10 Powerful Ways to Make Money from Your Website or Blog

I can remember when I started my first website back in 2006 and got no traffic, visitors or money. I had a dream of making money online but didn’t know where to start?

Do you feel the same way? Maybe you bought a domain name, installed WordPress or Wix, uploaded a nice theme and published some awesome content. Everything is in place except 1 thing: money!

You are not alone since most website owners earn very little money from their websites. In fact, 95% of bloggers make less than $500 TOTAL from their blogs.

What’s going on here? Well, you need to shift your mindset from just content creator to business owner.

Your audience comes to your website for several reasons: need help with a problem, seeking advice, looking for entertainment, dealing with pain or discomfort, etc.

They know what the problem is but do not understand which solution is best for them. As a website owner, your goal is to connect your visitors to the right solution and then boom, a sale or transaction is made.

We aren’t just bloggers or freelancers; We are problem solvers, entrepreneurs and business owners.

That was the mental shift I made to go from struggling blogger making zero dollars to making enough money from the internet to travel the world, live anywhere I want and own a digital business money making business.

Make Full Time Income from Your Website or Earn Extra Income: The Choice is Yours

That was my goal back in 2006 and it took me 3 years until I was comfortable enough to quit my job as a webmaster and live off my internet income. Some people keep their jobs while running their websites but I think in the long term most people want more freedom away from their jobs.

It’s up to you to where you want to take your website. Once you start earning money, you can actually make a rational decision so focus on driving traffic and making money before you file your resignation letter.

Monetizing your website is the first step into making more money so you have more options in terms of your career.

Ok. So let’s get to the tips. Here Are 10 Powerful Ways to Monetize Your Website or Blog

1. Sell Your Own Product or Service

If you want to be considered an expert in your niche/industry, you eventually need to launch a product or service for sale. Your audience likes your content and they want to buy from you.

I’ve helped do SEO and build websites for people who found my services through this blog you’re reading.

Selling your own product earns you the most profit margin and gives you 100% control over your income.

It’s easy to get started – I use Woocommerce on WordPress to sell digital items through this site and bill my clients via Paypal.

If you want to sell physical products, then Shopify is the best way to add an e-commerce store to your website.

2. Affiliate Marketing

Affiliate Marketing is a great way for you to earn extra money RIGHT NOW without worrying about creating a product or delivering a service. You earn a commission payout for every lead and/or sale you generate for merchants.

The most successful website owners and bloggers use a mix of their own products/services and affiliate marketing to build multi-million dollar sites.

There are several different types of affiliate content you can create:

• Product Reviews
• “Best of” Reviews
• Step by Step Tutorials explaining how to use a product
• Youtube video review
• Offer a bonus for signing up with your affiliate link
• List your favorite resources and link to affiliate products
• Share your affiliate link on social media sites like Facebook, Twitter and Quora
• Build an email list using ConvertKit and tell your subscribers to check out your link

Affiliate marketing makes up a good portion of my income and creating helpful content without sounding salesy works best for me.

Further Reading on Affiliate Marketing:

• Pat Flynn’s Epic Guide to Affiliate Marketing
• NicheFacts
• Making Sense of Affiliate Marketing

3. Display Ad Networks (Google Adsense)

Display ads work very well for niches where people don’t tend to purchase a lot of products. Niches like gaming, entertainment, and celebrity news do extremely well with display ads because you get a lot of pageviews naturally.

Your readers are passionate about your topic but don’t necessarily want to buy something. And that’s ok.

Showing display ads helps cover your hosting expenses and can earn you a lot of money once you optimize your ad placement.

Google Adsense is the most popular CPM network along with Media.net and Taboola.

4. Write Kindle Ebooks

Kindle E-Publishing is a great way for bloggers to take their existing content and monetize it on the Amazon platform. For shorter ebooks, you can bundle up some of your existing articles, reformat them and publish them as a Kindle eBook.

I still earn $50 to $100 per month from Kindle eBooks I wrote back in 2015. They earn passive income for me and I get to help people in the process.

Sell Sponsored Articles & Guest Posts

Ever since 2015, I’ve noticed a huge surge in companies looking to pay for a guest posts on my website. Websites need dofollow backlinks to rank high in Google search and you can make good money allowing resellers and companies to post articles on your site with a link back to their company.

Now, you have to know the value of your website before you start selling sponsored posts. Many resellers take advantage of website owners by offering you $10 while charging their personal clients $100+.

Charging at least $50 is a good way to weed out the resellers and if you get a lot of traffic and have a growing audience, then you want to charge more. You can get $400+ or more depending on how big your site gets. Don’t be afraid to ask for more money because you end up working with better clients who complain less.

For a more in-depth course, I highly recommend Making Sense of Sponsored Posts to show you how to make a lot of money using this strategy.

Accept Donations

Donations are an easy way to let your audience send money to support your ongoing efforts and expenses. Paypal is the easiest way to accept donations on your website. All you need to do is sign up for a Paypal account and install the button on your site.

If you use WordPress, Give is an excellent plugin for accepting donations and tracking your stats. You can create different pages and make a donation tracker to show people how much money you wish to raise.

All this only takes a few minutes to setup and you’re good to go!

Sell an Online Course

Online courses are making a lot of money and most people prefer learning through a hands on course with videos than reading a long ebook. Most courses are made up of # of lessons using video, audio, text and graphics to teach a speicifc subject.

You can use Teachable to create beautiful courses on their platform for free without worrying about technical stuff like plugins, theme modifications, etc.

If you use WordPress and have web deelopment skills, I personally recommend LearnDash or WPCourseWare for creating your online course. Both plugins are under $200 for an annual license and you control and own 100% of your course content.

Offer 1 on 1 Coaching or Lessons

While everyone loves useful articles and videos, you will realize a small percentage of your traffic needs hands on training from an expert like yourself. People are willing to pay for coaching and consulting services because you can help them avoid critical errors and get results much faster.

Create a “Consulting” or “Coaching” page on your website and allow potential clients to contact you. I use Skype to deliver 1 to 1 coaching because I can talk to clients no matter where they live without paying a bunch of roaming charges.

All you need is to figure out what your visitors will pay for then charge them a fair hourly rate for your services.

Sell Tshirts

If your website has lots of loyal fans, then consider selling them clothing like tshirts, hats and hoodies with your brand. You can also branch out into other designs and use powerful messages on your clothing to increase your sales.

Teespring & Spreadshirt are the two easiest ways to profit from the self design industry. These companies provide all the tools, materials, warehouses and shipping facilities to deliver your clothing to your customers.

Create some unique designs using Photoshop or Canva, upload your designs on their platform, and share your clothing store on your website and social media pages.

Once an order is placed, your profit is the difference between your final sales price and the cost of production. This is a simple way to monetize your website if you have an eye for design.

Don’t have any design skills? You can hire a talented designer from Fiverr or Upwork to create clothing designs for your store.

Embed your designs on your website and make money…Cha ching!

Sell Memberships

This is something I’ve been doing lately with lots of success because monthly website subscriptions provide reliable, passive income every month.

Netflix, Spotify and Amazon Prime are all examples of how you can turn a monthly subscription into a multi-billion dollar business.

In order to create a membership site, you need to create premium content or features then allow your visitors to access them for a monthly, quarterly or annual fee.

For example, you can offer premium videos for paying subscribers like Netflix or give extra forum features if you ran an online discussion forum. There are many ways to offer premium upgrades so get creative and think about what your users will pay extra for.

If you use WordPress, I recommend MemberPress or MemberMouse plugins for creating a profitable membership site. I personally use Memberpress and earn a small yet consistent income on one of my sites without tons of promotion.

You can also use Paypal Subscriptions to create a recurring payment option then allow your visitors to sign up using their credit cards.

Conclusion

If you follow any of these monetization methods, then you are well on your way to making a full time income from your website and opening up the possibility of you quitting your regular job, staying at home with your kids or traveling the world with your new found freedom.

Making money from your website also gives you an income generating asset with potential resale value. EmpireFlippers & Flippa are both well established website marketplaces for website owners looking to sell their sites.

You can sell your site for millions of dollars in the future once you build up the income stream. Many companies and entrepreneurs have access to billions of dollars and search for profitable websites to acquire every day. You can sell off your website and enjoy an early retirement or simply pour the funds into your next big venture.

I hope this article gives you some interesting ideas and I’d love to hear your personal thoughts in the comments.

Here’s to making a lot of money from your website! Good luck 🙂