Making money from your website isn’t a myth. It’s doable by anyone.

In fact – turning a part-time, hobby blog or website into an income-generating asset is fairly common with a bit of luck and some hard work.

At the very least, you should be able to make enough to cover your basic expenses for a domain and hosting. You might even be able to replace your income (and then earn some more).

Keep in mind that the strategies listed below range from easy and passive, to the ones which require a TON of on-going work (so make sure you pick something that suits your site and lifestyle preferences).

There are 33 total tips in this guide, but let’s start with the ten most popular (and predictable) site monetization tips.

Tip: If you want to create a website that you want to earn money, you can use our service, which along with building and designing a website, provides training and special services to earn money and increase your audience.

10 Most Common Ways to Make Money with Your Website

Making money from your website isn’t easy. These ten tips are probably your best bet to get started.

1. Affiliate Marketing (.. and Affiliate Links)

Let’s cover the basics first. Affiliate marketing is simply the process of promoting (a.k.a. marketing) the products or services of other people’s businesses in return for a cut of the revenue. For example, if Company A sells laptop at $1000 each and has an affiliate program, in which an affiliate marketer gets 2.5% for any sale, then an affiliate marketer would get $25 for every $1000 sale.

While $25 may not seem like much, affiliate marketing can be done at scale. If you drove 1,000 people to the site in a week, and 10% made a purchase, you’d make $2500. If you set up a website that converts them for you, then this happens week on week without your input.

With thousands of affiliate program now available to choose from, affiliate networks play an important role in this process as well. To find the most success with affiliate programs and networks, make sure you pay attention to ones with higher commission rates and who their target audiences are.

Where can I find products to promote?

Amazon-High variety of products –time payments
Commission junction – offers reliable products with on-time payments.
ShareASale – mostly clothes, accessories, and other offline goods.
Clickbank – high percentage payouts, but there’s a lack of GOOD products to promote.

 

2. “Pay Per Click” Advertising (Google Adsense)

AdWords are the advertisements that show up on the top of Google search result pages.

AdSense is the reverse, allowing publishers to tap into Google’s immense advertising network so that other advertisers can run ads on their website.

The best part about this system is how simple everything is.

Once you sign up, Google will place a simple code on your website that will identify the content of your site and start displaying relevant advertisements. For example, if your site is about pets (dogs & cats), Google AdSense will start showing your visitors ads for cat food, dog training, and more.

You get paid each time someone clicks on the ad. (Yes, it’s really that easy!)

Your cut might be anywhere from $0.50 to $5 per click. When your site has enough traffic, you can make hundreds (if not thousands of dollars) each month.

3. Sell Ad Space
incorporating Google’s AdSense on your website is just one way to make money from online advertisements.

Another is to simply sell your own ad space directly to companies looking to sponsor different blogs. You can come up with a price for each space, for example: “Sidebar banner ads will cost $xxx per month”.

You can get paid depending on how many visitors you get. Typically it’s quoted as a dollar amount per one thousand impressions (or CPM). You might see it as $5 CPM. If the website gets 100,000 visits a month, that ad price translates into $500 bucks.

The good thing about this approach is that if your site gets a ton of traffic from different sources, your simple banner ad pricing can go up to as high as $5000 per month! The obvious downside is that if your site doesn’t get a lot of traffic, you can’t expect to earn much either.

The other common method when selling ad space directly from your website is a simple direct price. You simply name a price (based on what you think it’s worth, relative to what the competition might be charging), and get paid upfront at the beginning of each month. This pricing is also generally a simple flat fee, not tied to a Cost Per Click like AdSense

4.Create Restricted Members Only Content

Your most loyal readers are huge fans and may be willing to pay to read more of your work. You can create a members-only area for them to share more in-depth blog posts, downloads, videos, audio content, and more.

Membership sites can be a big time investment since you must continually create premium content for your paying members. But they can be very lucrative because they are recurring revenue (subscriptions).

You can easily create a membership site using a WordPress membership plugin. We recommend using Ultimate Membership, it is the most beginner friendly and robust membership plugin for WordPress.

5.Create a Private Forum

Another option for creating a paid membership site is to create private forums that users must pay to get access to. Forums are a great way for your audience to get one-on-one advice from you. Other members of the community can also interact and help each other out.

While moderating a forum can be a lot of work, a paid forum is a great way to earn recurring revenue from your site.

6.Accept Donations

Last but not least, one way you can make money from your blog is simply to ask for it.

You can begin accepting donations in a few different ways. You could add a Paypal donate button or a Stripe donate button to your website. Or for a more professional look and advanced features like email marketing integration, you could use WPForms to create a donation form on your site.

Donations are last on the list because of their limited effectiveness, since you have to rely on the generosity of your readers. It’s usually more lucrative to offer them something in return.