14 WAYS TO ACTUALLY MAKE MONEY FROM A WEBSITE!

When it comes to finding ways to monetize your website and making money online, the best thing I have found, is to use a variety of different techniques and to always be testing.

This blog makes money by selling our own online courses, software and other peoples products as an affiliate.

However, there are a lot more than two ways to make money online.

Every site needs to be treated differently.

It can take a while to work out how to best make money from a website. If something doesn’t work, try something else. Don’t just give up. The main reason people fail with blogging, isn’t because their idea or website is bad but because they give up too soon.

Here are the 14 ways you can monetize your website:

Best Ways To Make Money Online

1. Email Marketing

This is one of my favorite things to talk about because it’s just so powerful.

Building an email list can make you a lot of money, help you 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 favorite, to drive traffic back to your site where you make money from other methods.

Gone are the days of finding it hard to get people to subscribe to your website.

A few years ago, we added a lightbox popup to IncomeDiary. Over night, we went from getting 20+ subscribers a day to well over 100.

At the time, most websites hated the idea of using popups because of the negative association people have with them. But these popups are different. Instead of popping up in another browser window, they popup as part of the page you are on.

It was a lot less intrusive. Even better, it wasn’t to promote something spammy, but rather something of value to the reader.

After seeing the massive results, we decided to create our own software, so that other website owners can experience the same huge gains we have.

At the start, some big names in the industry spoke out, saying they didn’t like them and wouldn’t use them. That didn’t last long, once they saw how well they worked. Now it seems like every site uses popups and despite that fact, they still perform so well!

Love it or hate it but a big reason for the success of popup opt-ins is down to this site you are on right now.

Another list building technique you should be trying, is a squeeze page. A squeeze page is a dedicated page on your site to getting a visitor to sign up for your mailing list. You can see an example of a page like this by checking out our squeeze page for our Traffic Domination report! If you want to create amazing high converting squeeze pages (+ a lot more), check out Optimizepress.

Here is an example of a squeeze page we created with Optimizepress for our photography blog:

In order to start collecting emails, you need to sign up for Aweber, which hosts your emails, which you use to send messages, create follow up campaigns, split test etc.

Personally I would defintely recommend getting some popup software. We currently use OptiMonk which looks like the best option on the market. You could also use PopUp Domination, which is a lower price option.

Remember: 63.9% of our email subscribers come from our popup.

Benefits:

• Very direct way to market.

• One email can make you thousands.

• Anyone can do it.

• Considered by most to be the no1 way to make money online consistently.

• Can work on autopilot, if you setup a autoresponder series.

Drawbacks:

• If subscribers don’t like your emails, they will unsubscribe.

2. Promote Products as an Affiliate

Another hot topic here on IncomeDiary.

We earn around 30% of our income from promoting products as an affiliate. What this means is we receive a commission when you buy something.

Don’t be alarmed, we promote what works for us, not because we will earn a commission. Fortunately nearly all products that exist, have an affiliate program. If you can’t find an affiliate program for a particular product, type product name + affiliate into Google. For example: PopUp Domination Affiliate. This should bring up their affiliate page, if they have an affiliate program.

In my experience, affiliate marketing works best when paired up with email marketing. Top marketers consistently agree, year after year, that email marketing is their most important income source. Combine that with affiliate marketing and you have a winner.

There are so many ways to go about finding a product to promote, it often depends on your industry. For a fitness blog, you could 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 Best Exercises To Get Six Pack Abs, then at the end, promote the product.

We have a photography blog. One of the ways we use affiliate marketing is to promote the cameras and accessories that we use. All of these are available on Amazon. So we signed up for Amazons Associate program and receive a commission every time a customer buys something through our link. We also get a commission on anything else in their shoppingcart which is kind of them.

One of the best tips I can give you for maximizing affiliate sales, is to make sure that the products you are promoting, are as targeted as possible to your content. Most websites have advertising space, it could be on the sidebar, above or below blog posts. The mistake most website owners make is, always showing the same advert, on all pages.

Using condition marketing, we display different adverts depending on the topic of the page. This is done by creating conditions for different tags, categories and authors. For example, any blog post with the tag make money online, will show an advert about making money online and any post with the tag drive traffic, will show an advert about the best ways to drive traffic to your site. This kind of targeting will significantly boost your conversions.

Benefits:

• Can earn you big bucks!

• Easy to setup and doesn’t require much support.

• Passive income.

Drawbacks:

• Earnings are not guaranteed, can earn $100 one month, $1000 the next.

• Great products can have low converting sales pages.

• High converting sales pages can have rubbish products.

3. 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 these posts.

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!

When it comes to selling any product of your own, I recommend using SamCart for your checkout page, upsells and affiliate program. They have a free trial, so make sure to try it out.

Benefits:

• Affiliates send you traffic, build your business.

• Passive income because of affiliates promoting it.

• Great for building your brand and authority.

• Big Money Earner.

Drawbacks:

• Time consuming to setup.

4. Sell Advertising Space

The most popular way to make money from a website is by placing ads on it. We all know what ads look like, but did you know that they function in many different ways such as Pay Per Click, Pay Per 1000 Views or Pay Per Time Frame.

The biggest downside of website adverting, is that most people know what they look like and avoid clicking them.

When selling advertising, you typically have two choices:

1. Find and work with advertisers yourself.

or

2. Work with a middle man who takes a cut for bringing you advertisers.

It all depends on you. Is this a business for you or is this just an opportunity to make a bit more money?

I always lean towards finding advertisers myself. In my experience you get paid more, build better partnerships and can do a better job for them.

Advertising sales makes up only a small portion of my earnings but it’s nice to know that money is almost guaranteed to come in every month.

Be warned, Google does not like the practice of buying and selling text links. People buy text links because Google rank sites better based on quantity and quality of links. When you link to someone, you are telling search engines that you trust this site and you are giving them some of your authority. Google likes this to happen organically. So when you buy/sell links and get caught, Google will punish you by slapping your site down in the rankings.

Benefits:

• Often guaranteed income.

• Little effort to monetize.

• Saves you a lot of time.

• 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 your traffic.

• Advertisers come and go, you have to spend time editing, adding, deleting and finding more advertisers.

5. 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.

As for what software to use, I recommend you check out Fiverr. They have a selection of freelancers who specialise in creating job board websites.

When it comes to marketing your job board, 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 a low price at the beginning so that 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.

For more info visit my blog – www.digitrekker.com