Day 6 – Monetize Your Website

Money, Money, Money!

This lesson is kind of fun because we’re talking about you’re going to make money with your website. It’s important to talk about this so that you understand how it works because it will guide your writing a little bit.

Ways to Monetize Your Website

There are a number of ways for you to make money with your website. You can use one method or multiple methods at the same time. With some methods, you can start using them from day 1 but with others, you may want to wait until your website grows.

1. The Money is in the List!

This is the golden rule of online marketing: you need to grow your email list!

Think about it – when you have a list of people that want to hear from you, you can go ahead and sell them something good with just a few clicks – whenever you want!

You can blast out an email and some of them will respond and then buy something.

Of course, you still want to always give them something valuable and not junk… kind of like how you write your articles, right? And you don’t always want to sell. That’s not how being social works. Give them good advice all the time for free and then sell to them once in a while when you have something good.

So what do you sell? Well, that’s what the rest of this list is for. The point is, you want to have a way for people to sign up to your list. How you get them to do that is simple but it’ll take a little bit of work.

Usually, people will trade their email address for something good. It can be something big like an e-book (PDF file) full of great advice or even something smaller like a good checklist or access to a list of resources you put together. Make a compelling argument for your offer and collect emails and build your list.

Here’s an article about how to set up an email list – sometimes called an autoresponder:

How to Set Up an Email List (tonyherman.com)

Review that and set a to-do item to get your list set up. You really do need this from day 1 of your website.

You can start offering a product in return for an opt-in (when someone signs up for your list) from day one.

A great tip here is your “Thank You” page. Once people sign up, you’ll thank them and then deliver your product via email. That way, you know you’re getting a good email address in exchange for your free product. On the page that you thank them for signing up, you need to include another offer. One of the best things to put here is an affiliate product, which I explain next.

2. Use Affiliate Programs

There are popular affiliate programs like ones from Amazon. Commission Junction (CJ), Clickbank and others. How they work is if you send someone to a website that has an affiliate program you’re signed up for, and that person buys something, you get a commission.

Affiliate programs come in all shapes and sizes. With some, you get big commissions and some you get smaller commissions. Some pay weekly, some pay you monthly and many of them have minimum thresholds you have to meet before they cut you a check or send you a payment via PayPal.

Whenever you’re looking at affiliate programs, you should look at the terms and conditions. It’s boring to read them but you need to make sure you’re following the rules or you won’t get paid. You don’t want to do a lot of work, build up a good balance and then have that work be disqualified because you did it the wrong way. It happens.

Look for Affiliate Programs in Your Niche

CJ and Clickbank run affiliate programs for other companies but there are lots of websites that run their own affiliate programs. You should go to websites in your industry and see if they offer a program. There’s usually a link in the footer section of websites that says “Affiliates” or “Referrals” so click on links like that and see if they have a program you can join.

Sometimes these self-hosted affiliate programs are a good deal because they’re not paying companies like Commission Junction their fees and they can pay you more. The downside is that you might be promoting their products and they might shut down their program and you won’t get paid. I had that happen once.

3. Start a Membership Website = Recurring Income!

These sites are cool. With this method, you could be seeing up to $2000 or more come in per month if you do it right!

Here’s the premise… get 10 good articles on your website that offer great content. These articles will be the bait. They’re not your best stuff but they’re really good. Your best content will be for paid members. That content can be articles or videos you create or slideshows or a mix of different things.

You can have them pay a price like $7 per month to get access to that content. You can even give them a free 3-day trial for $1.

You then keep adding a few awesome articles per month to that website in the member’s area to keep everyone that is paying happy. If you use PayPal, you can set up a subscription that automatically charges people every month and they can unsubscribe themselves.

Once you hit 286 subscribers, you’ll be banking $2002 per month!

Your list can keep growing from there.

You can even have an affiliate program yourself, which is like a referral program for members and if they get someone to sign up, you give them a commission – like a free month. That works out great because your members work to sign people up, you give one month away for free but you get that extra revenue from the second month on for that new subscriber.

You will need to provide absolutely great content but with some money coming in, you can pay writers to do that for you. You might pay $300-$400 to writers and then you’ll be making a profit of around $1600 in our example scenario. Pretty cool, right? You pay the writers, you publish the content (easy) and then just figure out how to spend (or save) your money!

If you under promise and over deliver on your content, people will keep their subscription going. Some of them put it on a credit card, pay it and kind of forget it since it’s just a small amount. That’s kind of nice but the better approach here is to give them such good content that they’ll see the $7 a month is totally worth it.

4. Google AdSense

AdSense is Google’s ad program. You see it everywhere and I’ve made a lot of money with AdSense.

Google know what people are searching for and it knows what content is on pages, so they are really good at putting the right ads on each page. All you do is sign up, paste the code where you want the ads to be (I mentioned the Easy AdSense plugin for ads, which works great) and Google puts text and image ads in for you.

You want to start using Google AdSense only when your site reaches 50 visitors per day or about 75 page views or more. You end up getting better ad rates (payouts) when your website starts off doing well.

5. Sell Your Own Product

The way to make the most money on a website is by selling your own product. The membership website model (#3 above) is one way of doing it but you can also sell products.

Products can be:

Books
Plans (how to build things)
Advice
Something you make/produce
Services
Directory listings
Webinars
Podcasts
etc.

I like books because you write them once and people buy them and you don’t have to do anything – your website sends them the PDF and everything.

Quick story… I get alerts from the PayPal app on my phone when I sell books and it’s fun to see that thing light up. Each time, I know I made about $5.50. Not bad. I might be out eating and it’ll ring twice and I know I just paid for most or a part of my meal.

6. CPA Ads

There’s a lot that can be written about CPA so I think I should give you a quick overview of what it is.

A CPA network is not a network of accountants. CPA stands for “cost per action” and it’s very similar to affiliate programs. You put up an ad or a link and when people click it and do that action on the other side of that link, you get paid.

For example, a common CPA ad is called an “email submit.” Someone clicks on an ad and there’s a page where they can sign up for like a $500 Visa gift card or something. All they have to do is give their email address – there’s just one field on the form… one for their email. When someone does that, you can get something like $1.60 or $2.00.

These ads work and people make lots of money. You do need a good, steady stream of traffic and the ad should match your audience. For example, don’t run CPA ads for free diapers on a website where the niche is reviewing power tools. You might not get too many clicks. Instead, you’d want a CPA ad for something like tool boxes. You get the idea.

The program I really like is called MaxBounty. You do need to apply to get in but you basically tell them that you’re taking an online course about Internet marketing (like this course) and show them your website with 10 really good articles on it and you should be able to get in.

How to Monetize the Right Way

Here are some tips (rules?) to follow when monetizing your website:

Believe in the offer you’re promoting. Ads are one thing but when you’re reviewing a product, don’t just look at the specifications and make something up. People can spot fake reviews. Your review should contain a genuine story about your experience with the product. A video with you holding the product would help, too.
Make your offer different (better). You can contact the manager of affiliate programs and come up with a co-branded offer or something different that nobody else has. You can offer the affiliate manager exclusivity on an article – meaning, no other advertising will appear on it. You can even arrange for an interview with someone at the company. Just be creative and be different. Don’t be afraid to try stuff. If you get shot down, who cares? Try something else instead but keep trying. Often, a successful website gets that way from other a bunch of small breaks or 1-2 big breaks. If you expect them to fall in your lap, it’ll never happen – you need to seek out these opportunities and make them happen.
Focus on the “bennies!” There’s a phrase out there, “features tell, benefits sell” which means you should emphasize the benefits and tell people what’s in it for them… since that is what they want. The bennies bring the Benjis! I just made that up, what do you think? 🙂
Find products with recurring payments. This is like the holy grail of affiliate marketing. Do the work once and keep getting paid, right? Try to find affiliate offers in your niche/topic that give out recurring payments as long as the customer is subscribed. This often happens in competitive niches like website hosting but it’s also available in other places.
Keep learning. I have websites that I have running where I just try stuff. A lot of times the ideas fail but there have been a good number of ideas that have really worked well. Keep your ear to the ground and see what others in the Internet Marketing industry are saying. Don’t hop from trend to trend – that’s a bad idea but you’ll see general trends that everyone is using. One such “trend” you might say is quality content, It’s more than a trend but you get the idea – it’s one thing all good marketers do.

One of the best days of your life is when you make your first dollar online. I’m kind of jealous that I can’t experience that anymore but there are more goals I can aim for – like my first million online. I’ll get there.

Section Conclusion

I’ve listed 6 methods to monetize your website but there are more – like selling ads yourself. I think these 6 are good enough for you right now and they’re easy enough to get into and start earning money with.

Your best bet is probably to start with Amazon since they have lots of products. There is probably a bunch of products on Amazon that are related to what your website is about. The Amazon program is easy to get into. If your website is aimed at children (under the age of 13), then you might have issues joining Amazon – that about the only sticking point with them.

Once your website gets more traffic, go ahead and add AdSense. You want to start using more than one revenue stream on your website – maybe even up to 5 or 6 but don’t overload your website with ads because that looks spammy.

Your ultimate goal is most likely going to be developing your own products as that is how you can earn the most money.

Homework

Go sign up for the Amazon.com Affiliate Program and see how it works. Start planning to write content that can incorporate products you find there. The best products to promote are ones that cost $100 or more so that your commission is decent with each product.