9 Tips to Make Money with Your Website

Posted by EightNine at August 10, 2010

In order to make money online you pretty much need a website. There are ways that you can make money without a website but it is much easier if you have your own site. There are dozens of ways that you can make money with your website, you are really only limited by your imagination. That being said most people stick to the tried and true methods of making money online rather than trying to come up with something completely original. It is perfectly acceptable to follow a well worn path and copy what has worked in the past. A truly great original idea may be necessary to make billions of dollars but you can certainly make lots of money online by doing what has worked for other people.

1. Adsense

When most people think of making money with their website Adsense is usually the first thing they think about. Adsense is Google’s advertising program and it has the enormous advantage of being very simple, it is really just a matter of adding some code to your site and Google takes care of the rest. The downside is that most webmasters who try to make money online with Adsense will end up making very little money. The reason for this is that they don’t have websites that are on topics that have the potential to make money. They type of ads you get from Adsense will depend on the content of your website, Google tries to show ads that are relevant to your visitors. If you want to make money with Adsense you need to have a site with content that attracts advertisers. If there is no product to sell that is directly related to your site you may want to think about a different way of making money.

2. Affiliate Marketing

This is by far the second most popular way to make money online after Adsense. An affiliate program is one in which you will sell somebody else’s product in exchange for a commission. There are thousands of affiliate programs so finding one to promote should be no problem. The advantage of an affiliate program is that you can earn more money than you can by selling ad space if you know what you are doing. If also offers the advantage of having no risk because it costs you nothing. The downside is that it is very difficult to sell affiliate products. There is a lot of competition and most people online aren’t really interested in buying anything. The key to being a successful affiliate is to find a product that will appeal to the visitors to your site and get very good a pre-selling.

3. Banner Advertising

Banner advertising is probably the simplest way to make money with a website, you get paid to display a banner on your site, and you don’t need to sell anything or need anybody to click on your ad. The advantage here is that you know right up front how much you are going to get paid. It is also very simple, all you need to do is add a little bit of code to your site. The disadvantage is that you need a lot of traffic to make any money, nobody is going to pay to advertise on your site if it gets no traffic. The other disadvantage is that you need to find advertisers, you can do this yourself but it will take quite a bit of effort, or you can use a broker, in which case they will take a hefty percentage as a commission.

4. Sponsored Reviews

Sponsored reviews have become quite popular in recent years as a way to make money with your website. In order to get paid you will write a review of a product and post it on your site. There is no requirement that the review be positive so you can provide an honest review. The advantage here is that you can make money online even though your site may get very little traffic, you don’t normally need a lot of traffic to be approved to write reviews. The downside is that you don’t really make very much money, you get about $5 per review and may get a couple a week at most. The other problem is that if your site becomes full of sponsored reviews you will likely find that you have few readers. There are plenty of websites that you can sign up for if you want to make money writing sponsored reviews.

5. Donations

This one surprises a lot of people but you can actually make a lot of money online simply by asking for it. It is very easy to set up a button for donations through PayPal and a surprising number of people will donate. There are a number of webmasters who make the bulk of their income through donations. The key to getting donations is to have good quality content that makes people want to donate in order to help keep your site going. There really is no downside here, it is easy and costs nothing to put a donation button on your site and you may be surprised at how much money you make.

6. Premium Content

This can be one of the most lucrative ways to make money online providing you have good enough content to get people to pay to read it. The idea here is to offer some of your content for free but to make your best stuff premium content that requires a membership to access. The advantage here is that you can get a recurring income by charging a monthly fee rather than a onetime sale, this is what makes membership sites so profitable you get paid over and over again by the same customer. The downside of course is that you need to have a lot of good quality content and you need to keep adding it. Nobody is going to pay if you don’t offer them value for their money and they aren’t going to keep paying unless you keep adding new content.

7. Build a List

It is widely agreed that the best way to make money online is by building a list and selling to them. A list is simply a the names of people who have agreed to receive emails from you on a regular basis. Obviously they aren’t going to do this for no reason, you have to give them a reason to sign up for your list and you have to provide them with good content in your emails to keep them signed up. Generally to get people to sign up for your list you need to offer them a free product, usually an eBook. Once you’ve got them to sign up you will send them emails on a regular basis, in effect you are sending them a newsletter. Occasionally you will mix in a recommendation for an affiliate product. The biggest mistake people make when marketing to their list is to try to sell too often, you shouldn’t be promoting a product with every email.

8. Sell Your Own Product

This is similar to selling an affiliate product only you are creating your own product to sell instead. It is a lot easier to create a product than most people realize and potentially it can be much more lucrative than affiliate sales. Usually the product people create is an eBook but this is by no means a requirement. The advantage of selling your own product is that there is less competition since you are selling a unique product. When you are selling an affiliate product you are competing with hundreds of other affiliates trying to make money online by selling exactly the same product, having your own product solves this problem. The downside is that you have to actually create your own product. Although this is not as difficult as most people think it is there is still quite a bit of work involved.

9. Sell your Website

Once you have a website that is actually making money you can sell the website and make a substantial profit. In fact there are many people who set up businesses specifically to build and sell websites. Generally the most profitable way to do this is to build a website and monetize with one of the methods listed above and when the money starts to role in you can sell the site. The other approach is to simply build websites and sell them as turnkey businesses. These websites will not be monetized they will simply be sites preloaded with content. There are many people who want make money online who either don’t know how or can’t be bothered to build a website, these are your potential customers. Obviously sites that aren’t yet making money will sell for a lower price, but the trade off is that they can be built and sold much faster.

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