It costs money to keep up a website, whether you’re paying for hosting, paying for bandwidth, paying for a domain or paying for traffic. You also have to consider buying content, paying for ads and paying for analytics, if you’re taking everything seriously. All of this, to try to make money from your site. You need all the help you can get. Thankfully, the web is full of resources you can use.
Key Takeaways
- Affiliate marketing platforms like Clickbank and Amazon Associates let you earn commissions without creating your own products.
- PPC advertising through Google Ads is limited by ad blockers, affecting nearly a third of internet users.
- Direct ad space sales via BuySellAds can be more lucrative than PPC, though harder to manage independently.
- Digital product sales, including apps, e-books, and crafts, tap into a $560 billion annual digital media market.
- Built websites can be sold on Flippa for five or six figures, offering an alternative monetization exit strategy.
Affiliate Marketing
Why spend thousands of hours developing and manufacturing a product of your own, when you can sell something someone else made, and take a commission off the top? Affiliate marketing is the place to be if you don’t have something of your own to sell.
Site 1: Clickbank - This is one of the affiliate sites with the best reputations amongst all of the networks available. Find a good niche, find the right products to promote and you can laugh all the way to the bank. All you need to do is write content, test a site and generally have a compelling landing page to get people to buy.
Site 2: Amazon Associates - Do you like the things Amazon sells? Do you think the people who visit your site also like the things Amazon sells? Join the Amazon Affiliates program, called Amazon Associates, and you can make money when people buy things from Amazon. All you need to do is post links with your tag attached and you’ll earn a commission whenever users make a purchase - even if that purchase wasn’t the exact item you linked to. With nearly 90% of UK shoppers and a huge proportion of US shoppers using Amazon regularly, the potential audience is enormous.
Site 3: Backlinko - This site isn’t an affiliate network, and you won’t make money directly through them. What they do is teach you a lot of what you need to know about affiliate marketing. Any questions you have, from the basics to the advanced techniques, you can find answers to in their guides and resources.
PPC Advertising
With pay per click, you position ads on your site and, whenever a user clicks on them, you earn a commission. A large part of making money with PPC is volume, but you also have to pick the right ads and niche. Bear in mind that nearly a third of all internet users now use an ad blocker, so PPC alone is rarely enough to build a sustainable income.
Site 4: Google Ads - Google is one of the giants in the PPC industry, and you can implement their ads on your site with relative ease. The only problem is the restrictive nature of the program, and the fact that there are certain topics they won’t touch. Make sure your traffic is legitimate and your content complies with their policies, and you should be fine.
Site 5: WordStream’s PPC Guide - A comprehensive and regularly updated resource covering everything you need to know about running effective PPC campaigns. Whether you’re just getting started or looking to fine-tune an existing strategy, this is a solid place to turn for practical, actionable advice.
Site 6: Portent - Portent’s PPC services and resources offer solid insight into running effective paid campaigns. While a good portion of the advice is aimed at the advertiser side, the principles apply equally when you’re evaluating which ad networks to work with as a publisher.
Selling Ad Space
Sometimes you don’t want to work through an affiliate or middleman to make money from your site. You just want to sell ad space and make money directly from advertisers. Direct sales can be tricky to manage, but they can be much more lucrative than PPC and affiliates. The programmatic digital display ad sector alone is projected to generate over $175 billion globally, so there is real money in this space - if you can capture even a sliver of it.
Site 7: BuySellAds - One of, if not the best marketplace available for advertising. You can sign up as a publisher and have complete control over the ads that appear on your site. If you choose to advertise later, you can take the role of an advertiser and know exactly where your money is going. There are also plugins that can help you sell ad space on your website directly without a marketplace.
Site 8: Google AdSense - One of Google’s core advertising offerings, AdSense serves display ads and gives you the banners you see across sites all over the web. Keep in mind that you’ll generally need upwards of 10,000 monthly visitors before you’ll see meaningful income. You also need to be careful about ad positioning, density and topic compliance - but when done properly, AdSense can work alongside other ad networks to contribute a solid chunk of passive revenue.
Selling Your Products
You can sell just about anything on the web today, including things you make yourself. Software, physical items, books, digital media - it’s all possible. In 2024 alone, internet users spent over $560 billion on digital media including videos, e-publishing, digital music and video games, which shows just how large the appetite for digital products has become.
Site 9: BuildFire’s App Building Guide - A practical, up-to-date guide on how to create a mobile app without needing a computer science degree. With the right idea and some effort, you can get something into the app stores and start generating income from downloads or in-app purchases. Getting more downloads and installs is something worth planning for before you even launch.
Site 10: Amazon KDP - Amazon’s Kindle Direct Publishing is a way for anyone - anyone at all - to sell an e-book. What subjects can you write about? Anything. You can write how-to guides, case studies, long-form blog content repurposed into guides, fiction, poetry - the sky is the limit. Write it, publish it and have it live in hours. Once you’re live, check out some proven ways to increase your Kindle book sales.
Site 11: Etsy - Okay, so Etsy isn’t strictly monetizing your website, but if you do any sort of physical crafting at all, it remains one of the best places to sell those crafts. You can then use your site for promotion and secondary monetization to fund your creative work. If your store isn’t gaining traction, it helps to understand why your Etsy store might not be getting visitors.
Lead Generation
Why bother making your message strong enough to sell a product? Why not just get paid to send potential leads to businesses, and leave the sales to them? That’s the theory behind lead generation. You send the people in and get paid for doing so - they have to do the work of actually closing the sale.
Site 12: GlobalWide Media - One of the top-tier lead generation and performance marketing networks. You can run affiliate marketing, lead gen and advertising all within their platform, making it a versatile option for publishers at various stages.
Site 13: MaxBounty - A well-established CPA network that has built a strong reputation among publishers. Signing up gives you access to a wide range of offers across many niches, with competitive payouts and a reliable tracking platform. Note: Peerfly shut down operations in 2019, so MaxBounty is a solid alternative worth considering in its place.
Alternatives
These are other ways to make money with your site - they won’t work for everyone, but once you have some growth, you might be able to make them work.
Site 14: Campaign Monitor’s Email Monetization Guide - This guide walks you through the realities of monetizing your email list, including newsletter sponsorships and ad placements within your emails. Essentially, once you have a solid subscriber base, you can rent out space in your newsletters to relevant businesses. Think of it like display ads delivered directly to inboxes. Done well, it can be highly lucrative - done poorly, it will cost you subscribers fast.
Site 15: Flippa - Flippa is a marketplace for buying and selling websites. Once you’ve built an audience and a following, you can sell your site and everything that comes with it to interested buyers. Build a site, grow it steadily, and it’s entirely realistic to sell it for five or six figures.
