How To Monetize a Website – 9 Easy Ways

There’s a number of ways to monetize a website today. It depends a bit on your wishes and preparedness to work for success, but monetizing a websit can be rather easy, provided you start it the right way.

It’s actually rather exhilarating to hear that you can work out of the comfort of your own home and earn money. Or, for that matter, from anywhere in the world, literally. All you need is an interenet connection, and you’re on. This thought alone can spark joy in many people’s minds once they grasp the idea.

But starting out can be frightening. You can take a look around the web and you’re literally bombarded with articles, videos and ads from people doing that. So how do you even start to monetize a website? How exactly are you supposed to join the successful ones?

Step #1: Choosing a niche

Well, you’ll have to start somewhere, and obviously, you’ll have to build a website. But in order to monetize a website properly, your very first step should be choosing your niche. This means that you have to choose the interest area (or market, if you wish) where you can go and create content. For instance, you could choose to write about golf (I know, everybody’s writing about golf nowadays – but let’s leave that as an example). Or breeding horses. Or cooking on open fire. Literally anything goes, as long as there are people interested in the subject.

The best niches, according to Clickbank, are

• Making money online
• Health and weight loss
• Relationships

So if your chosen niche fits one of those, there are thousands of sub-niches in any of the main groups. Just pick the one (or more) you feel proficient at, and go.

Step #2: Building a website

Clearly, in order to monetize a website, you’ll need one first. Again, there are many options out there, but our favorite is WordPress. For that, you’ll need a domain name that corresponds to your niche as close as possible, a hosting account with a service provider, and a little bit of patience. Surely, I’m not diving in this subject here, but if you want, you can read a little bit more about that here. This post is actually oriented towards building an online store, which is another way to monetize a website, but the principles are the same.

You can build your website by yourself, provided that you’re techy enough, or pay someone to do it for you. By building it yourself, you’ll spend some time doing it, can be quite a lot, depending on your level of expertise of course. In the other case, you’ll spend some money on it (can be anywhere from $1,000 to $5,000) and then a little bit of time learning how to update it.

In any case, once you have it live and published on the web, it’s time to monetize a website.

How to monetize a website

There are many different ways to monetize a website. The most popular and the easiest one (arguably) is selling ad spaces, but there are many other great ways to generate income online.

The best way to monetize a website will always depend on your plans, target audience, and personal preference and expertise. This is where the plan of action comes into play. It can be easy to think that bloggers or website owners simply create a website, place some content, and then watch the money roll in.

Surely enough, anything is possible. But in most cases, in order to monetize a website to its full potential, it will help to have a few key points in mind, or you will likely fail. These critical aspects include a growth mindset, at least a 6-month time commitment, and the right tools at your disposal.

So now that we have a brief overview of these fundamentals out of the way, what actually is website monetization?

To monetize a website means you’re making sure your website or blog make money for you. It is an essential concept because website monetization helps you generate active or passive income from your website and should enable you to scale your operations easily.

However, regardless of the way that you monetize a website, you will notice one common component.

Interesting and engaging content

The key trait is simple; the site can draw an audience and keep them by providing valuable content that resonates with them. This quality content continues to draw in a larger audience, and the website’s value increases as it happens.

In many cases, the website makes a sort of an implicit or explicit promise to the respective audience. For instance, it might teach the audience to get rich, it could provide valuable advice on landing a technology job, or it can help individuals to meditate or cook eggs.

Whatever the case may be, the website acts as a vital source of information on a specific theme.

In a nutshell, create a website, create quality and compelling content, maintain your website, grow your audience, and then monetize a website. The website creator establishes trust and continues delivering quality content, and the audience regularly returns to learn or solve their problems. That’s it.

For monetization, you can partner with big players like Google and Microsoft and join their ad programs, Adsense for instance. You can also partner with affiliate networks like JVZoo, Warrior+ or Clickbank in order to promote affiliate offers they have.

You can become an author and create and sell courses about a specific subject, or maybe create interesting reports and ebooks that people might want to buy.

Again, it depends completely on your plans and wishes – and expertise, of course; if you plan to earn $15,000 a month, your approach will be significantly different than when you plan just $1,000 per month.

Using AI to generate content

AI is a very popular tool nowadays, and for a reason. You can do many things with it, one of them is generating content – like articles, posts, ads, and even reviews of other software.

Be careful, though.

The search engines (Google, Bing, etc…) don’t particularly like pure AI-generated content. The reasons are obvious, as are the results of such doing. Your website will not reach your SEO goals, it might even get penalized. Simply put, what this means is your website will not be shown on the search pages. As this is one of the most important sources of traffic to any website, you will end up loosing visitors, subscribers, sales, and in the end, possibly even a whole business.

You can use AI, just not as-is. You can read about some tools that can help you with that in this post.

9 ways to monetize a website successfuly

Here are the most common 8 ways to monetize a website.

• Sponsored content
• Direct advertising
• Google Adsense
• Affiliate marketing
• Charge for your content
• Request donations
• Sell products and services
• Create a full online store
• Flipping websites

In certain cases, it’s enough to use one method to monetize a website to the extent that you reach your goals. In most cases though, you’ll need to combine different ways of monetization in order to earn a substantial income, especially if your website is new. But using more than 2 or 3 methods can be questionable, for a simple reason. You’re ruining the visitor’s focus.

As an example, let’s say you’re selling coffee mugs (inventive, huh?). You want people to see your products and click on that buy button you’ve included.

Now, imagine you’re using Adsense on the same page. Google is smart and its all-seeing eye will know exactly what you’re selling and more importantly, it will know exactly who is visiting such pages. So Adsense will publish a great ad about coffee mugs, possibly better looking and cheaper than yours. You visitors, of course, will see this ad. So what happens next?

The visitor is clearly interested in coffee mugs. If they spot such an ad, chances are they will click it – earning you a few cents through the Adsense program, but taking your customer away from potentialy buying your mugs and you earning much more. You see where this leads?

So, a little prudence is needed when combining different ways to monetize a website. Let’s say a few words about the mentioned ways of monetization.

Sponsored content

Sponsored content, also known as paid content or native advertising, is quite similar to ads in that someone pays you to advertise something on your website. This can be in the form of paid reviews, sales announcements, product launches, event coverage, or direct offers.

It depends solely on you to determine the type of sponsored posts you want published on your site. You can also determine if you or the sponsoring brands have to write the posts. By writing posts by yourself, based on the specs, you can earn additional income.

Sponsored posts can be a lucrative venture, but you don’t want to overdo it. Ideally, you want to ensure your regular posts outnumber the sponsored posts by a very wide margin. You also want to ensure the sponsored posts do not hurt your brand or annoy your audience in any way, meaning you have to carefuly choose the partners and their content.

Direct advertising

Google Adsense, for instance, acts as a middleman between you and the actual advertisers. For that, they’re giving you a small portion of their income, usually a few cents per click.

Instead, you could work directly with advertisers, ensuring you get what they pay for advertising.

This, unfortunately, depends completely on how popular your website is – how many visitors it attracts, how popular the chosen niche is, and how high the advertising potential of the website is. So if you’re just starting out, you can probably forget it, as you’ll have a hard time finding someone to advertise on a blank website, at least for the money you expect for this.

Yes, Google has a huge base of advertisers, and you don’t want to compete with it. Instead, choose a more focused niche where you can be an influencer much easier, bringing you more visitors. Then, you can attract specific advertisers into your business, as it will make much more sense to them.

For instance, you could run a blog about having ducks as pets. It is a highly specialized niche, with probably 100 times smaller audience than many, but it’s a hobby; as such, people who are looking for pet ducks are 100x more likely to spend something on their hobby, compared to a regular by-chance visitor of a golf blog. Here, you can easyly find an advertiser who sells specialized duck food or something similar. Got the idea?

Google Adsense

Google Adsense is a huge advertising platform that uses your resources (the website) to show ads from advertisers all around the world. Tipically, Adsense will place ads all over your website, making it relatively easy to monetize a website, although you can select areas where you want those ads to appear. It’s almost ideal for starters, because Adsense knows what to publish, so you don’t have to worry about it at all.

It has three major drawbacks, though, at least in my experience.

First, it pays poorly. Tipically, the payout is somewhere in the range of a cent per 100 views, and around 10 cents per click. If you have a general website, you’ll need hundreds of ad views for a dollar – much less if people click the ads, of course. The more specialized your website is, the more Adsense will pay you – but you’ll have better options to monetize a website using other ways, too.

Second, your website has to be approved by Adsense to run ads.

It’s not that much of a fuss to initiate the process of approval itself – all you need is a Google acount which you use to apply. It’s their approval process that sometimes makes it a nightmare. For one, they don’t like empty websites, so you’ll have to make sure to have plenty of content already published, which immediately rules you out as a starter. Then, even if you have plenty of content, it’s at their disposal to either like it or not. Meaning they can refuse practically without pointing out the reason, usually saying (in an email) that you have to make sure you have enough quality content according to their rules.

Now, how much quality content is enough for Adsense to let you monetize a website? I honestly have no idea, and my last drawback below is to blame. One thing is for sure, using AI content does not please Adsense easily – if you choose to use AI content, be sure to use AI for ideas and rewrite in your own language later, otherwise…

This is happening to the last website I’ve published with Adsense in mind, called Prepping for Survival. It has quite some content now, but I’m still failing at Adsence approval for months now – hence no ads, no money.

Which brings us to the third drawback, and it’s about Adsense policies. Google likes to change their algorithms often, and Adsense is surely a part of those changes. As such, their policies and algorithms can change anytime. Changes are usually subtle, so subtle you would barely notice it in their docs, but affect the ads horribly. This can affect any website and there are many stories about once successful websites who failed to comply with something on Adsense and lost their income practically over night.

So…

I’m using it in some of my websites, and I’m making anywhere between $0,10 and $20 every month from each. The worst thing about it is it’s completely unpredictable.

Affiliate Marketing

Affiliate marketing is when you promote a certain offer in exchange for a commission that you get when sales are made. This can take all sorts of forms, one of them is Amazon Associates Program. You can see on my site that I’ve mentioned above there’s a banner right under the menu – it will lead you to Amazon, where you can order all sorts of stuff (I’m sure you’re familiar with Amazon, right?).

They also have an approval process in place, but it’s much simpler than that of Adsense. If anything, be sure to always include the site you plan to use in the settings within your profile; traffic you send with your tag without a known origin will get your account banned. I’ve done that too.

Amazon has relatively lousy commissions, up to a few percent (2 – 5%, I think). So $10-$20 per month is relatively easy, for more, you’ll need a good strategy and advertising, which again costs money.

But affiliate marketing is widely spread in other areas also, including services, software tools and other systems. So you can earn much more running this kind of affiliate marketing by joining networks such as JVZoo or Clickbank. There are thousands of offers there in any niche you can think of, and it all comes down to choose the right offers to promote. It’s not always easy, but you can get some “feeling” for it with time.

Then, there are systems that are actually affiliate eco-systems, such as Master Affiliate Profits. This system is centered around affiliates, which gather and use the system as an entry point for a number of earning possibilities. Master Affiliate Profits, or MAP for short, also contains over 50 hours of professional training on making money as an affiliate, along with many tools and free email list building assets. Most importantly, the system generates traffic to member’s links and actually sells in their name, making them commissions all day long.

If you’re starting out and are seriously consider becoming a pro affiliate marketer, I strongly suggest you watch this free presentation and join MAP while it’s still a young system. The sooner you join, the more clicks you’ll get from the system and the higher your chances are to earn without really doing anything. It even looks a bit like a pyramid scheme, but I surely don’t think so. Not with all the assets you find inside.

Charge for your content

If you’re a pro in a certain subject, whatever it is, you can actually charge people for access to your content.

Maybe you know everything about duck breeding as mentioned above, or you’re a master at crochet ornaments. Whatever the subject, there are people interested in it, I asure you. You just have to find them, and that’s a whole other story that includes social networks, advertising and similar shenanigans. But there are people interested, and better even, they are willing to pay for that information.

You can set up posts and pages behind a paywall, charging to show the entire post, or build a membership site, which is even more powerful.

The tools will differ. I’m always in for a membership site, and there are many many tools that you can use to build those. The important functionality here is to lock people out if they haven’t joined, either for money or something else you want – maybe a social share, a review, or an email address to build a list.

The best tools I’ve used so far are

• Groove.cm: a complete marketing system, including site and page builder, membership site builder, online store builder, email marketing and many more. By the way, right now there’s an offer live where you can get a full year of unlimited use FOR FREE. Check whether the offer is still there and if it is, subscribe immediately!
• ProductDyno: a comprehensive system that enables you to sell practically anything, whether digital or physical, and build membership around any group of products. It also supports licensing and secure product delivery.
• ThriveCart: the best cart system in the world in my opinion. It includes just about any option you could think of when it comes to carts, including multiple payment gateways (like Paypal and Stripe) integration, secure online delivery, paywalled pages, bumps and funnels and so on. Additionally, it supports your own affiliate program, so you can gather your own affiliates to do the selling for you, specifying exactly how the commissions flow.
• OptimizePress: This is technically speaking a bundle of a plugin and a theme for WordPress that has all the functionalities you need to build membership sites, landing and lead pages, as well as full marketing funnels. A great solution if you want to stay within the WordPress world and not wander too far into separate systems. You can read a bit more about it HERE, as well as check one of my lead pages built on it HERE.
• Convertri: a great builder, a great membership site builder, a great tool all in all. What it lacks is email marketing, but it compensates with being a builder that produces by far the fastest landing pages in the world, I believe. If you’re not sure what I mean, check one of my pages HERE and be observant about the page loading time. I have no idea how they do it, but it works. By the way, this report is a great asset if you want to learn about making your first $1,000 online, so I definitely recommend it while it’s available at that price.

Building a membership site around specific niche content is by my opinion one of the best ways to monetize a website.

BTW, yes, I’m paying for all the tools mentioned above. Yes, I know I’m a bit odd. But one day I’ll be sure of which is best or which suites me the best, and I will ban the others. But until then…

Request donations

If you have many dedicated readers coming to your website, but putting your content behind a paywall doesn’t sit well with you, you can politely ask your readers for donations.

This approach may well be the least profitable as not everyone would donate. Moreover, even those who want to donate might not know how much to contribute. You have to think it over for yourself.

Setting up donation channels on your website is easy, though. You can add donation buttons linked to your website on Stripe and PayPal. If your website or blog accepts crypto donations, you can ask your readers to donate crypto assets by listing your respective cryptocurrency addresses.

Make sure you politely and consistently promote your readers to make donations. It would help if you made the donation process as easy as possible.

Sell products and services

Now, we’re coming to the ways to monetize a website that can bring you the most money. There’s one huge drawback, though, you have to have something to sell.

This can be a digital product, or a physical product range like T-shirts, coffee mugs or duck food. They each have their own set of pros and cons.

With physical products, you’ll have to hold some sort of a stock – this is by far the biggest problem here. Other than that, it’s relatively easy to set up an online store (more on this HERE), collect payments (via WooCommerce, ProductDyno, Groove or ThriveCart), and then ship the goods around the world. The more complicated stuff usually includes inventory and tax calculations.

With digital products, it’s very different.

First, no stock needed. Once you have a product ready, you can sell it as many times as you wish, and it ships automatically, based on your chosen platform (ProductDyno, ThriveCart, Groove, etc).

Second, product creation is relatively simple these days. A digital product can be anything – even as simple as a specialized report on a certain subject, maybe an ebook, a training, or anything digital that people might need. Of course, the amount you can plan to earn depends greatly on the quality of the product, how extensive the content is, and – overall – how benefitial it is to the target group.

Again, there is always AI that can help you greatly with that. But the warnings are the same as mentioned above – if you want Google and other search engines to really love your content (which makes it high-ranking on the search pages, obviously), beware of pure AI content. Add some personality in, rewrite it in your own voice, and provided it’s interesting for a certain number of perople around the world, you should be OK.

The most valuable advice I can give you with this kind of way to monetize a website is very simple – get a good mentor. There are people selling their knowledge and experience that you have yet to obtain, and doing it from scratch, no matter how smart you are, is always way more expensive than paying $500 or even more to someone to teach you a method that is proven and already works.

I can recommend three systems right now which I’ve personally joined and used to learn and improve my skills.

• MAP (Master Affiliate Profits), a comprehensive and full-of-tools and knowledge affiliate eco-system that sells for you automatically, including a huge base of to-the-point trainings (over 50 hours) and a ton of marketing tools, as well as a very helpful community of marketers always ready to help you.
• Ambassador Program – similar, but not completely same thing. It teaches the ins and outs of affiliate marketing, but also about product creation and gives you powerful email marketing tools that promote products via the Clickbank network (and you earn commissions). If you’re interested, I suggest you watch the free webinar by clicking the image below this paragraph.
• Online Success Coaching – a membership completely oriented on digital product creation, it includes 25+ super powerful AI tools, and will hold your hand all the way to promoting it and creating a product launch. It goes live on January 20th on Clickbank; I don’t have a waiting list for it published, but you can join my list by opting in VIA THIS PAGE, getting a valuable affiliate resource along with it. I will surely inform everyone on my lists about this when it goes live, so you’re on the safe side.

Remember, with this way of monetizing a website, you can earn the most money, getting into 5- and 6-figures in a realitevely short time. It’s well worth checking, so be sure to check the links above.

Create a full online store

Creating a full-fledged online store is easier than ever today. One has to utilize WordPress, install Woocomerce, and there you have it. Or is it so?

It mostly is, but there are plenty of steps between those mentioned. If you’re not really techy, you can still do it, but you will most probably be better off paying someone to do it for you.

If you’re techy enough – and we’re not talking rocket-science-techy here – you can build it by yourself in a matter of hours. You can use an online store, to sell any product, digital or physical, each with its own set of pros and cons. It’s not much different than what’s described in the previous paragraph, but this time it adds a full-blown ecommerce platform that you own – your website.

I will not go too deep into this right here, but you can read more about the steps needed HERE.

You may still need some outside tools, like a checkout cart (like ThriveCart), but you can also start with WooCommerce alone and upgrade when (if) needed.

Flipping websites

Last, but not least, is flipping websites. What this means is after you create a website and make sure it gets good traffic and earn a certain monthly amount, you can sell it for pure profits online.

The general rule is that websites sell for roughly 50x the amount they’re making per month. So if your website is making a consistent $100 monthly, you can easily sell it for $5,000 and probably more. If it’s making $1,000 monthly, we’re already at $50,000, and so on. There are websites reaching (and surpassing) a million dollar price tag on the market daily.

Of course, you’ll have to make it as far as making that kind of monthly income, which could easily take a year or two of dedication and work. It also includes learning about SEO (Search Engine Optimization), lots of quality content creation, and so on. But it’s a sure way to monetize a website, if only you can afford to build it.

One thing you’ll always need in order to monetize a website

Traffic. You’ll need traffic.

In Internet terms, this means getting people to come to your website. Imegine the shop that sells the best donuts in town; how many will they sell in only two people visit every day? Two, maybe four. And how many will they sell if there’s a flood of people standing in line every day? Hundreds.

That’s the basic comparison. Online, the same principle applies. You simply have to get lots of people to visit in order to monetize a website to the extent when it starts making money.

The basic rule: you can have the absolutely best product, but without customers, you’re out of business.

Driving traffic to any website can be a real pain. There are proven techniques, though, that work over and over again – and you should be learning what they are. Again, I strongly suggest you don’t invent hot water yourself, instead rather get a good mentor to show you exactly what works and how to do it. Join one of the programs (or more, depending on your budget and plans) mentioned above where you’ll learn it fast and put them to work for you ASAP.

If you’re interested in driving traffic to your website and offers, here’s a post that says a bit more about it.

An important shift in thinking

I come from a “previous generation”, so to speak – I’m 60 at the time. We were always looking for products to sell, but back in the old days, the rule was to find something that was rare in the market and that only a small number of vendors could deliver. It worked very good back then, and yes, it still works sometimes today.

What I has to do to turn my head and accept the new rules is hard to describe. What rule, you mean?

In these tech days, the product that many people sell is the one to sell.

Yes, it’s the logic turned around, but it makes perfect sense. The fact that many people sell the same product, like a training or a special report on something or anything digital really, means that many people make money selling it. Which in turn simply means that there are many people buying it.

Which, by the end of reasoning, simply means you should sell it too.

How long does it take to monetize a website?

Well, this is where I say – again – it depends. It depends on the model you choose, on your dedication and your will to put in the work needed, and many more factors. In general, it takes at least 3 – 6 months to monetize a website properly – meaning it starts to bring a substantial income.

But again, it depends. If you decide you want to build an affiliate website to sell (flip) when the time comes, you can almost surely calculate at least a year.

On the other hand, if you go and join one of the affiliate programs mentioned above, then invest a week or two studying, you could actually start making considerable amounts of money within a month.

No matter what you decide and which model you choose, there’s one thing you must be aware of.

There is no magic button and there is no free money.

Whatever you do, you’ll have to pay for it – either with your time or your money, almost always both. And in the end, it’s completely up to you whether you make something with all that or not. If you don’t, nothing will change. If you do, you could change your life forever.

Decide and take action.

Good luck!

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