3 Easy Website Monetization Methods for Beginners
You’ve just taken the plunge and bought your first website – congratulations! Now it’s just a case of sitting back and watching your bank balance accrue right?
Wrong!
Do some website monetization!
Even if you’ve got the most killer domain name in the world, without any monetisation steps your website won’t earn you a penny. In fact, with hosting fees and renewal costs, your site could end up losing you money in the long-run. That’s why you need to establish a clear monetisation strategy from the start; one that will inevitably shape the way your site evolves.
Monetization Methods
So if you’re looking for inspiration, here are three rudimentary monetisation methods you can look to take advantage of:
1. Good ol’ Advertising
A stalwart of the online monetisation scene for a long time now, advertising is probably the easiest and quickest to setup of all the methods mentioned herein. After all, what could be simpler than covering your site in ads and watching as a clicking frenzy ensues?
The reality, however, is that monetisation through ads can take a long time to bear fruit and ultimately involves a lot of hard work. This is because you need to have large volumes of traffic flowing through your site before you can start making money from pay-per-click (PPC) advertising.
Therefore, your time will be consumed with SEO, social media marketing and content creation just to attract visitors. That’s why ad revenue isn’t as easy to leverage as you may have first thought.
By all means give it your best shot – you’ve got nothing to lose and a great starting point is to create a Google Adsense account.
2. Affiliate Marketing
Similar to advertising, affiliate marketing sees you getting paid whenever one of your website visitors clicks on an affiliate link and purchases a product or avails a service.
The nice thing about affiliate marketing is that you can be really selective in what you promote, which is particularly powerful when your site has a tightly defined niche. For example, if you run a site that specialises in writing camera reviews, a perfect affiliate fit would be digital cameras on Amazon.
Like advertising, however, affiliate marketing ultimately takes a long time to start bringing in the big bucks. Again, you need visitors, but not just people who come and go. You need an audience – people who come to trust what you say and frequently return to catch your latest updates. These types of two-way relationships are undoubtedly the most responsive in the long-run.
3. CPA Offers
Yes you read that correctly ‘CPA’ or cost per action. Again, similar to advertising and affiliate marketing, CPA offers pay you a small percentage every time one of your website visitors clicks a link and completes an action.
Now this may sound bizarre but we assure you that it’s legitimate and represents another way to monetise your website. Furthermore, because CPA offers don’t rely on a sale for you to get paid, your visitors are naturally more likely to complete them – especially if there is a free gift or discount offered as a reward.
It maybe that you host a CPA offers which require someone to sign-up to a free trial, fill out a form or obtain a quotation, upon which you will receive a nominal fee. The added incentives make CPA offers more appealing to your visitors, which is great for you as the website owner.
Next week, we’ll look at a few more ways to monetise your website; methods that are more innovative and require you to think outside the box.
