If you want to generate revenue from your website, then you need to find ways to monetize it. The great thing about this is that there are many different ways that you can do this. Although monetizing your website sounds like a daunting task, it doesn’t have to be. There are many ways to monetize your website and this article will outline the most popular income streams.
1. Banner Advertising
The first way to monetize a website is through banner advertising. Banner ads have been around for 20 years and they are still an effective way of getting people’s attention on the internet. Websites can make money by running banner ads on their sites through advertising networks like Google Adsense or Mediavine, which make it possible for websites to generate revenue by displaying ads on their sites.
2. Affiliate marketing
Another common way of monetizing a website is through affiliate marketing, which is when a business advertises another product or service on their website and gets paid when that person buys it. Affiliate marketing can be done by partnering up with other companies and linking to the products or services they offer on your site as an affiliate. Every time somebody makes a purchase through the link that you provide on your site, you will earn a commission for the sale.
3. Google Adsense
Google Adsense will help you earn money by placing ads on your site that are relevant to the content on the page where they are placed. The ads will then generate revenue for you as long as people continue to visit the site regularly. It’s quite easy to get started with Adsense: Get Started with Adsense
4. Membership Website
One of the most popular ways to monetize your website these days is by selling memberships. If you have content in the form of videos, audio files, downloadable PDF’s, e-books or plain ol’ articles with images that speak to a need within your community, a membership website is the way to go. Most membership platforms offer a range of options in terms of fee collection, from monthly or annual recurring, non-recurring, free trials, discounts and more.
5. Course Website
Cousin to the membership site is to sell courses. Many software platforms (Kajabi.com, SubHub.com) let you do both at the same time, while others, such as Teachable.com and TalentLMS.com are strictly course related. Setting up a course can be surprisingly simple, since it’s really just a collection of articles or videos presented in a particular order. That’s a bit simplistic, but not far off. You can also mix live content with recorded content in your courses. Most of the time you will charge a non-recurring fee for courses, unless you are offering extended support.
6. E-commerce Website
If you have products or services to sell, most of the online shop platforms give you plenty of options. You can usually sell in bulk or bundles, offer upsells and discounts. Shopify and WooCommerce for WordPress are the most popular choices, but there are a number of lesser-known storefronts that can process payments just as well. You can sell anything from books and DVDs, to clothing and pet accessories. Customizing the WooCommerce design is a bit tricky, but it tends to follow your theme, so it may not be necessary to do much tweaking.
Many website owners start by running with one or two of these models, then they search for other options as they get more traffic in their web pages or expand the offerings on their site.
You can start from one or two methods and then explore other income streams as a website owner and blogger.
Which of these (or other) ways have you used to monetize your website? Which would you like to try?
Let me know in the comments!