For most amateur website builders building a personal website can be a creative and fun process but not necessarily one that generates enough income just on its own. Unless you’re running a personal blog with no profit-making in mind, you’ll definitely want to create income streams from your website that will boost your earnings.
Fortunately, thanks to the rapid expansion of the internet, website owners have multiple ways to capitalize on their websites. Whatever money-making strategy is chosen, the main target is to bring in more traffic to your website to improve your website status and revenue. Hence, there’s no reason not to customize your website for monetization, given it probably aligns with your goals.
Here are a few ways to make a customized website profitable.
- Affiliate Marketing
The most common way to monetize your website is through affiliate marketing. Being an affiliate means promoting a product or service to your website’s visitors in return for earning a commission if a purchase occurs through your link. These days, most website owners engage in affiliate marketing to significantly boost their income.
Many e-commerce websites offer affiliate programs, including Amazon, Alibaba, Etsy, and more. The commission percentages vary from brand to brand, so make sure to research before deciding which brand you want to be an affiliate for.
- Sponsored Posts
Publishing sponsored posts is also a great way to customize your website, which results in income. Sponsored posts, sometimes known as advertorials, are adverts in the form of an article, usually containing the advertiser’s website link. Again, this is a great way to customize your website since you’re not pressured into sales conversions to generate income.
Most website owners make money by receiving the advertiser’s article and writing engaging content for the advertiser organically and engagingly. They typically charge the advertiser for the service, but this depends on how popular their site is and the website traffic. For example, a website needs to be very popular for the advertiser’s purpose.
- Product Review
Another excellent way to generate income is by placing product reviews on your website. This method is especially good if your website focuses on a particular niche with similar followership. Even if the product does not suit the interest of the site’s readers, one could still write an engaging review of the product after trying it out. For example, PeopleLooker reviews analyze a website that grants you access to public records and information about people.
Depending on how high up you are in the search engines and social media, companies are often more than happy to send some freebies to the website owner and, in some cases, even pay the same as sponsored posts after getting good results. Product reviews need to be done in a way that doesn’t seem to be biased, as this can put off many people.
- Sell Digital Products
If you haven’t considered setting up an online business, you should, provided you have easy access to resources, products, or talents. Digital products such as print items, graphics, templates, ebooks, and podcasts are excellent examples of digital products that can help a website owner earn a passive income without too much effort and income.
Many people have found this to be a viable income method throughout the pandemic as the demand for digital products has increased exponentially. If you don’t want to go all-in, you can consider this a side income source alongside your main one.
- Sell Physical Products
You can also opt to sell physical products the old-fashioned way by setting up a merch store or eCommerce shop. Your products can be anything and everything based on your business plan, but it’s usually advisable to start small and then gradually ramp up to bigger and more expensive products.
For example, you can sell t-shirts, mugs, plushies, posters, etc. If you have a popular YouTube channel, your website’s followers could make purchases. This way, you improve your brand presence online and also have an opportunity to monetize your business in ways you didn’t consider before.
One Step at a Time
Monetizing a website is a lot like poker—it’s easy to understand on pen and paper but will take you a long time to implement and master properly.
The beginning might be a bit slow since you will already have a lot of competitors out there, but don’t let that discourage you. Just stick to the basics and don’t do anything that will get your website penalized.
