Do want to know how to monetize your website?
Blogging is one of the easiest ways to start a business, earn money and leave your job. People get into blogging with the hope that it will provide the freedom to travel, enjoy life, and freedom from a 9 to 5 job.
Those are great dreams, but is it really possible to make money from blogging? One survey showed that half of all bloggers make under $100 a month. Yet, 13% in the same survey said they make at least $1000 a month and some even make over $10,000 a month.
What sets that 13% apart from the half that make less than $100?
A solid foundation to monetize, consistency, and a plan.
If you want to learn how to make money from your website, keep reading.
What’s Your Niche?
The first step to monetizing your website is to determine what your niche is.
There are a few general niches that are popular and have been shown to be profitable. They are:
- Health & Fitness
- Making Money Online
- Travel
- Lifestyle & Self Improvement
- Food
Once you have a general niche, you can keep the topic as a general topic or you can drill down further.
For example, your niche might be how to make money online. You can then decide to drill down to target other webmasters to make money online or you can target mommy bloggers.
Write down a handful of ideas that you have for your niche. In the next step, you’re going to see which ideas viable, and which ones aren’t.
How Much Traffic Will You Get?
The key to making money with your website is doing the research to make sure there’s enough interest in your site before you launch it.
If you have a niche picked out, and some topic ideas around that niche, roll up your sleeves and do your research.
Start by entering your topic ideas into our Keyword Planner. This will help you discover how much volume keywords have.
If your niche is health and fitness and you decide to niche down to fitness for people over 50, you’ll want to check to see how many searches are done related to fitness over 50.
Remember, in order to make money online, you’ll have to have at least 30,000 page views a month. Websites that make a killing financially have about 250,000 page views a month.
What Will You Sell Online?
There are dozens of ways to make money online. Memberships, courses, consulting services, and products are an option.
What you’ll need to consider is how much time you want to spend delivering the product or service.
For courses, books, and membership sites, there will be a lot of work upfront. There will also be some customer service work on the back end. With these products, you may have to rely on sales volume to have a high income.
If you plan to sell services, you can charge a premium rate, but there will be a lot of time on delivering the service and
There’s also affiliate marketing. That’s when you sell someone else’s product or service for a commission rate. This is a growing opportunity, with sales predicted to hit $6.8 billion in 2020.
Amazon.com is the largest affiliate program, with about 900,000 affiliates around the world. Most affiliates have a blog that generates a lot of traffic to Amazon, and if someone buys a product, you can get a commission.
This is great if you plan to have a topic around high-priced items, such as photography equipment and computers. If you’re selling books or lower priced items, you will have to rely on volume to have a high income.
Build Your Website and Set Traffic Goals
Once you know your niche, determine that it’s viable, and know how to monetize a website, it’s time to build your site.
Most bloggers use WordPress for their website CMS because it’s so easy to use and set up. You’re going to want to make sure that your website is set up for SEO success.
When you’re getting ready to launch your site, it helps to set traffic goals.
Monetizing a website is a long-term project. It’s very easy to let other projects get in the way of consistent blogging and promotion.
Traffic goals will help you stay focused on what’s truly important. That’s getting traffic and making money.
The important thing to remember is to keep your goals SMART. Don’t start off by saying that you’re going to get 10,000 page views in the first month.
You can start off by setting a goal to get 100 page views in the first month, then 500 the next month, then 1000 by the third month.
Promoting Your Website
Now that your website is up and running, it’s time to tell people all about it.
There are several ways to promote your website. You can use social media, SEO, and paid ads. It’s a smart idea to use a few promotional tactics and stick with them.
Rules change on social media sites and search engines every day. For example, Twitter rolled out new rules that affected many bloggers. Google changes its algorithm hundreds of times a year.
If you have only one major source of traffic, that source could change without warning and decrease your traffic.
Having a few sources of traffic can mitigate that risk. Depending on what you choose, the main traffic drivers can complement each other.
For example, if you use social media and SEO as your main traffic drivers, you’ll be pleased to know that social media has a big impact on SEO.
When you’re promoting your website, it’s critical that you choose things that you can stick with. To put it another way, if your promotion stops, your traffic stops.
If your traffic stops, you don’t make money.
How to Monetize a Website
Learning how to monetize a website can be daunting because there is so much information out there.
If you keep things simple and build a solid foundation, you’ll be sure to have a successful website.
Want to know more great website tips? Check out our blog.