Your Site Is Live, Let's Make Some Money!
Monetizing your website begins today.
So you’re ready to make some money online. You’ve spent time and effort on creating your website: it looks great, has a professional template, is fully functional and you have some fast, reliable web hosting too. You’ve already added content, images and your site is good to go. But what now? How can your site bring you that extra income? Here are some tips and ideas on monetizing your website:
- Build traffic
First things first: to even think about monetizing your website you need some good traffic. The more visitors your website has, the greater the chances of earning some decent cash. How do you go about that? First of all, tell all of your friends and family, ask them to visit your new site and maybe leave some comments, ask them for their opinions, etc. You can also promote your site on your personal social media channels. Post it on Facebook, Tweet about it, add some pins to your Pinterest board. You can also set up social media pages specifically for your website and run some paid ads to get initial traction. If your website is about something local, or could benefit locals, perhaps get in touch with local magazines and newspapers. Ask them to feature your website in an interesting interview. You should also work on your SEO skills: either do it yourself or get an expert to optimize your site (if you haven’t already done so) and work on keywords and meta descriptions.
One of the most straightforward ways to start monetizing your website is through affiliation. This is basically an agreement with a third party business which pays you a fee every time a visitor coming from your site to theirs spends any money on their website. Usually the fee is a percentage of the amount the visitor spends on that website. For example, if your website is all about wellbeing, some types of affiliate links you could place on your site are: vitamin tablets, supplements, healthy eating cookbooks, dieticians, etc. Be aware of what type of industry you are linking out to: it needs to be relevant and interesting to the visitors on your site.
- Paid ads
Another method for monetizing your website is to place paid ads on your site. One of the leading providers for this service is Google AdSense, where you place code snippets on your site which then place ads for paying brands. For each ad space there is a bidding, with the highest paying ad being placed on the websites. Also, only relevant brands will be placed on your designated ad space so that your visitors feel like you’re providing value, rather than just random industries.
- Banner ads
Once you have achieved a high level of traffic, you can start approaching companies of your choice directly and offering them banner space ads. This form of monetizing your website cuts out any middle man. You can negotiate directly with the company of your choice and place the ad you have approved on your site yourself. This has the benefit of a high, regular monthly contribution to your income.
This may be quite obvious, but unless your website is an online shop, perhaps you didn’t entertain the thought of actually selling something yourself? If your site is about opinions, reviews or guides, perhaps you could put together a series of leaflets targeting specific situations, how to do something, how to repair something or just some friendly advice. You could offer the first one for free in exchange of an email address, and any subsequent orders would have a download fee. Or perhaps people really like your logo? You could design a small and easy to manufacture product with your branding and offer it online. You could create giveaways on your social media channels for the first, say, 10 people who comment, and the rest would have to pay. There are many creative ideas to generate income in this way.
If you’re ready to start making money online, build your website today with WestHost’s Website Builder tool.