign up to promote the products and services of the merchants or companies. There are multiple publishers and merchants signed up on a network which facilitates and takes care of all the behind the scenes admin work including receipts from merchants and payments to the publishers. Here are some of the well known Affiliate Networks:
- ShareASale
- Affiliate Window (AWIN)
- ClickBank
- CJ Affiliate (formerly Commission Junction)
- PayKickStart
- Amazon Associates
- eBay Partner Network (EPN)
- FlexOffers
- Pepperjam
- Rakuten Marketing (formerly LinkShare)
- JVZoo
- Warrior Plus
- 2Ckeckout (formerly Avangate)
- ImpactRadius
- Partnerstack
- Refersion marketplace
2. Google Adsense
Google Adsense is a program which brings together 2 kinds of online people. Those who write content and those who want to advertise their products and services. It is a free, simple way to earn money by displaying ads next to your online content.
With AdSense, you can show relevant and engaging ads to your site visitors and even customize the look and feel of ads to match your site. Google allows website owners to publish content pages on which ads will be shown by way of text, images, video, or interactive media to the site audience at the discretion of Google, who will administer, sort, and maintain the ads. Google will match ads to your site based on your content and visitors. The ads are created and paid for by advertisers who want to promote their products. Since these advertisers pay different prices for different ads, the amount you earn can vary.
3. The Amazon Associates Program
The amazon associates program is one of the very biggest affiliate networks in the world. You can promote amazon products on your website for which Amazon will give you a small commission, usually 4% to 8%. There are separate country specific programs you need to sign up for if you want to promote Amazon products in your native country.
People feel that 4% – 8% is too low a percentage to make the effort to promote, but you must remember that you can get more number of sales on Amazon and thus can definitely land up making good money. There are multiple ways you can promote Amazon products.
-
- You can also create an Amazon store page – Since Amazon has such a vast range of products, no matter what your niche is, you will definitely find relevant products to promote in your niche
- Write reviews for amazon products
- Do comparative tables for different brands selling the same product on amazon
- Add links within your blog posts to amazon products
4. Product Reviews
Everyone likes to read reviews before buying a product. Some people Never buy anything without looking up a review online. If you can build a solid reputation for giving good reviews for products in your niche, people will start making it a point to check your reviews and buy through your link. It is always a good idea to try out a product before you write a review, that way you can give an authentic review for it. You can always ask the companies or the vendors to give you a trial copy or review access, and they will be happy to do so if you are going to write them a genuine review.
Some companies will also pay you to write a review, but again you should declare that in your post and you should be prepared to understand that a paid review will not carry much value with your readers.
5. Direct Banner Ads
Selling Direct Ads is similar to Adsense except that selling banner ad space on your website is more attractive since things are more in your own control here. You don’t have to depend on Google who takes its own share of the money you earn. You get to set your price and can negotiate your terms. For selling banner ads, you can charge either
-
- per click, called CPC ( Cost Per Click ) – that is the number of times your ad is clicked on, or
- per thousand views, called CPM (cost Per M, M being the Roman numeral for 1000) – that is the number of times your ad is shown 1000 times
If you don’t want the hassle of keeping track of the views and clicks, you could also charge a flat rate – simpler and easier for everyone concerned!
6. Relevant Articles
Another way to monetize your content is to display relevant articles instead of ads.
One such popular service is Taboola which works by displaying relevant articles, and not banners, from advertisers on their network.
These networks pay you every time a visitor clicks on an ad or for every 1,000 impressions that it gets.
7. Content Writing
Another great opportunity to make money from your site is to be able to deliver good quality unique content to other website owners. Content writers are in big demand, because “Content is King!”
Yes, its 100% true. Both for your website visitors and for Search Engines.
If your content is rubbish or even mediocre, no one will visit your site and the Search Engines will not rank your site high. All website owners don’t know how to write, you can offer your writing services by charging to write for them
8. Create your own digital product
You can create an eBook that is 20 pages short or a 300 page full size in-depth one. You can also create a 1 hour video course at a go by just talking into your webcam. There are plenty of other digital products that you can create very easily just from the knowledge you have or what you are passionate about.
Here are a few examples of what kind of digital products you can start creating
-
- Ebooks
- Graphics
- Templates
- Checklists
- Printables
- Online courses
- Software
- SaaS products
- Podcasts
- Videos
- Mind-maps
- Cheat Sheets
- Interviews
9. Donations
Many sites offer free services and a simple way to monetize such a website is to ask for donations. However, unless your site is an established authority, it might not be very effective and you should not be relying on it too much.
To ask for donations, you can add a simple PayPal donation button on your website and ask people to donate whatever they like if they like your content.
Some of the biggest websites like Wikipedia run either partly or solely on donations. But, like I said earlier, you should be known as an authority in your niche, even if it’s not as well known as
Wikipedia!
10. Sell Physical Products
You can sell your own physical products on your website. Branded products like mugs, photo frames, t-shirts etc, sell like hot cakes. You can design the products on the below kind of sites and sell them on your site.
- Teetakies
- Printland
- Zazzle
- Vistaprint, etc
Even if you want to sell them on marketplace sites like eBay or Etsy, you can showcase them on your own site and then link them to the platform that they are listed on.
11. Business directory
You can set up a business directory page and get companies to pay you a fixed fee to list their business in there.
You could even charge an annual or monthly listing fee if you have a reasonably good level of traffic to your site.
12. Your own Affiliate Program
Once you have your own product to sell, you can also create your own affiliate program and recruit affiliates to help sell your product. Affiliates can get you more sales as well as more traffic for your website. It’s a win-win situation for both. Vendors who sell on some of the networks like JVZoo, Warrior Plus and Clickbank etc have thousands of affiliates applying to sell for them.
You can launch your product on one of these platforms and have affiliates sign up to sell for you. Of course you have to pay them a good commission to get them motivated to sell for you. The normal commission ranges from 50% to even 100% on the front end product, but then you also land up getting many more sales with affiliates than you could have done on your own.
13. Online courses
Whatever your website niche is, you can always teach people something. The best way to start is to think of the problems you yourself had in this niche and then show how you solved those. Just remember that if you had a particular problem and didn’t know how to solve it, there will be many more people out there who also have the same problem. Create an online course as an add-on for your website.
This is another way to get your visitors to pay for premium content. You can simply deliver the course via emails with your favourite email autoresponder, or you could have a private post page with a password that you could send to your buyers, or you could invest in a software to deliver your course. You can also think of putting it up on an online course platform like Udemy or Skillshare. The advantage of using a well known platform is that you can reach a huge reader base, but again, be careful that you are uploading your own courses and not one created with PLR as such courses created through PLR are not allowed. Here are some of the good course building tools
14. Online Consulting
You can charge hourly consulting fees for advice in your field of expertise.
You can advertise it on your website and take your payment upfront on your site too. To schedule your meeting, you can use
- Skype
- Google Hangouts
- GoToWebinar
- Zoom
- And a host of other online meeting software.
15. Paid advertising
Paid ads like Google ads or Facebook Ads work very well and work fast, but you have to really master the concepts and techniques, know your target audience, choose the right keywords, learn the strategies, know how to spy on your competitors and how to track your ads.
If you jump into paid ads without learning your basics well, be prepared to have your money run out like water.
16. Sell advertising
You can get companies to buy advertisements on your site. You can offer to advertise in bulk for a discount, that way you are assured of regular inflow and you can offer them a much better rate.
17. Joint Venture
You can partner with your top advertisers to create a product or a service. That way your JV partner gets better conversions on your website and you can get a commission from every sale.
18. Build your subscriber List
Create a weekly email newsletter and capture your website visitors into regulars on your site. When you offer valuable content that people like to read, you will also get more opportunities to sell to them. Here are some email marketing services that you can tie up with
- AWeber
- GetResponse
- ConvertKit
- ActiveCampaign
- Drip
- Constant Contact
- Mailchimp
- Campaign Monitor
- MailerLite
- Sendinblue
- Gumroad
- BombBomb
19. Lead Magnet
Offer a free eBook, Template or some other digital product on your site in exchange for your website visitor’s email id. Even after you have let them download the eBook, create an autoresponder series where you keep sending them interesting bits of advice, tips or information. Either at the end of it, if it’s a short series, or intermittently, if your series runs into weeks, start sending them affiliate links for products that you feel will help them in their business. Here are some of the better list building tools
- Sumo
- HubSpot
- Hotjar
- OptinMonster
- Thrive Leads
- Contactually
- RafflePress
- Intercom
- Layered Popup
- GoViral (formerly SmartBribe)
- PageModo
20. Facebook Group
Create a Facebook group and invite your visitors and customers to join it.
Keep them engaged with helpful content so that when you offer them affiliate products or your own products to buy, they will be more eager to buy from you.
21. Free Forum
Create a forum for your niche and get people to join it. Active forum members will return to your forum everyday, creating additional opportunities for you to sell to them. People that join a particular niche forum are very engaged in the topic.
22. Paid Membership Forum
Create a paid subscription mastermind membership forum, where the subscribers pay a regular subscription, or a one-time entry charge. Like minded members can engage with each other and also help each other to brainstorm, discuss and solve each others’ problems.
But remember that since you are charging a joining fee, you need to create enough helpful and effective engagement and interaction so that members see a value in it. Otherwise instead of creating a community it will become a shell as members leave in disappointment.
23. YouTube Videos
Create entertaining video content for your website. Videos are not only the best media to keep your audience attentive and engaged but you could also earn money from your videos. YouTube allows you to monetize your video content in many ways. YouTube uses ‘Cost per impression’, also known as CPI, as the metric to gauge how much to pay you. At 10,000 views, the potential to get paid begins. Although the numbers may vary considerably, YouTube pays around 50 cents to 8 dollars for every 1000 ad views based on the location of viewers and the target audience. It also varies from country to country.
If you want to get paid directly through Google Adsense on YouTube, then you need a minimum of 1,000 subscribers. After that, the payment threshold is $100, in which you won’t get paid until you meet that from ad revenue. If you are able to create videos that go viral, you could land up making a lot of money from your videos.
24. Sponsored Posts
Once your website is getting very good traffic, people will pay you to write posts about their product or service on your website. Of course you need to have a fairly large audience who will buy your recommended products and services. Such sponsored posts are known as advertorials and are actually advertisements in the form of an article, usually containing the advertiser’s website link. The advertiser will either send you the written article and you just have to post it on your blog. You should network on facebook groups in your niche for advertisers to be able to locate you!
Imp: When you write a sponsored post, you need to comply with the FTC regulations, which require you to add, usually at the end of the post, that it’s a sponsored blog post. It could be something like this : “This blog post was sponsored by {Advertiser’s Brand Name}.”
25. Paid Articles
This is almost the same as sponsored posts, but here, besides just posting the article on your blog, you write the article content for them too. You can get paid much more here as you get paid for your time and writing skill too. There are a lot of different views on how much one should charge for a paid post. It of course depends on a number of factors like the traffic your site is getting, and the kind of authority you command, what your blogging rate per hour is, how many hours you spent writing the piece, etc. Taking all these into consideration, you could charge anywhere between $100 to $1500 for a single post. However, even if you just started blogging recently, I feel you should never charge less than $75 to $100.
Imp: When you write a paid post, you need to comply with the FTC regulations, which require you to add, usually at the end of the post, that it’s a sponsored blog post. It could be something like this : “This blog post was sponsored by {Advertiser’s Brand Name}.”
26. Premium Articles
If you are able to create incredibly premium content that readers are dying for, you can very well charge your readers for it.
Gaming websites are great examples for premium content. Gamers get frustrated when they are stuck at any place in a game and don’t know how to proceed, and they will willingly pay a reasonable amount to learn some little known secret strategies to go ahead in their game. You can bait a visitor by offering some tips, and then ask for payment to show the final most valuable information. The easiest way to do that is to simply link a password protected page which will automatically open when the user has paid up.
You should charge a small reasonable amount for this, something within $10 at the most, which your readers won’t mind paying.
27. Charge to write Guest Posts
When you are Authority in your niche, you will get invited to write for other sites as a guest blogger. You can charge for it according to the time you spent on researching and writing as a guest blogger.
28. Charge Guests to post on your site
Conversely, if someone wants to write a guest post on your site, you can charge them for it. That’s because by writing on your site they are getting exposure to all of the inbound traffic coming to your site.
29. Triangulation deal
This is a scenario where there are 3 parties to the triangle and a deal that benefits all three. A good example would be a book publisher (A) who will pay you (B) to write a book because you have a large viable target audience of your website readers (C), who will buy your book from the publisher. All 3 parties benefit monetarily or get value from this deal.
30. Case Study of your site
If you have already been successful in monetizing your site, teach other people how to do the same. Make a case study from your own website and show people how they can look over your shoulder and do the same. You can charge a good price for it because people love “look over the shoulder and do” step by step video tutorials.
31. Free Webinars
If you have built a decent size audience, you can offer a product creator to conduct a webinar for his audience and teach them the basic concepts regarding his product niche. At the end of the webinar you can offer the product to your audience at a substantial discount for a limited time and take a commission on every piece sold.
Let’s take an example. You know a vendor who has a product that automates all the initial steps of setting up a new WordPress website . These tasks are routine boring tasks that require no great intelligence, just a lot of time. You have an audience of customers who routinely set up WordPress niche sites, and this software would save them a lot of time every time they set up a new site. Your webinar could teach people how to manually do all these tasks and even give them a checklist or a cheat sheet to help them keep track of all the tasks to be done so that nothing gets missed out.
At the end of the webinar, if you offer them the software that will do all these tasks at the click of a button, once you have configured just a few settings, then many of them would definitely be interested in purchasing the product. If you tell them that for a short period of next 30 minutes, the software will be available at a hugely discounted rate, the rest of them will jump in too! This way, you gave them value, taught them good stuff and at the same time made good money out of it. However, vendors will not be interested in doing a webinar for you unless you can assure them of an audience of around a 1000 participants.
32. Paid Webinars
You could have a weekly or monthly series of webinars that people have paid for to learn something new
33. Recordings of past events or seminars
Many people cannot afford to attend live seminars in a different city or country, because besides the actual event ticket, they would also be paying for travel and accommodation. However they will be willing to spend a fraction of that cost to get their hands on a recording of the event speeches. Sell that on your site.
34. Paid Speaker for an event
If your site has become very popular and has established you as an authority in your niche, people will pay you to speak at a conference, seminar or even a webinar. It will be a double whammy for you. You get paid and you also get a host of new visitors to your site if the attendees like your talk.
35. Sell your services
If you have a specialty talent, like copy-writing, or graphic design, or Search Engine Optimization, put up a ‘Hire Me’ button on all pages of your site which will take them to a page that showcase your services with details of what you can do and your past experience in the same. You can also offer the same services via freelancing platforms . Here are some freelancing sites you could work with
-
- Fiverr
- Upwork
- Freelancer.com
- Envato Studio
- PeoplePerHour
- Toptal
- Guru.com
- DesignCrowd
- Nexxt
- DesignContest
- TaskRabbit
- crowdSPRING
- Hireable
- WriterAccess
- 99Designs
- Catalant
- Bark
- DesignHill
- Skyword
- Gigster
36. Site Flipping
Site flipping is a regular business where people build up a site that is getting good traffic and good money and then sell it. Then they start on another site. You too can build a site and once it’s properly monetised with high levels of traffic, you’ll have an asset that you can sell. There are people making regular 5 figure incomes who have replaced full time jobs for this.
You can easily sell a profitable well running website at a price of 6 to 12 times of your website’s monthly profit. You can use websites like these to help you find a buyer:
37. Sell Part of Your Website
When one part of your website is not making as much profits as another part, you can split it into two websites and sell the one making lesser profits. The price to sell can be 6 to 12 times the monthly profits.
38. Text Link Ads
Use text link advertising by selling basic text links to an advertiser’s website called in-content advertising. You can either charge per click or you could charge a fixed rate per month like maybe $30. There are many such marketplaces like Backlinks and LinksPanel where you can, both, buy and sell links.
39. Skimlink Your Content
Skimlinks is a commerce content monetization platform. Its technology automatically monetizes product links in commerce-related content. It works like any other affiliate networks where it allows you to earn commission on purchases made through links on your site. Where it stands out is that, as well as allowing you to create individual affiliate links on your site, Skimlinks can also be installed on your website to automatically monetize your content. When you link to any product in your content who’s merchant is a part of the Skimlinks network, it will convert the link into an affiliate link automatically and you’ll get paid when a visitor makes a purchase via your link.
40. Customized Code
Very often you find while building your website that you have built a lot of customized code for the easy running of specific functionalities. It’s either something that has saved you time or money.
Surely people in your line of business could also use the same to save their time or money! You can easily create your customized piece of software and sell it as a product to people in your niche.
41. Public domain content
There is a vast sea of information in the Public Domain that can be re-branded, re-purposed and legally resold without any permissions. There are over a million books and software programs in the Public Domain. You can easily make combinations of the content available and create your own unique products to sell
42. Sub-domain co-branding
Another version of Joint Venture can be creating a sub-domain on your site dedicated to a specific product which will be basically managed by your JV. When your viewers see a product as your sub-domain, they know it’s something you trust and that creates value.
43. Syndicate your content
Syndicate your content to a number of sites that want to curate good authority content for their sites. Content syndication means your website content is re-published by a third-party website. You can syndicate either an entire blog post to a third-party website, or you could syndicate just the headline with a link back to your website.
Any kind of digital content like articles, blog posts, info-graphics or videos can be syndicated. Since Google frowns heavily upon duplicate content, you should ensure that your syndicated content is indexed correctly, both on your site as well as on your syndication partner’s site
44. Sell Your website Content Offline
Yes you obviously cannot sell your content to other sites as Google will penalize it as duplicate content, but you could definitely sell it to offline magazines, whitepapers, educational institutions etc.
45. Create publications from multiple posts
One of the best ways to create a book or an eBook or a kindle eBook is to take a number of your interesting posts and compile them into one. Let’s say you have a blog with almost 500 posts, they will be in various different categories and might be inter-related or connected. You could take 20 of the posts from a single category and compile them into a book. Your readers will love to buy it.
46. 404 Error Pages
Convert your 404 error pages to your advantage by putting some ads on it. 404 pages are ones that come up when someone has typed a wrong page URL (site path) or there was a broken link somewhere and a visitor landed up on your 404 page. Normally, people just say “Oops you’re on the wrong page” and link back to the home page. YOU could put some kind of an ad there or a few affiliate links at least.
47. Add-Ons
Always offer add-ons to your existing base of customers. For example, if you are teaching a batch of students all about “How to set up a WordPress website from scratch” , then as you go through the course you can start adding on to the services you offer, in case you are a web space re-seller, you can get them to buy the web space from you for their new site. Similarly, you can give them special offers, which will actually be your affiliate links, to buy domain names, web hosting, email services, WordPress themes, plugins and so much more as you go along your course.
And it works for any niche. Say your niche is painting, as you teach your course, you can tell them where you buy your canvases, paints and other material and send them affiliate links to buy the same stuff. That’s one of the biggest advantages of conducting courses, not only do you earn from the course fees but you also earn, and probably you earn more, from all the products you promote during the course.
48. Answer queries on your site
You can answer your readers’ general queries for free on your site, but in case they have a technical query or an emergency where they want to to solve an urgent problem, you can charge them by the hour or half hour for it.
49. Arbitrage
It’s one of the oldest ways of making money. You take a job, get it done somewhere else, and charge your customer your cost plus a fee.
For example, say you get a contract for creating a set of 12 branded mugs for $60.
You go to a local shop and get it done for $35 and deliver it to your customer.
You made a cool $25 doing nothing much really. Just be careful of the quality of the work you’re getting done. If it’s not up to the mark, you will end up losing customers instead.
50. Digital arbitrage
Similar to the above, some people do not have access to certain things they want due to restrictions, for example, certain country specific media may not be available in other parts of the world. If you can offer the service with the help of a simple VPN hack, people will be willing to pay you for it, and you can even charge according to the desperation of your customer, the more badly he wants it, the more you can charge.
51. Experience
As you get experience in your work you can do it more easily. Once you are well versed in setting up your website, you can very easily charge someone for setting up a website for them too. People won’t mind paying you to take away all the hassle of trials and errors not to mention the time it would take to set it up on their own.
Automate Your Website Monetization
How about you? Are you using any of these techniques to make money with your website? Which ones do you use? Do you think it’s too much work? It’s too hard?
Yes it is. There are so many things to set up and take care of when you do all this manually.
What if I told you that there is an easy way to automate your WordPress website in such a way that you could create 20 ways of making money from your website with just the installation of a plugin. Click the button below to know more
Let me also know if you are monetizing your website another way or with some other tools. I’d love to know and so would my readers!
