How To Create A Website That Makes Money

Websites are the future of commerce, and as such, there are numerous ways that you can make money from your website. 

In this guide, we’ll show you how you can create a website that is centered on bringing in revenue. Let’s get started.

Creating a User-Friendly Website

• Come Up with a Theme and Conduct Keyword Research

Before you start any website, you have to make sure that it caters to a specific market. This process is called theming. It involves figuring out what your site is all about and how you are going to brand it. The process can range from choosing what types of content will appear on your website to how you will approach topics. Check out this guide on MangoMatter to make a website that you’re proud of.

There are two significant benefits to theming: first is that it allows you to monetize your website for certain types of products and services; second, it helps you rank better in search engines.

When you have attracted enough visitors to your website, and people know that you are relevant and hold an audience for a particular topic, it makes it easier for you to monetize your website.

For example, let’s say you have a “Mommy Blog.” You can now add affiliate links to baby products on your website or run advertorials about maternity clothes. You have to understand, however, that you can’t just sell everything and approach everyone when it comes to monetization. You need to be able to maintain a following that aligns with your theme.

The second point of theming is that it allows search engines to recognize you for your content, and this lets you rank better in organic traffic. Theming will also result in you starting to vie for specific keywords that could trigger your website to appear in search engine results pages (SERPs). However, this is still dependent on your SEO, which will be discussed in a bit.

Additionally, during this point in the theming process, you can decide to include a store where you can sell products and services, essentially turning it into an ecommerce store.

• Create Relevant Content

Once you have your theme figured out, you can start crafting content that is apt for your site. Content is going to be integral in keeping people on your website.

If you want to monetize your site, the content has to be built in a way that adds value to your readers. This allows you to have a following, and it builds your reputation as a site that people can trust.

This is the part where you can invite people to advertise on your site via advertorials and the like. As long as your content is excellent, they will not mind being able to publish along with your other posts. However, this is still dependent on how much traffic you can garner in a month.

• Increase Your Exposure Through Social Media

Social media channels have to be utilized to start driving traffic and trust to your site. It is also a form of link building since these platforms will link out to your site as well.

A lot of people promote their potentially viral content on major platforms like Facebook and Instagram to get the traction in garnering traffic for their website. Since the concept of social media is giving out engaging content for free, you have to harness this power to bring people into your website.

• Apply Search Engine Optimization Techniques

Once you have your website adequately themed and it is running with appropriate content, it’s time to take a look at how your website is optimized to rank for organic traffic on search engines.

Being able to rank for specific keywords on search engines makes you garner organic traffic. This works when someone goes into a search engine and searches for a keyword that you are ranking for. The way to rank is to make sure that you are doing what it takes to fulfill a ranking factor.

There are more than 200 observable ranking factors in SEO, and there are many ways that Google advises webmasters to follow. However, this can be summarized by one primary rule: build your web property with your end-user in mind.

For example, making your website mobile-friendly is considered a ranking factor because a significant portion of search engine traffic comes through phone searches. Another example is site speed. If your site takes too long to load, you can lose your customers’ interest quickly.

By following these steps, you will be able to get your site to move up the SERPs properly.

• Increase Your Traffic

Increasing the number of visitors to a website is a highly multidimensional topic, and it has to involve all your outlets of exposure. However, the main point of increasing traffic is to make users go to your web property by creating quality content.

When you have built up significant traffic, you can now be able to market your website correctly to be able to monetize it.

Monetizing Your Website

Here is a shortlist of what you can do adequately monetize your website:

• Generate and Sell Leads

Almost any website can sell leads depending on the type of site it is and the content it has. Your site can sell leads for companies, too. Companies depend on new leads in order to refresh their customer base, and one way they do this is by employing “agents.” It makes sense to lead them in the direction of the purchase and earn commissions in the process.

• Do Affiliate Marketing

What you have to do is find a product that you would like to get behind and promote this product on your website. You get a particular affiliate link for the product. The reason affiliate links are popular is that some providers find it to be a cost-effective way of promoting their goods without spending too much. All they have to do is pay the person who’s keeping the affiliate link around.

When your reader decides to click on the link and purchase the product, you get a commission for it. These commissions can range from 10% to 70% of the product price, and that’s just the products you can promote. You can endorse services, too, and even have multiple affiliate links working on your website at a time.

• Feature Sponsored Posts

If your site is getting popular, a lot of people will want to have their content displayed on your website, and this can be monetized. Think about it this way: if you have a following, that means people have trust in your content and services. This allows you to leverage your audience for people who want to have their products or services featured.

These are necessarily adverts and editorials, hence the portmanteau “advertorial.”

• Sell Ads

Newspapers still do exist, and they survive through advertising. This is a strategy that might be typical for community news sites online, but almost every site owner can do it depending on the traffic that your website is generating. Selling banner or graphic ads on your website is a great way to create a recurring income because the package can be built on a “real estate” basis.

You can charge them a monthly fee and a renewal fee to keep their ads on your site. Furthermore, you can make your rate card flexible for you to include advertorials, or even feature them as a major sponsor.

• Consider Paid Memberships

There are plenty of ways to go about this route. If you can offer more value to your customers by offering them a paid membership to your website, this can be very profitable.

It works like this: say you already have existing content on your site that has been getting a lot of attention, and the community has been asking you for more information. You can tier the information that you provide to them by offering free versions for everyone, but locking up “premium” stuff using a membership model.

However, this does not only apply to content; this can be a membership to offer ad-free services to your customers, for educational tutorials, and for pretty much anything that you feel that you cannot give away for free.

• Allow Your Audience to Hire Your Services

This is applicable for service-oriented websites, but you can also use it on a normal blog. Say you are someone who runs a website that primarily makes its money from selling goods. If you are a professional web developer on the side, you can offer your services.

Getting people to hire you allows you to utilize your website differently by promoting your skills, too. What’s your main selling point?

• Utilize an Ad Network

While selling advertisements was previously discussed, this is a different approach to ad selling altogether. It involves using a network that places ads automatically on your business website or your website. It will still be dependent on your placement of the ad generators on your website, but it’s an excellent way of getting an ad campaign running on-the-fly.

There are ads from other companies on your website depending on your content. They take care of the relevance of the site to other companies’ advertising needs.

Every time a user clicks on the ad, you get money coming in. This is similar to the way affiliate marketing works, but with affiliate marketing, they pay you when a product is sold. Ad networks will pay every time someone clicks on your advertising.

• Have Multiple Streams

You have to remember that proper monetization involves you being able to use any of these methods that have been mentioned above in a dynamic fashion. You have to be able to be creative with them as well. For example, you don’t have to host just one affiliate link when you can host multiple links.

Also, you should be mixing things up for yourself. Use a combination of these monetization techniques to bring in multiple streams of income to your website. You cannot just rely on a single channel.

Conclusion

As you can see, with just a little creativity, you can turn your website into an income-generating machine with multiple income-generating channels. It’s not even that difficult to implement these systems.

However, the caveat is that you need the traffic to support income-making strategies, and you need to be able to make sure your website is relevant to a particular topic.