Get ready to learn how to make more money from your website…
Recently I have spoken about
what makes me money and what I think will be
making me money in the future. What works for me in one niche, may not work in another.
I get several emails every week from readers asking me how do I make money from my website? What should I be doing?
The answer is, it depends. It depends how big your site is, how new
it is, what niche you are in, what your goals are etc. Today’s post
should answer your questions about what monetiziation technique is best
for you.
Over the years I have tried dozens, if not hundreds of ideas and ways
to make money from my websites. Some worked and some failed, it is
important that if you try something and it doesn’t work, don’t just give
up. The main reason I see people fail with a business online, isn’t
because their idea or website is bad but because they give up too soon.
Great things often take time. Take a look at the screenshot below
from my inbox of all the emails from PayPal, notifying me that I have
made money:
So lets begin:
Ways To Monetize Your Websites
Sell Advertising Space
The most popular form of making money from a website is by placing
ads on it. We all know what it is, but it can make you money in
different ways, such as Paid Per Click, Paid Per 1000 Views or Paid Per
Time Frame.
The most common form of advertising is Google Adsense which is paid
per click, however a lot of people know what Adsense is in some
industry’s so perhaps in those markets the other two may be more
profitable.
If you want to sell advertising I recommend either complete site
domination with Google Adsense, placement is important, where you put it
on the site can be the difference between $10 a day and a $100. If you
have more traffic or depending on your industry I recommend you sell a
small amount of advertising at the highest price possible.
Benefits:
- Often guaranteed income
- Little effort to monetize
- Great way to connect with others in your industry.
-
Drawbacks:
- Takes away from user experience.
- If you set a set price per month, you can’t make any more even if you double you traffic.
- Advertisers come and go, you have to spend time editing, adding, deleting and finding more advertisers.
Create a Job Board
This works like so:
People looking to hire someone will post a job on your board and
readers will apply for the job. This is a great method of monetizing a
website which I have seen done by a lot of authority websites.
On the other hand, I have seen smaller blogs try to do this and
completely fail because it’s competitive and if you can’t send them
anyone to apply, it’s pointless for them to post a job. Jobs can be
anything from, writers to trainers. If your looking for a example of a
Job Board,
check out Probloggers.
There are a whole load of different Job Board plugins and software. In the past I have used
Jobpress
with WordPress and it worked well. You will want to use some of your
advertising space to promote the job board so that readers will see it
and apply for jobs.
Charge low at the beginning for a listing so you can attract a lot of
customers and if they get applications they will be happy to return.
Benefits:
- Completely hands of, you don’t have to do anything.
- Adds to credibility
Drawbacks:
- Doesn’t work for small blogs
- Very competitive at times.
Selling Services
Selling services is a very popular technique people use to make money
from a website and is often the reason for them building a blog in the
first place. They want to get more clients, to do that they need to get
traffic and blogs are great for that!
A nice example of someone selling services is
Underground Wellness.
The easiest way to start selling advertising on your blog is to
create a new page within WordPress and call it services. Here you can
put in the information about your service, testimonials and a buy now
button.
For sites earning less then $10,000 a month, I recommend using Paypal
buy buttons as a payment gateway, this is very straight forward to set
up and makes life easy for the customer.
Benefits:
- High converting, they see your blog and want more!
- Highly profitable.
- Easy to deliver.
- Low refunds.
Drawbacks:
- Exchanging time for money.
- Customers are always right (which we know isn’t true).
- Can be periods of time where you have no customers!
Collect Emails & Market To Them
This is one of my favourite things to talk about because it’s just so powerful.
Building a email list can make you a lot of money, help build a solid
brand and of course help readers come back to your site, time after
time. Email marketing can be seen to make you money in a few different
ways, such as direct email promotions, to deliver free reports that are
monetized and my favourite, to drive traffic back to your site where you
make money from other methods.
The most
profitable follow up series I ever wrote came only 10 minutes after I
completed the most amazing email marketing crash course we’ve ever come
across – the McIntyre Method. Unlike other guides, the McIntyre Method isn’t made by a self-proclaimed guru, but someone who actually knows the industry.
Gone are the days of losing subscribers or prospects…
Last year I quadrupled my subscribers by adding
PopUp Domination
to my blog, which is a WordPress plugin I developed myself. I started
letting other people use it once I saw it increased my conversions by
over 500%! I’m also a huge fan of squeeze pages.
A squeeze page is dedicated to getting the visitor to sign up for
their mailing list. You can see an example of a page like this by
checking out our squeeze page for our
Traffic Domination video! If you want to create amazing high converting squeeze pages (+ a lot more), check out
Optimizepress, we wrote an in-depth
review on it.
As I said before,
I have spoken about email marketing a lot, the first thing you need to do is register an
Aweber account, personally I would say you should also pick up
PopUp Domination,
not because I own it but because it’s the best thing for email
marketing. About 85% of my subscribers sign up via it, 10% from my
squeeze page and 5% from other optins.
Who ever tells me that I should take down my lightbox
popup because they don’t like it, that’s the reason why I delete your email, it greatly benefits my business!
Benefits:
- Very direct way to market.
- One email can make you thousands.
- Easy & Simple.
Drawbacks:
- Promotions can have a negative effect on readers.
- Always require new leads.
- Subscribers come and go a lot.
Review Products as an Affiliate
I know quite a few people who review products on their blogs, it
makes great content and if the product you are reviewing has an
affiliate program, can make you a lot of money. You can review anything
from software, to bikes, cars, hotels, holidays, food, anything you
could think of and it’s all tax deductible (I believe) if you buy
something to review.
Check this post out about
How To Start a Review Blog.
I personally want to review one product a month, it’s not so many
that readers will be turned of but enough that it will make up a high
proportion of my income. Doing small amount of reviews means you can
pick all the best products and don’t have to speak about negative ones.
Benefits:
- Great source of income.
- Converts higher then banner ads and email promotions.
- Free products sent to you to review.
- Connect with industry leaders.
- Get noticed as a top affiliate.
Drawbacks:
- You can’t always say nice things.
- If you say bad things, don’t expect to work with that person.
- Products become irrelevant quickly in some industry’s.
Promote Products as an Affiliate
Another hot topic here on IncomeDiary, it works very well.
In my experience it works best when paired up with email marketing or
reviews, placing advertising banners promoting affiliates products do
convert well but can be hit and miss sometimes. Over the last year I
have done a lot of research into affiliate marketing and put all my
findings on
Traffic Domination, make sure to check it out!
There are so many ways to go about finding a product for your site,
it often depends on your industry. For a fitness blog, I would go to
Clickbank, find a product about six pack abs and grab an advertising
banner from their resources area and put it up on my website.
You could also do a blog post such as, 7 Ways To Get Six Pack Abs, then at the end, promote the product.
Benefits:
- Can earn you big bucks!
- Can get high conversions if your promotions are done right.
Drawbacks:
- Earnings are not guaranteed, can earn $100 one month, $1000 the next.
- Great products can have crap converting sales pages.
- Great converting sales pages can have crap products.
- Not always the best of resources to promote.
Offer a Membership Site or Premium Content
This technique I have seen become more and more popular over the last couple of years.
Premium content is paid for in a special members area, typically
there is free content which attracts readers and then they realize they
need more and will pay for it. PSDtuts have a
great example
of this, readers come to see free tutorials on how to do something in
Photoshop, then they tell them they have to become Plus members to get
the photoshop files and see even more advanced tutorials.
Your first step should be to work out what your going to offer. Then,
you want to create a membership area for them to login and see the
information your selling,
I spoken about this in detail here.
Next, I would do 3 things, email my mailing list and do a blog post
about the membership, then create an advert for the bottom of every post
which says something like, Liked this?
If you love my membership site then,
click here to find out more.
Benefits:
- Continuity income, keep making money, month after month.
- Can be set and forget, if you time release.
- Affiliates will send you traffic!
- Can be a huge earner, it accounts for over $90k a month for Tutsplus.
Drawbacks:
- Can be a lot of work to set up.
- Regular work to release more content.
Create & Sell Your Own Digital Product
Something I’m experimenting more and more with and I’m not sure if
it’s just me.. but it seems like the world has gone crazy about making
products, they are everywhere which has educated the market so they know
they have to purchase content now. The simple version of creating a
product is as followed, create a 30+ page word document about something,
turn it into a PDF and sell it.
You can find out more about creating a product and selling it online by
reading this article.
Personally I think your first steps would be to ask your audience
what they want to know more about, create a product around that and sell
it!
If your goal at the beginning is to make only a small amount of
money, say you expect to make no more then $1000 from selling it the
first month or two then I recommend you go with using PayPal like with
selling services. Once you grow your business and you are selling more, a
great choice is to use
Clickbank who handle all the orders and allow you to have affiliates.
Benefits:
- Affiliates send you traffic, build your business.
- Because of affiliates, you have a passive income.
- Great for building your brand and authority.
- Big Money Earner.
Drawbacks:
Sell Paid Directory Listings
This isn’t very common but I believe it should be.
I see it as a smart way to sell advertising, you see instead of
putting adverts on your sidebar, you have a directory on your blog where
you link to different company’s and websites in your industry and
charge a premium for the listing. If you charged a monthly fee, so for
example, say you had 1000 people listed in your directory and charged $7
a month, you would earn $7000 a month in continuity.
In some ways, this is actually beneficial to the reader, say you have
a website about becoming a model, in the directory could be a section
for photographers, where photographers pay to list their services.
Models will come and look for the right person to take pictures of them
for their portfolio, helpful and profitable.
Just like a job board, I would add adverts to my blog, promoting the
directory to make sure customers are happy with the number of people
seeing their ad and the traffic they get. To start with, I would even
advertise on other sites to get people to list in your directory, as
well as reaching out to people and company’s to buy a listing.
Benefits:
- Highly profitable.
- Useful to readers.
- Makes you stand out as your doing something different.
- Nearly guaranteed income.
Drawback:
- Costs to setup.
- Smaller sites may not work so well.
Host Webinars & Sell Something
Although I tried this year and didn’t have good results, I think that
was down to promoting other peoples products instead of my own.
People get on webinars to hear you speak, not someone else to do a
sales pitch. What you do is set up a free webinar that you reply once a
week where you teach them something and then at the end you sell them
into 4 more webinars. Once you complete the webinar series, you now have
a product that you can sell as a home study course
Start by buying
GoToWebinar,
personally I would host a free webinar and not sell anything on your
first one so that you can get in some practice with the software and
talking live with people.
Lewis Howes talks about successful webinars in a
recent interview we did together.
Benefits:
- High priced, low amount of customers, so low support.
- Readers want to connect with you.
- Highly beneficial to those who buy.
- Great way to teach.
Drawbacks:
- If your doing live webinars, your exchanging time for money.
- Investment for software.
- People have to turn up at a specific time, hard for different time zones.
Write Tutorials & Promote Something
Another thing I don’t see often, but I love to do!
Content is what everyone is after, that’s why they come to your
website, so create content which includes them buying something so that
when they do buy, they buy via an affiliate link, and you make money!
What I do to create a tutorial is start with the product, find one
that you are using and you get a lot out of, it of course needs an
affiliate program. Then do a tutorial about doing something using that
tool.
So for example it could be a post about Photography and take a specific type of photo but you need this lens to do it.
Benefits:
- Makes great content.
- Good for search engines.
- Profitable long term.
- Quick to produce.
Drawbacks:
- Finding enough products that have affiliate programs.
- Some people may not be interested because they don’t yet have the product.
Publishing A Book Because Of Your Blog
A lot of people want to write a book, however they have no audience.
A blog can bring you branding, can help you connect with other people
in your industry, help you understand what people like to read about,
more importantly what people don’t like. All this can help you write a
book that can become profitable.
A lot of people don’t consider a book because you only get a couple dollars a book but that’s not just what you earn.
Publishing a book can allow you to then launch a product because
people always want more, also a more exciting prospect is being paid to
speak. If you are published, your automatically seen as an expect, it
doesn’t matter if you never sell more then a dozen books, this means you
can charge to speak and charge a lot more for consulting.
There’s so many different ways to go about publishing a book, most
choose self publish but if your blog is successful, either they will
find you or in my case, a friend connected me with his published and
told me I should write a book. Someone in your industry who blogs, will
also have published a book, help them and they will help you.
Benefits:
- Authority.
- Long term earnings.
- Increase your charge for consulting.
- Paid to speak at events.
Drawbacks:
- Timely or expensive if you have a ghostwriter.
- Doesn’t make you a lot of money on it’s own.
Offer Live Training and Workshops
Just like selling consulting and services, you could also use your blog to sell live training, workshops and seminars.
People read your blog but I wouldn’t be surprised if over 80% don’t
act on what you say. Having a workshop means they learn from you and
implement with you, this is a very attractive offer to some people and
they are willing to pay high prices to do it.
You don’t just make money from the price of the ticket but you can
also make money from selling follow up workshops and masterminds. If you
bring in speakers, then you also collect 50% of everything they make if
they sell from stage at the end. Another thing to consider is recording
the event and then selling that as a product on your blog.
Putting on an event is a daunting thing, however it really isn’t to
hard. Ring up a hotel, book a conference room, now you have a date,
write a blog post and send everyone on your mailing list to that page.
Mention your event every where and keep hustling! Apart from that,
all you NEED to do is create your slides and turn up. Some of my friends
even hire people to run everything for them so they don’t have to worry
about the event side of things themselves.
Benefits:
- Can make you a lot of money.
- Can be made into a product.
- People will invite you to speak at their events so that you can sell yours.
- Makes you an authority.
Drawbacks:
- Time consuming.
- Selling can sometimes be hard.
- Stressful for first timers and often the pros.
Sell Your Website
Definitely my favorite of all the above and also the one that pays the most.
Selling your website can make you very wealthy, or it could be just a
nice retirement fund. Whatever it is, it can be a great way to get a
large lump sum of cash.
Typically, websites sell for 12 – 24 months revenue, however if your
site is old, has something unique about it or is the authority in your
industry then you can expect any figure you want. I have seen some blogs
go for over 200 years revenue and it didn’t even make $100,000 a year.
Work hard and it will pay off.
It is important to remember if you sold your site for 2 years revenue
and it made $5000 a month, you would get $120,000. To earn that amount
of money it could take you 6 or 7 years because of expenses and taxes.
Also you have to consider how long it took you to build your business,
if it took you a year to build your blog and it’s now worth $120,000 and
you made $60,000 this last year.
That I would say would be a very profitable year! If you’re already at the stage where you can sell a website then head over to
Flippa,
this site allows webmasters to sell websites and allow people to come
bid and ask questions. I have sold a few sites there before, some for 5
figure sums.
Benefits:
- Large amount of cash.
- Can be sold within a month.
- Enough money not to work for years.
Drawbacks:
- You no longer have a website.
