It costs money to keep up a website, whether you’re paying for hosting, paying for bandwidth, paying for a domain or paying for traffic. You also have to consider buying content, paying for ads and paying for analytics, if you’re taking everything seriously. All of this, to try to make money from your site. You need all the help you can get. Thankfully, the web is full of resources you can use.

Affiliate Marketing

Why spend thousands of hours developing and manufacturing a product of your own, when you can sell something someone else made, and take a commission off the top? Affiliate marketing is the place to be if you don’t have something of your own to sell.

Site 1: Clickbank – This is one of the affiliate sites with the best reputations amongst all of the networks available. Find a good niche, find the right products to promote and you can laugh all the way to the bank. All you need to do is write content, test a site and generally have a compelling landing page to get people to buy.

Site 2: Amazon Affiliates – Do you like the things Amazon sells? Do you think the people who visit your site also like the things Amazon sells? Join the Amazon affiliates program, called Amazon Associates, and you can make money when people buy things from Amazon. All you need to do is post links with your tag attached and you’ll rake in the cash whenever users make a purchase, even if that purchase wasn’t for the item you were selling!

Site 3: Backlinko – This site isn’t an affiliate network, and you won’t make money directly through them. What they do is teach you a lot of what you need to know about Affiliate or CPA marketing. Any questions you have, from the basics to the advanced techniques, you can find answers to in their knowledge base.

PPC Advertising

With pay per click, you position ads on your site and, whenever a user clicks on them, you earn a minor commission. A large part of making money with PPC is volume, but you also have to pick the right ads and niche.

Site 4: Google AdWords – Google is one of the giants in the PPC industry, and you can implement their ads on your site with relative ease. The only problem is the restrictive nature of the program, and the fact that there are a few subjects they won’t touch. Be careful with what you do, make sure your traffic is legitimate and you should be fine.

Site 5: 7Search – 7Search is one potent alternative to AdWords, but it has an entry fee before you can join. This warns some people away, as does its reputation for low quality traffic. It’s great if you have the volume to support it; not so good if you don’t.

Site 6: Portent – Specifically, Portent’s guide on running an effective PPC campaign. You can make a lot of money by studying what they know, and while a good portion of the advice is for the other end – the person paying to run the ad – it still applies.

Selling Ad Space

Sometimes you don’t want to work through an affiliate or middleman to make money from your site. You just want to sell ad space and make money directly from advertisers. Direct sales can be tricky to manage, but they can be much more lucrative than PPC and affiliates.

Site 7: BuySellAds – One of, if not the best marketplace available for advertising. You can sign up as a publisher and have complete control over the ads that appear on your site. If you choose to advertise later, you can take the role of an advertiser and know where your ads are going for your money.

Site 8: Google AdSense – Another of Google’s advertising offerings, AdSense works with display ads to give you the banners that you so often see on sites around the web. You need to be careful about positioning, density and topic, but when done properly, AdSense can make you a sizable chunk of change.

Selling Your Products

You can sell just about anything on the web today, including things you make yourself. Software, physical items, books; it’s all possible.

Site 9: This Article Series – This series is a two-part post about making an app for mobile devices. It’s easier than it sounds, and with a little know-how and a little work, you can throw something on the app stores for $1 and rake in the cash.

Site 10: Amazon KDP – Amazon’s Kindle Direct Publishing is a way for anyone – anyone at all – to sell an e-book. What subjects can you write about? Anything! You can write how-to guides, you can write case studies, you can write extensive blog posts, you can write fiction, you can write poetry; the skies are the limit. Write it, publish it and sell it in hours.

Site 11: Etsy – Okay, so Etsy isn’t strictly monetizing your website, but if you do any sort of physical crafting at all, it’s the best place to sell those crafts. You can then turn your site to promotion and secondary monetization to fund your crafting.

Lead Generation

Why bother making your message strong enough to sell a product? Why not just get paid to send potential leads to businesses, and leave the sales to them? That’s the theory behind lead generation. You send the people in and get paid for doing so; they have to do the work of actually making sales.

Site 12: Neverblue (now called GlobalWide Media) – One of the top-tier lead generation networks, you can also run affiliate marketing and advertising with their network.

Site 13: Peerfly – Another great lead generation platform, signing up as a publisher gives you quite a bit of potential and access to their huge network.

Alternatives

These are other ways to make money with your site; they won’t work for everyone, but once you have some growth, you might be able to make them work.

Site 14: Indiemark – This guide will get you started with the realities of email rental. Essentially, you build an email list and then you rent out space in your newsletters to targeted businesses. They pay you for that space and you deliver the advertising. Think of it like display ads within your newsletters. You have to be careful to only provide good advertising, or else your newsletter will falter and fail.

Site 15: Flippa – Flippa is a marketplace for websites. Once you’ve build an audience and a following, you can sell your site and all that comes with it to interested parties. Make a site, grow it up and sell it for 5-6 figures.

Join the Discussion

No comments yet. You could be the first!

Built for advertisers.
Set your budget, target your visitors, get traffic.

Drive thousands of targeted visitors to your website, online store, or affiliate links, and use powerful geolocation and interest targeting. Track your campaign daily in our reporting dashboard. Change your URL at any time and split test between multiple pages to see which performs best.