There are people on the internet that are making thousands from their online blog or website. Wouldn’t you like to be one of them? You could be and all it takes is a little time, effort and know-how.
Some people just want to earn a few dollars from their website as a hobby, but maybe you would like to quit your day job and go full time. Both are possible, but if you want to do this as a full time project you should not underestimate the time and effort required. Earning money from your website is easy, but earning enough to quit your day job is hard. It can be done though and many people have achieved this goal.
There are many ways in which to earn an income from a website and here are the the most common ones.
1 Sell our own products and services
One popular way to make money online is to create a website that enables you to sell your own products or services. You could offer almost anything and this includes art and craft products, design expertise, business consulting, marketing services, virtual assistant services, website development, website design, photography, courses, ebooks and more.
If you create products yourself, they can be sold online through your website. Build a site, add a store and place your products in it. If your products are desirable it is possible to earn a good income from them. If you don’t have anything to sell, there are countless other products you can sell through affiliate schemes.
Many companies, particularly small ones, have more work than they can cope with and they need help. You could offer your services as a virtual assistant. This might involve posting updates on social media, monitoring comments on websites, administrative tasks and so on.
You might be a writer and offer ghostwriting, copywriting, article writing, scriptwriting, blog posting and other writing services.
The list of products and services you could sell from your own website is endless. What could you offer?
2 Earn income from advertising
Selling your products and services through your website can provide a good income and it is a great way to earn a lot of money. However, advertising requires no effort on your part and the money comes in without you having to do anything. It is sometimes called passive income and the thought of lying on a beach while money flows into your site is an attractive one, although maybe not too realistic. However, once set up, they don’t require much input from you.
To earn money from advertising it is best, but not essential, to join a service like Google AdSense. This is just one of many advertising services and others include Ezoic, Monumetric, Media Vine, Revenue Hits, yllix, Adversal, Infolinks, and Propeller Ads Media to mention just a few.
Google AdSense, and many rivals, pay when people click the adverts on your website. The more ads you show, the more ads people click and the more money you make.
This means that it works best with websites that have a lot of visitors that read a lot of pages. If you have a very popular website you can make a reasonable amount of money from adverts with very little effort. It is hard to make a lot though.
3 Sell advertising space
It is less common to get paid for just showing adverts, but it is certainly possible. Instead of getting ads by going through a company like Google, you could get ads directly from advertisers – companies with products and services they need to promote or sell.
If you have a successful website that gets a lot of visitors, companies will approach you with offers of advertising. You can also contact companies that fit your site niche and enquire about advertising opportunities too.
Your website needs to be popular for this to work. Advertisers need to put their ads in front of a lot of people, so it might take some time to build your site’s audience before advertising becomes feasible.
You could create your own ads for affiliate products you sell.
4 Join affiliate marketing schemes
Affiliate marketing means promoting another company’s products or services. You write articles about them, provide links that take your visitors to the company’s site, and you earn a commision if and when people buy the products or services. It makes no difference to the price to the buyer and they pay the same. Here is an example:
Many website owners have found affiliate sales to be a great source of income and some sites make a lot of money from it. You need a website that brings in lots of potential buyers and you then need to be able to forward them onto your affiliates.
A few companies run their own affiliate schemes, such as Amazon, but mostly there are large affiliate network sites that handle everything for them. You join one of these sites, such as CJ affiliate, ShareASale and others and then choose which products and companies you want to work with.
Affiliate marketing is harder than it sounds and success depends on picking a good niche with low competition and driving people to your site through SEO, marketing, promotion and advertising. It is possible to make a lot of money when it is done well, but you really need to drive people to your site with their credit card in their hand ready to buy. Trying to sell random products to random people does not work.
5 Sell through email marketing
Use your website to build up an email list of interested people and followers. This is usually by offering something for free, like an ebook, PDF, templates and so on, in return for a visitor’s email address. Tempt them to sign up and then you can email them with offers.
A services like MailChimp, Mailerlite, Sendinblue and others can be used to handle signups, email creation and sending. There are many alternatives, but Mailchimp is good for beginners because it is free for mailing lists of up to 2,000 people.
What you include in the emails is up to you. It could be products you sell or services you provide. It could include links back to your site where you then have affiliate links that earn money. It could include an email course with multiple parts.
6 Create a membership website
Your website could be entirely membership-only or you could provide a mix of both free and premium content. You can attract visitors with the free content and then offer them premium content for a fee.
Many website owners provide online courses that require a subscription or one-off payment. These courses may cost very little or hundreds of dollars, it is up to you. They can be hugely successful, bringing in thousands each month in income.
It requires a lot of effort to create online courses, but once they are done, it becomes passive income that requires little work. Maybe just the occasional refresh or update, but mostly your work is finished once the course is written.
Online course: First steps to build your website or blog: WordPress basics
- Great ways to earn an income from a WordPress blog
- How to choose the right platform for your website or blog
- How to set up a free wordpress.com website step by step
- How to log in to the WordPress admin interface back end
- Discover the difference between WordPress posts and pages
- How to create new posts for your WordPress website or blog
- How to create pages in WordPress and how to edit them
- How to customise a WordPress theme and improve the look
- How to find and apply WordPress themes to your blog/website
- How to add widgets to a WordPress website sidebar
- How to customise WordPress settings from the admin interface
