Generating Online Revenue through Your Website

Many businesses have learned that selling their own products and services may not be the only way to monetize their websites.  There are many ways to generate revenue from your website properties and add extra income streams that will effectively make you money while you and your employees sleep!  For example, some website development platforms will allow you to pull in additional advertising dollars just by installing a few appropriate plugins. Some can be set up easily in 5 minutes.

For example, if you have a WordPress website, you can add the advertising widget Ad Squares, which allows you to place affiliate banners in your sidebar or anywhere else on your template that allows widgets.  Make sure whatever banners you choose to appear on your website are complimentary to the existing content of your site and reflect items and services that your target market would be interested in buying.  Once you've had your banners up for at least a month, it's a good idea to work out which affiliate banners are bringing in the most cash from your website.  Many website owners stick with the same banners all the time, even although they don't attract any clicks and purchases. Be smart about it and only have banners that are actually giving you an extra income.

Many internet marketers also choose to install a Google Adsense plugin so that their ads are specific to each page's content.  There are many different places within your website that you can place these blocks such as the header, before and after content, and within the sidebar. However, you are only allowed a maximum of three ad blocks per page.  When setting up your AdSense channels, track which ads are giving you the most revenue, and change the size and placement of ads to find the combination that gives you the maximum income possible for your website.

You may want to consider pay per view and other lesser known options as ways to monetize your website.  There are several plugins that will allow your visitors to view a limited amount of a blog post and in order to read more, they need to pay a small fee.  You can also use the pay per view method for videos. This works well if you have created a training website with many how to videos or content posts.

A step up from the pay per view model is the membership site.  These are becoming more and more popular with website owners.  If creating fresh monthly content does not appeal to you, then you can create a one-time payment membership site, with no pressure to add regular fresh content to that site. There are many different membership models to suit every business within every niche that you can emulate if you decide to monetize your website by creating a membership site.

Another method is to refer business to other complementary sites and earn a commission. For example, we set up an Inkwhy store with Teespring. If you click on this link, you would be able to set up your own t-shirt store to sell customized branded items and run campaigns -- and if you refer others via a similar link then you would get a commission on the t-shirts that they sell. Our referral link for you to set up your own branded t-shirt store is: http://teespring.com/invites/07mcgn

These are just a few ways that you can monetize your website. If you start implementing these ideas today, you could be generating a profit in a very short amount of time. Do you have any other thoughts or questions? 

Comment below or e-mail us at ask [at] inkwhy.com.