By Mashum Mollah
Monetize Your Website Without Ads
Display ads tend to be effective, but they are tediously annoying. Upon visiting a website and first-hand experiencing the dislike of a visitor when they are bombarded with ads. It is enough to convince anyone that they would never allow the monstrosity to be displayed on their website. However, Google AdSense, which shows ads to monetize your website visitors, is one of the effective tools to monetize your site.
Fret not, AdSense or ad placement is not the only monetizing method available to you. In fact, there are dozens of alternatives that could help you generate profit from your website. The alternatives are not as quick and easy as Google AdSense ads and may require a lot more hard work. But they are a much effective long-term strategy and profitable too.
Depending on how much time and effort you invest in your website and its monetization. Your profit will range between covering essential site expenses such as site hosting and domain.
So here are a few ways you could go about and emerge victoriously.
Affiliate Marketing
Affiliate Marketing is a type of passive monetization in which you make the initial effort and wait for the strategy to gradually work its magic.
As an affiliate, you review, promote, or market someone else’s product. While also supplying the link to the customer from where they can purchase the product. So when a site visitor clicks on the link you provided and purchase the product. You earn a percentage of commission for that sale.
The technique also comes in handy in reverse when you sell products via an affiliate and they pay a fraction of the payment you received.
You can find sellers or affiliates for your website on affiliate networks such as Clickbank, CJ Affiliate, Amazon Associates, Rakuten Marketing or ShareASale, Remember, to be an affiliate your site must have decent traffic or your marketing must be A-game.
To gear up your earnings, you must focus on targeted traffic. An example of targeted traffic is when someone searches for “Best Internet Services” through the search engine, they find your page where you review different internet packages and competitors’ comparisons in detail such as Spectrum v/s Cox v/s AT&T v/s Windstream internet service.
Along with the review, you link to their services and when they purchase one of the plans you reviewed, you get a commission. Make sure to find products you are well-versed with and can sell with ease
Cost per Action or Cost per Acquisition (CPA) Marketing
The concept of CPA marketing does not allude to the bidding option on Facebook, Google, or some other ad network. Rather, it’s similar to affiliate, but here you acquire a commission when a visitor upon your referral performs a particular action on the clients’ site.
The action or acquisition does not always mean a purchase on the site, rather the action can be signing up for the newsletter, or a free trial, getting a quote, filling a form, or creating an account.
Upon successful referral and completion of an action, you are paid around $1 – $2. It may be quite less than referring to product purchases, but it is one of the best forms of passive income and it is also incredibly easy to employ as you attempt to convince a visitor to sign up for a free trial on a video streaming service.
Selling a Digital Product
If you are not up for selling a physical product, you could go completely digital by creating a video, music, eBook, audiobooks, PDF, photos, or software, and sell it to the people looking for them.
The strategy lets you sweat a little bit as you create your own digital products, but afterward, you can sell them a hundred times over without any additional production cost of the unit.
It’s easy to create a digital product, but first, you must decide which niche you want to target and familiarize yourself with the target markets’ needs and demands. A little bit of researching and testing could help you even differentiate your product and offerings from your competitor, and spur your sales.
Plus, it helps if you already have loyal followers on social media, a deluge of traffic on your site, or even an email marketing list.
On the other hand, there are a number of digital marketplaces where you can sell your product such as SendOwl, Gumroad, FastSpring, FetchApp, Sellfy, Simple Goods, or Selz.
Build an e-commerce Store
The most obvious and uncomplicated business model is selling something on monetize your website i.e. turning it into an e-commerce store. Opening up an e-commerce store has never been this easy, you can quickly build your e-commerce site with one of the ready-made templates at Wix, Weebly, and if you want to opt for more personalization then Shopify or WordPress, powered by WooCommerce would do.
Moreover, you don’t even have to acquire storage for your stock. Since dropshipping allows you to directly relay your customer’s orders to the manufacturer and they will do the rest. Dropshipping is one of the cost-effective tactics for an e-commerce store, which also spares you the hassle of carrying your stock.
Deliver Solo Ads
If you have generated a healthy email list, then you can even monetize it. Many sponsors will pay you for sending a solo ad to your list via an email newsletter. Usually, you may make around $40 for 100 clicks on the solo ad you sent. So the higher the number of subscribers, the higher the returns.
On the other hand, if you want to place your product ad, then you could approach an active mature website, which has already cultivated an email list to sell your ads.
Exercise caution though; always send ads that are relevant to your niche and with less frequency lest the users unsubscribe from your list out of sheer annoyance.
Sponsored Posts
If your site has adequate traffic or you have loyal followers on your social media account. Then sponsored posts are a very lucrative monetization strategy. In a sponsored post, someone pays you to post a review, photo, or video about their product or service on monetize your website.
For this strategy to be profitable, your site ought to be niche specific. Well-favored and a credible source of authority in that niche along with a steady flood of regular site readers. The better you are with these aforementioned factors, the more you earn.
Moreover, either you or the sponsor can deliver a ready-made post to you. But it’s highly recommended that you develop the sponsored posts by yourself as the readers deem you as the legitimate authority.
On the other hand, Google doesn’t appreciate the link selling and purchasing activity as the deliberate linking practice aims to kick up rankings for certain web pages.
However, Google cannot easily pinpoint the purchased links. So it’s easy to get past the search engine when you have indulged in the activity sparingly. Any suspicious patter in the links will get you penalized. Therefore, it’s advised that you familiarize yourself with all forms of link purchasing activities. And the associated consequences before dabbling into it.
Selling to monetize your Website
If you are fed up from your website/business and are considering retiring and that too profitably, then consider selling it.
In fact, buying and selling websites is a flourishing business with most auctioned at the price tag of thousands of dollars.
Flippa is a sensible auction platform for startup businesses with websites being sold and purchased under $20,000.
If you want to monetize your website values under $100,000, you can try BizBuySell. Here, you have to list the business yourself.
If your website is too high-profile, say with $250,000 to $20 million valuations. Then you may want the deal to be handled via a professional broker on a platform such as Digital Exits. A broker would be useful in finding an investor, negotiating the deal price, and finalizing the sale.
Meanwhile, Foundersib.com is for the website with even high stakes i.e. over $20 million. With profits per year calculated around $5 million a year.
The Endnote
There are a hundred ways to monetize your website. But the one you choose depends on the time and effort you can dedicate to the gig. It may be a little hard to figure out in the beginning. But with a bit of research and slight dabbling among different combinations can help you see what works the best for you.
Read also: The Ultimate Guide to plan your website
