🤑6 TIPS ON HOW TO MONETIZE YOUR WEBSITE🌐

[TheSopranos]

THIS THREAD IS SPONSORED BY TheSopranos

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Can you earn a good income from your new website? The answer is a definite “yes.” But it takes a lot of hard work.

At Webflow, we like to be radically candid about everything we do. And website monetization is the type of topic that requires maximum transparency.

As blogging and influencer marketing become professions instead of hobbies, it’s easy to assume that making money on the internet is simple. You can just create a blog, choose one of the frequently recommended monetization strategies, and watch your bank balance go up.

Technically, that’s true.

Around 68% of bloggers make less than $5,000 per year, but most new bloggers will quit before they see those first dollars roll in.

That’s because creating a website is easy. But maintaining it means a lot of unpaid hours before monetization starts to work.
However, if you power through that initial stage, build up your audience, publish new content regularly, find your target audience on social media and bring them onto your email list — and do all of the above month over month — you have a good chance of success.

Website monetization pays off
Blogging has become a serious business.

And like any venture, it can net you some cash. As Financial Samurai, an investment banker turned professional blogger, noted: “Nobody leaves a $750,000 a year job to blog full time unless there wasn’t incredible financial upside as well.”

Michelle Gardner, of Making Sense of Cents, says she consistently earns 6 figures per month blogging about finance and has earned over $5 million since starting her blog.

Woah.

And BuzzFeed generated over $300 million in total revenue in 2018 from a mix of sponsored deals, pay-per-view advertising, and ecommerce sales.

All of those websites took years to build up their readership, credibility, and traffic. And that landed them in the top 1% of earners.

But smaller websites can make a good profit too.

A ConvertKit survey found that established, full-time bloggers generated a mean income of $54,108 per year, with average expenses of $15,895 and profits of $38,016.

Yes, the money is there for people who work for it. But a website isn't a cash machine running on autopilot. To earn a profit, you’ll need to invest the time (and often money) into:

Setting up your website
Creating content for it
Doing SEO to boost your traffic
Building an audience on social media
Growing your email list
Engaging and cultivating a devoted readership
And only then comes the fun money-making part.

11 ways to monetize a website
This guide won’t teach you how to make loads of moolah in a few clicks, but it can show you how to get tangible ROI from all the work you pour into your website.

Here are 11 proven ways to monetize your website in 2024:

1. Experiment with affiliate marketing
As an affiliate marketer, you earn a commission from every referral you make to another business.

For instance, if you are apart of the Webflow affiliate program, you’ll receive a revenue share from each person who clicks your affiliate link and sets up a paid account.

Book bloggers can earn some extra cash if a reader buys a book through the blog’s affiliate links (often through Amazon). If you buy a jacket recommended by a fashion blogger, they might receive a percentage of that sale too. You get the picture.

Seems simple, right?

But here’s an important caveat: To succeed with affiliate marketing without damaging your integrity and reputation, you need to:

Properly disclose any affiliate links or relationships you have (no one likes a sleazy pitch)
Recommend products and services your audience cares about
Don’t go on a frenzy of promoting anything and everything (without testing the product or at least checking its reviews)
Keeping all of the above in mind, let’s take a look at the different types of quality content you can create to earn a good commission.

Product reviews
As many as 78% of customers trust online reviews as much as personal recommendations. And loads of us browse reviews before making a purchase. As an affiliate, you can fill in that information gap and publish reviews of the products you’ve tried and liked.

Tom’s Guide specializes in reviewing consumer tech and has earned a strong reputation for detailed, unbiased reviews (that do contain affiliate links).

galaxy affiliate review
Tutorials
You can deliver tons of value to your audience, and pitch a product at the same time, by creating a tutorial around it.

This type of affiliate marketing content works best for recommending:

Software and online tools
Beauty and makeup
Kitchen appliances
Hobby-related products
WebsiteSetup created a +10,000 word guide explaining all the nuts and bolts of setting up a WordPress website for beginners. Nick Schäferhoff provides a detailed step-by-step walkthrough and recommends a host of free and paid (affiliated) tools along the way. Now imagine doing this, but for Webflow!

how to create a website for beginners
Recommended tools and resources
Create a dedicated page on your website where you list all your favorite tools, apps, books, and anything else you genuinely enjoy. Include affiliate links when relevant and say your readers can support you by purchasing from the affiliate links.

For example, on my website, I list my favorite books (can vouch for every one of them!). Smart Blogger recommends different blogging tools their team swears by.

Or take Jan Losert for example, who became a top Webflow affiliate in 3 months by creating UI kits for Webflow users.

2. Create and sell a product (digital or physical)
Selling a digital product is an excellent monetization method if you’re short on time because it doesn’t require continuous content creation work (like blog posts do). You create the product, then invest time in promoting it to your audience and new readers.

Physical product sales require a bit more attention. But you can delegate inventory management, fulfillment, and shipping to a third-party provider and focus on customer service and marketing above everything else.

Let’s take a closer look at the types of products you can create and sell.

Ebooks and audiobooks
Pack your expertise into an actionable guide and attach a price tag to it. Yes, you’ll need to put in a ton of work beforehand and:

Become an expert in something
Sit down and type those words
Transcribe them to audio (optional)
Design a cover
Prep a marketing campaign
But once you are done with all those steps, you can sit back and earn some passive income from your books. Mridu Khullar Relph from The International Freelancer packed her decades of journalism and content marketing experience into a series of ebooks, retailing for $4.99 each.


Launch an e-course
Online courses are another way to productize your expertise and earn a recurring income whenever you launch or (relaunch) your course.

Marie Forleo and her signature B-School training program is a prime example of how you can earn 8 figures per year by “creating a life you love and teaching others to do so.”

marie forleo's course
The e-learning market is climbing toward the $325 billion mark, so you won’t be short on students if your e-course is good!

Build and sell an application, plugin, or other software
Use your website as a launchpad for a new software product. Survey your readers to find a problem an app or a plugin could solve. Test a minimum viable product with a small group of beta users. Launch with Webflow to a warmed-up audience.

Sell digital downloadables
If you have some graphic design skills (or resources to hire a designer), put a digital product on sale on your website. Here are some product ideas:

Templates, checklists, trackers
Blog graphics
Stock photo bundles
Photoshop presets
Illustrations
Website themes (including Webflow templates)
Premium design elements (icons, fonts, etc.)
Video effects or stock footage
Audio elements (jingles, brand tunes, etc.)
Sell merch
Add an ecommerce CMS to your website, connect a third-party fulfillment service, and start selling branded merch.

For example, the popular Wait But Why blog has a quirky store featuring tees, toys, posters, and other doohickeys with recurring blog characters like the panic monster.

wait but why merch
The best part? You can sell your own products without the headache of logistics and shipping by connecting your store to an on-demand printing platform. Such services take care of product customizations, fulfillment, and logistics.
Some of the popular options are:

Teespring: on-demand apparel printing
Spreadshirt: apparel, phone cases, and accessories
KITE: over 250 product types supported
This monetization strategy works best for creative, personality-driven blogs in the lifestyle niche.

3. Start a paid membership website
Set up a private thematic area on your website and pack it with extra value that justifies the price tag. You can use something like MemberStack to easily bring this functionality to your website.

The most popular types of membership sites include:

Paid communities featuring private forums, discussion boards, members directory, masterminds, special discounts, and more. Example: Traffic Think Tank
Education buffets sell access to a bundle of courses, webinars, podcasts, and other educational resources. Example: Game Arts Academy
Mastermind and accountability groups organize group coaching and mastermind sessions with a small-knit group of students. Example: Mark’d Women
Spinoff idea: Paid job board
Got a lot of industry connections and more freelance work than you can handle?

Create a paid job board or referral group to exchange those jobs with others. That’s how Carol Tice, a veteran freelance writer, monetizes her website.

freelance writers den
4. Monetize access to your email list
Do you spend hours meticulously curating your newsletter and creating content for it?

Ask your readers to chip in for the effort. Most will gladly agree because they already know how great your content is.

The Economist (Espresso) has been running a paid newsletter since 2014, and since it’s still up today, we can assume this monetization strategy pays off.

You can use Revue or Substack to set up a paid email newsletter and protect your content from public sharing.

5. Publish sponsored posts and product reviews
Another way to leverage your website audience is to negotiate sponsorship deals with other companies. You can charge for:

Publishing a post on a relevant topic with a link to the sponsor website (advertorials)
Reviewing one of the sponsor’s products in your article (sponsored reviews)
Including their content in your email newsletter (newsletter sponsorship)
Any bonus promotion on social media
While sponsored content isn’t a scalable website monetization strategy (unless you want to turn your blog into an advertising board), it can yield you some extra cash.

Alexis from Fitnancials says she charges brands $750–$1,500 per post and an extra $100 for social media promotion.

Important: Always properly disclose any advertising relationships you have and mark all such content as “sponsored.” To avoid SEO penalties, add rel="sponsored" or rel="nofollow" attributes to such links per Google recommendations.

6. Gate some of your content
Take a page from news publishers and restrict access to some of your content to premium subscribers. You can place a paywall for some of your longer, deeper, and more researched posts like Mark Manson does.

mark manson's content
Most of his personal essays are free to read. But if you want to enjoy audio versions of all articles and “new perspectives and poop jokes” (in Mark’s words), you can pay $4 per month for access. Again, you can use MemberStack to bring this functionality to your website.