When it comes to making money online, one of the most obvious ways to do it is to monetize your website. This blog makes money by promoting my own products, as well as, other people’s products and services as an affiliate. However, these aren’t the only ways to make money from a website.

It can take you a while to figure out what works best for making money from your website because every site has a different audience. If something doesn’t work the first time, then try something else. Don’t just give up. In fact, it could take you a few months to a year to start seeing some sales from your monetization efforts, provided that you are sending regular traffic to your website.

So that is why it is important for you to be consistent. Work on your site every day if possible and keep going until you see some results.

To help you get started, here are 5 ways to monetize your website.

1. Become An Affiliate

Affiliate marketing is a hot topic here at 10K Real Visitors. I earn the majority of my income from promoting products and services so that I receive a commission when you buy something. The main thing that is important is that you pick products and services to promote that appeal to your audience.

That is where a lot of affiliate marketers go wrong. They simply pick a product based on how much it pays without considering their audience’s needs at all. If you’re not sure where to find products to promote as an affiliate, check out my previous post here: THESE SITES Are the Top Affiliate Networks.

A great way to promote affiliate products on your website is to make a post that reviews the product or a list article that talks about the top products to purchase. For example, you could do a blog post called 10 Ways to Organize Your Home and link to various products from Amazon throughout.

Benefits:

• You could potentially earn steady monthly side income.
• It is easy to set up; just insert your links.
• Passive income.
• For the most part, it is set it and forget it. Just check your links to make sure that they work periodically and haven’t expired.

Drawbacks:

• You’re probably not going to make much if you don’t get a lot of traffic.
• Some affiliate products don’t convert well so you might want to start by choosing products that you see others promoting in your niche.
• Make sure that whatever you’re promoting is a good product so that your audience won’t be disappointed.

2. Make Your Own Product

Product creation is an easy way to make money from selling online. In fact, you can actually use your products to drive more traffic back to your website by selling your product on a marketplace like Fiverr, Udemy, and others. These marketplaces receive a high volume of traffic which will make it easier for you to get sales than just simply posting the product on your own website.

Benefits:

• Build your brand.
• Get sales through your own affiliates.
• Passive income.
• You choose how much you want to charge.
• Get recurring monthly income if you promote your product as a monthly service.

Drawbacks:

• Product creation takes a lot of effort and you’ll probably have to spend quite a bit of money to get it developed and to promote it.

3. Sell Advertising

If your website gets a lot of traffic, why not sell advertising on your site? Sites like AdClerks and BuySellAds make it easy for you to sell banner advertising on your site. You also don’t have to go through these sites at all.

You can also monetize your website with good, old Google AdSense. However, you need to take care and make sure that you follow their guidelines carefully or you could get banned. Just create a page on your site for advertising and use other websites in your niche for inspiration on what types of ads to offer and how much to sell them for.

Benefits:

• Little effort to monetize your site.
• When you work with an ad network, they take care of the payments and ad setup for you. All you have to do is install some code on your site that will display the ads.
• Great way to find customers for your business.

Drawbacks:

• Too many ads can hurt the user experience of your site.
• You can only charge a fixed amount for ads which means you don’t get paid more if some of your customers have better conversion rates than others.
• Advertisers aren’t exactly loyal so you’ll have to spend time looking for them.

4. Host Webinars

People love to interact with site owners and the best way to get to know your audience personally and make money at the some time is to do a webinar. The other thing that’s great about a webinar is that they are excellent for selling products at a high price point.

You also don’t even have to make your own product. You could actually sell a product as an affiliate during a webinar. Create a free webinar that your site visitors can sign up for and set it to replay once a week. Once you’ve put together a few webinars, you’ll have enough material to bundle into a video course that you can sell on its own.

If you’re just starting out and you want to see how much traffic a webinar might attract, use YouTube Live to host a webinar live for free.

Benefits:

• People love webinars.
• A great way to share your knowledge.
• You can sell high-priced products and you don’t need a large audience to make sales.
• You can replay them anytime so that users can watch them at a time that is convenient for them.

Drawbacks:

• If you don’t enjoy being on camera, this might not be the best monetizing option for you.
• You’ll have to invest in webinar software in order to deliver a professional quality webinar.
• People might find it difficult to make time for your webinar especially if they don’t see that you are offering something of value.
• You have to come up with fresh content regularly, which means you’ll probably have to hire a writer at some point.

5. Publish a Book

If you’re an expert on anything, publishing a book should definitely be on your bucket list of things to do at least once. While it can be time-consuming writing a book is extremely rewarding because you’ll be able to share that you’ve shared your knowledge with the world. Publishing a book also shows your audience that you take your online business seriously and that you want it to grow.

If you read what some authors have shared about book publishing, you may be surprised to learn that some people didn’t even know that their book would end up becoming a bestseller.

In fact, this is the exact story of J.K. Rowling, the author of the Harry Potter book series, who went on to become a millionaire from her books which have sold more than 400 million copies. She is the United Kingdom’s best-selling living author, with sales in excess of £238M.

So how does this help your website?

You can actually increase the number of shares of your website by linking to your website in your book so that people can learn more about you and your website. In addition, publishing a book could also lead to other business building activities, such as getting paid for consulting or being invited to speak at an event.

There are so many platforms to publish a book on these days, such as Amazon. You can even make your own website for your book and sell it yourself.

Benefits:

• Demonstrates your expertise.
• Write a book on an evergreen topic and receive earnings for years to come.
• Increase your changes of attracting other opportunities for your business, such as speaking or consulting.

Drawbacks:

• If you’re not a good writer, it will cost you time and money to hire a ghostwriter.
• A book won’t make you a lot of money on it’s own if you don’t promote it or publish it through a popular platform like Amazon.

BONUS IDEA: Sell Your Website

If you’ve spent a lot of time investing in your website and it is taking more of your time than you would like it to, you can consider selling it. Depending on the worth of your domain name and the amount of money and traffic that your website brings in on a monthly basis, you could expect to earn a good amount of money.

If you want to sell your website, post it on a site like Flippa or GoDaddy Auctions. You can also head to the NamePros forum to ask for advice from domain flipping experts on how to sell a website.

Benefits:

• You can get a lump sum of cash for your site.
• You might actually enjoy domain flipping as a business.

Drawbacks:

• It can take a long time to find a buyer for your site.
• People may try to low ball you.
• You could end up selling it for less money than you’ve spend on it over the years.

I’ll give it to you straight; you’re going to have to think creatively to make this work for your website. If it was as easy as click and profit, we’d all be rich. Focus on improving your conversion strategy, growing your audience, and delivering value to start seeing results.

Do you have any other ideas for monetizing your website? Share them below in the comments!