If you ever thought that making money from a website or a blog is a myth, I can assure you it’s not. Many people turn their part-time hobby into a source of stable income. If you struggle with choosing the best methods of traffic monetization, fear no more: here are 10 great ways to monetize your website. Hopefully, the least it can do for you is to cover your hosting and domain upkeep expenses.
Pay-Per-Click Advertising
One of the most popular models of traffic monetization is PPC. In this model, the advertiser pays every time their ad gets clicked. There are quite a lot of good ad networks that offer PPC ads in many different formats. Among them all, Google AdSense is probably the most well-known as well as one of the best paying. They also work with so-called contextual ads. You just set up which places should have ads and what the formats will be, but AdSense automatically delivers the ads depending on your website content. All to boost the possible user conversion.
However, AdSense may be problematic for some people. For one, they have very strict rules when it comes to the content they accept. If your website or blog has content even related to something from their prohibited list, you won’t be accepted into their program. Moreover, they don’t offer payment through PayPal and other popular online payment methods. Additionally, the contextual ads may bring you more grief than money.
Luckily, there are many alternatives to AdSense. For more information, check out the guide in alternatives to Google AdSense when it comes to website traffic monetization at the Shorte.st blog.
Affiliate Marketing
In the case of affiliate marketing, you basically pick a network that sells a product fitting your audience and try to sell this product through different means: text links, banner links, pop-ups, and roll-ups. The number of different affiliate networks is pretty big: Some, like VigLink, specialize in in-text links monetization. Other in creating very specific sales funnels and an interesting approach to cookies policy, e.g. ClickFunnels have so-called “sticky cookies” which count a conversion from a user that will start in your funnel but convert on their own. The important thing is, to make your pick very carefully and choose a product that will be both interesting for your audience but will be easy to sell, so something with short user flow would be the best. Otherwise, you may earn very little or nothing at all.
Selling Advertisement Space
If you still want to sell your website space for ads but want to have maximum control over what will be displayed you may try to sell the ad space without any intermediaries. May websites and blogs have a section called ‘Advertisement’ or ‘Advertise with Us’ in which the website owner lists all possible types of advertisement they offer. These usually side banners, top banner, and some in-text or in-list ads. Sometimes the ad offer can be rather extensive and can also include events and actions instead of space, e.g. access to the email newsletter or paid product review.
Some websites list the methods of advertisement together with fixed prices for each piece or time of display. If you are not sure how much you can ask and how much your traffic is really worth, you may just list all the possibilities and ask for contact to discuss the details. In my experience, it works much better for smaller, less-known websites as well as niche blogs.
Paid articles
If you like to write articles and blog posts and your website or your website is a specialized blog, sponsored posts may be a way to go. The process is really simple: you write a review of a product or a service for which the related company pays. It is very important to always be honest with your readers and never over-advertise the product because once you lose the trust of your reader he or she will probably never trust your judgment again. The biggest chance for well-paid sponsored articles has expert blogs that function in some kind of specific niche. Of course, your overall number of readers may be much lower than in case of more generic and easy-to-read blogs, but for the interested company, you just gathered a very specific group of people in one place.
Guest Posting
Once again, an advertisement type related to content. In this case, you will just accept (or not) an article written by another writer or produced by the company and publish it on your own website. However, while paid articles are means of informing the target audience about product or service, for many guest posting companies the main goal is to achieve a dofollow link from your website and tap into your link juice. The price will be based mostly on the average monthly traffic, geos and bounce rate. Just remember to always check if the article is of good quality, that it is original content that brings value to your audience.
Premium Content
If you are a content creator you can set up a subscription system in place. In short, you will offer premium content for those who subscribe to you with a monthly fee. This is a great way to boost your revenue, especially if you are considered an expert in the field and your knowledge and access to data can get quite expensive. On the other hand, some artist post exclusive drawings, songs or short stories or organize exclusive discussion panels and chat-groups only for the subscribed. If you are already a content creator with a decent following, this may be a very good choice to boost your website earnings.
Accept Donations
In case you have a rather strong support of a small community, this may be one of the best ways to capitalize this following. Although you won’t buy your first Lamborghini from the donations, it will at least cover the website upkeep cost. An important thing you have to remember that there is a very thin line between accepting donations and e-begging. Moreover, if you function in charity or social issues related field it is more likely for your audience to donate.
When it comes to the method, I feel that PayPal is one of the easiest ways – it is quite popular and very fast. The time required to donate is really important because most donations are compulsive.
Always look for more
There is no one, correct path of making the money from your website or blog. You will always have more things to consider then we can cover in one article. So the last piece of advice is to test different things and ask your audience for what they would be ready to pay and how much.
Do you have another way to monetize your website traffic which wasn’t mentioned? Be sure to leave it in the comment.
