Here’s How to Make Money With Your Website in 2023
There are hundreds of different monetization strategies and tactics that website owners can use to make money with their websites. The amount of traffic your website receives, the type of website you are managing, and the behavior of your users can all impact the success of individual monetization methods.
Some of the options that will be discussed below including; adding E-Commerce to your website, creating ad space and running ads, participating in affiliate marketing programs, or creating sponsored content. While all of these can be used by any website, it is important to consider your overall strategy with your website and make sure your monetization tactics align with that. Here are a few tried and true methods of making money with your website.
How Can I Add E-Commerce Functionality to my Website?
Adding E-commerce functionality is the more direct way to make money with your website. While adding E-Commerce functionality to your website may seem daunting, it does not always need to be physical products. If you are looking to sell products with minimal or no movement of physical goods, there are thousands of E-products to sell like e-Books, online courses, digital products (like logos or designs) and even your services.
Can I Make Money Selling Products on my website?
Yes, you can definitely make money selling physical products on your website. If your business creates, manufactures, or distributes products, you can easily sell them on your website utilizing WooCommerce. WooCommerce is a free to use software that can be plugged into your website to help you sell your products. The basic options that come with WooCommerce will be enough to get your physical products store off the ground. Before you get into selling physical products on your website, consider these questions:
- What will happen after the order is placed? / Do you have a process for order management already in place?
- Do you have the resources to package and ship your physical products?
- What happens if the individual who receives the product wants to return it?
- What are the margins like? / Can I scale my physical products to sell more?
- Why should someone buy from your website rather than a big box retailer?
If you are interested in adding an E-commerce store to your website, but you don’t have any physical products, or are uninterested in dealing with the logistics of physical product sales, selling products is still an option. There are hundreds of digital products that could be sold, including (but, definitely not limited to):
- Graphics, logos, images or digital art
- e-Books, articles, scientific information or valuable research and data
- Software or an electronic tool
- Courses, training guides or extensive step-by-step walk throughs
- Templates: Meal plans, scheduling guides, recipes
Can I make money without selling products?
If your business provides services to your existing clients or customers, you should definitely be selling them online. Providing an easy way for potential or new clients to purchase your services directly from your website, reduces the amount of time it takes for a website visitor to commit personally and financially to purchasing your service. Selling your services online is the easiest way for a service-based business to make money with their website in 2022.
Can I make money selling ad space on my website?
Yes, but you must:
- Understand if you have the appropriate traffic to generate revenue from ads
- Understand how ads affect user experience
It is important to note that the amount of traffic your website receives will directly impact your website’s ability to generate revenue. In order to effectively sell ad space on your website, you will need to have consistent traffic to your website and a solid understanding of your audience.
Setting up a Google AdSense account (free of charge) is the first step in adding ads to your website. The Site Kit by Google plugin is available to connect your Google AdSense account directly to your website. There are a handful of different types of ads you can create through Google AdSense including Display ads, In-feed ads, In-article ads, and Matched content. You are able to place ads automatically, but it is best to place them manually to maintain control over the formatting of your website. While this is just a brief overview of one way to sell ads, it is important to due further research to understand how ads will:
- Affect User experience
- Benefit (or annoy) users on your website
- Generate revenue on your website
How do affiliates make money?
An affiliate program is where a website will pay you a commission, or portion of the sale for every buyer, or for traffic or visitors. It is important to recognize that not every potential affiliate will be right to partner with. Like advertising, the affiliate partnership should be beneficial to some of your visitors and should match the general demographics the company is looking for. Affiliates advertise products or services through things like sharing reviews in blog posts or videos and providing affiliate links that are easily accessible.
If you are selling products or services, you can also be the affiliate partner and pay others for referrals or purchases on your website that were initiated by them. Smaller websites might have a hard time getting affiliates. For the best affiliate partners, we recommend considering your target avatar for your website and how that might compare with those of companies running affiliate marketing programs you may participate in. It will often be a better, more profitable partnership if they have commonalities between them.
Another angle of affiliate marketing is being the affiliating body itself. Meaning, you provide individuals or companies a small cut of revenue for referring their audience to you. This method works great if you have partners in the industry or other companies who provide services or products that are complementary (pair well) with your own services or products. You should be extremely selective in having an affiliate partner as you want to make sure the leads and business that your affiliates generate are quality and have a high customer lifetime value.
How to make money by creating sponsored content?
If your website has a steady flow of monthly traffic with established reach, you may be approached to create sponsored content on your website. This is when a company, business, or other individual reaches out to you and offers to pay you for creating content (usually a blog post or video) about their product or service. Oftentimes this comes in the form of product or service reviews, comparisons between products, or showcasing of new products. Sponsored content is a great way to make money with your website, but here are a few things to consider:
- Don’t only post sponsored content: If you are constantly posting sponsored content, your website visitors will start to notice and seek other sources for unbiased information. Even when you’re giving your honest opinion on a sponsored post, over-doing it can look as though you only care about making money.
- Be tasteful: Sponsored posts should fit the overall purpose of your website.If you’re selling computers online, don’t write a sponsored post for a make-up company, that wouldn’t make sense.
- Is this useful to your website visitors? If you agree to do a sponsored post, make sure it’s with a brand or product that aligns with your personal or business beliefs and interests. If you are lying in your sponsored posts about how “great” and “absolutely perfect” the product is, people will see right through it.
- You SHOULD want to make money with your website, but you SHOULD NOT just look to get the largest amount of money possible. This is almost a reiteration of the last bullet, but if you’re only seeking the highest profit sponsored posts, you have probably lost sight of your audience.
Conclusion
The monetization strategies listed are just a few of hundreds of different ways answer the question of how to make money with your website. Factors such as your website’s target audience, monthly traffic, the strength of your call-to-action, and your business objectives will influence the decisions you make around generating revenue from your website. If you try to make money using one strategy and it does not work, don’t be afraid to pivot and try new things. If you need help with starting to or improving your website’s monetization strategy or if you need a website maintenance plan, let us know, we would love to help. Another pro tip: follow this easy to use small business website checklist to make sure you’re starting in the right spot!
