Let Your Website Generate Income With These 5 Tips – BlueHost.com

Now that you’ve learned how to create a WordPress website in five easy steps, it’s time to figure out how to make money with your site. You may be selling products or advertising a service, but if you don’t get much traffic to your website, it can be hard to start driving up your revenues. So how do you monetize your site? Here five ways to start building a healthy revenue stream to turn your website into a cash cow. Ka-ching!

1. Affiliate Marketing

Adding affiliate links to your website is an excellent way to create a passive revenue stream. Affiliate marketing is simple: you earn a commission for promoting another brand’s products on your own website (and securing a sale for the other company). This is a fairly easy way of making money, although it’s wise to only partner with businesses and products that resonate with your audience.

2. Webinars

Offering potential customers something of value is perhaps one of the best money-making strategies that new business owners overlook. Host an online workshop to teach your customers how to use your product or service or any other topic that is related to your business (and therefore your customers’ needs).

In The Ultimate Webinar Marketing Guide, author Lewis Howes explains that webinars provide multiple revenue stream boosters, including selling a product at the conclusion of a training event and building a marketing list for future campaigns. Listen to his MixEnergy interview to discover how he converted a free, 50-minute webinar into $6,300 immediately after the session closed. Hint: He decided to offer paid training (promoted during the free webinar, of course) on LinkedIn.

3. Pay-Per-Click Advertising

Pay-per-click (PPC) advertising allows you to pay to have your ad displayed on another website, like Google’s search results pages for example. You pay a pre-determined fee — the Cost Per Click (CPC) — every time someone clicks on your ad. As WordStream says, “Essentially, it’s a way of buying visits to your site, rather than attempting to ‘earn’ those visits organically.”

And here’s the great part: you can make money with PPC. Make space available on your own website for Google PPC and bring advertisers to you. Every time a visitor clicks on an ad, you’ll get paid 68 percent of what the original advertiser paid Google.

4. Banner Ads

Banner ads (also known as display ads) are displayed on high-traffic websites and link to the business’ site when clicked. Selling banner ad space on your website to other business owners is a great way to build a new revenue stream.

Get the word out that you have space available through Conversant, AdSense, and Exponential. And check out this article from AdPushup before you go live if you need help optimizing your banner ad campaign. If you’re already attracting a lot of traffic to your blog or website, consider getting other brands, such as Google AdSense, Crisp Ads, and Amazon Associates Ads, to advertise on your site. Simply sign up with one of the companies listed here, and they will automatically generate the code that you paste onto your site where you want to display the ad.

5. Freebies

Neil Patel knows the value of giving away content for free. Create a short video packed with helpful information that viewers can use to make their life easier, more productive, or fun. There are plenty of free and premium A/V tools out there like Animoto and YouTube. And remember that if you’re using WordPress, you can also tap into the dozens of free plugins designed to help you upload the finished masterpiece onto your website.

Here’s the monetizing part: at the end of the clip, tell readers how they can sign up for a paid subscription so that they never miss new releases. Or include a link to download your latest e-book at a discounted price.

Making money with your WordPress blog or business site doesn’t have to take any high-tech skills or a huge investment of time or funds. Many of these methods are passive income generators. Try one or more of these ideas to start monetizing your website.