Ways to monetise your website

With all the ways of making money online, setting up and running your own website can be a great source of income for you or for a business idea you may have stashed away in the back of your mind. This could be from setting up a simple blog, an e-commerce store, a serviced based website or even learn how to create a drop shipping website to provide an extra source of income on the side.

Whatever your goals may be, here are the top ways you can monetise a website.

1. Subscriptions

Subscriptions are a great way to generate monthly revenue, with many sites offering a range of resources and content across many different industries and market niches In return for a monthly or sometimes yearly subscription price. These resources could include:

  • Premium content and access
  • Information insights
  • Downloable content
  • Courses and learning materials
  • News and updates
  • Offers and access to promotions

Picking a niche and offering your subscribers valuable information coupled with an exempt user experience, you can begin to build a community which drives monthly revenue and establish yourself as a go to place in your particular niche/market. Starting from scratch can be difficult when trying to drive and attract traffic to your site to establish trust and ultimately gain more subscribers. Utilising a targeted SEO strategy and social media marketing, you can quickly amass a following and begin to drive visitors to your site.

2. Sell products/set up an e-commerce store

Shopping online has far surpassed that of traditional high street sales with many brands now solely adopting e-commerce as their business model and strategy moving forward in a digital world.  E-commerce stores are popping up left, right and centre in what seems to be almost every industry and market across the globe. Whether you sell your own products or resell others, you can make a sizeable profit from selling goods online with many types of products able to be sold, including:

  • Electronics
  • Clothes/merchandise
  • Digital goods 
  • Experiences
  • Art

Again, it can be hard to establish new e-commerce brands from scratch, with trust and visibility being major factors in driving sales and establishing a customer base that buys again and again. Have a read through our e-commerce section to find out more about the industry and how to grow your brand.

3. Ads

Ads can be a good way to drive monthly revenue but it’s not without its hardships. If you can drive large amounts of visitors to your site, who are particularly interested in a specific topic or industry, you can generate well paying ads based on page views which drive monthly revenue form you or your brand. For example generating 50,000 page views a month could make you around $4950 a month in ad revenue. 

Gaining large volumes of traffic can be difficult, especially if you are looking to spend as little as possible for setting up a site and to market your offering. But you can make the most of SEO and social media to drive organic traffic which engages better with your content and produces revenue.  

You could set up: 

  • A Blog
  • News site 
  • Streaming site 
  • Educational resources 

4. Lead Generation

To make money you don’t always have to make directly through services or products. Generating leads for other businesses is fast becoming a popular service which many smaller organisations rely on to drive leads for them. If you can manage to create a site which offers content and resources around a particular industry vertical or niche, you can begin to drive leads through forms which can be sold to other businesses for a fee of your choosing. 

You can also gain leads and data from your site to use for other activities such as email marketing or other direct approaches which may drive further revenue for your business. Gated content is when you offer specific content such as downloable content or information in return for the users information which can then be used for other marketing activities such as email marketing.

5. Donations

Donations have become quite popular on streaming sites like twitch and other platforms where users can donate money or even crypto currency to content creators to help them continue to make content and support the financially when the creator might not directly ask for money.

Websites are no different and if you can establish a following on your own platform, offering a donation button might help to drive some much needed revenue to help you continue to create the content you love. Charities and other non profit organisations might also find this technique useful to drive extra donations I’d addition to other activities.

What now?

There are many ways to monetise a website in the modern world. But in order to succeed, individuals and businesses need to establish a strong following through consistent value in the form of digital services, goods or informative resources. In doing so, they can begin to establish a brand that has long lasting relationships with their users which drive revenue. 

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