5 Great Ways to Earn Money on your Websites

We all thought about running our own website or writing a blog. Many of us acted on that idea and now are proud owners of websites and blogs. Unfortunately, owning a website can get quite expensive. Hosting and domain costs can grow pretty fast the more popular your website starts to get. If you’re not a web developer yourself, you are most likely using a WordPress theme, however, all good ones usually cost a lot. Plus those sweet photos and images, you probably should buy them.

You also probably heard about different ways to monetize your website traffic or you may even do this already, but you got no luck or find the returns not satisfactory. Fear not! We’d like to share with you some of our expertise in website traffic monetization and talk about some of the best ways to make money on your website.

Google AdSense and Contextual Ads

One of the best ways to start monetizing your website traffic is to lend specific spaces at your website to ad networks that offer contextualized ads. Among the biggest and best-paying networks are big names such as Google AdSense or Media.net.

There are dozens of ad formats from small sliders, through the top, bottom and side banners to pop-ups and full overlays. Choosing the perfect ad for your website depends on many things. How big is the website? Are there only a few pages or is every other blog post you publish a separate sub-page? Where can you place ads in such a way to not destroy the website’s design? Also, the most important aspect, how far can you go with ad placement before you irritate your user too much. Luckily, these ads are practically always in your website context, thus there’s small chance your audience will be attacked with something completely unrelated to them.

The problem with Google AdSense is that it is quite hard to fit their principles. Their admission process can take some time. They also won’t pay you through PayPal or other fast payment systems. Moreover, their rules on prohibited content and topics make it impossible for many people to advertise with them. However, there is a ton of alternative ways to monetize a website traffic, as well as there, are other reasons people decide not to use AdSense. Some time ago we wrote about the best Google Adsense alternatives in website traffic monetization at our blog, so feel free to check it out if you are interested.

Affiliate Networks

If you can’t or don’t want to advertise with Google AdSense or any other straight-up contextual ad network (most of the networks are), you may want to try your luck in affiliate marketing. You just need to find an affiliate network that offers products or services that your audience may find interesting. You get paid for every converted user, usually, this means a sale, that found her or his way to the affiliate site from your website. It sounds complicated, but in fact, it’s really simple. You will still most likely show ads of certain products through your website. However, you may also write a blog post review of a certain product and put your advertisement as an in-text link. In general, the affiliate marketing industry is pretty large and offers something for anyone.

Guest posting

If your website is rich in content, frequently updated blog you may try finding people that will pay you for links from your site to boost their SERP scores. This is usually in form of guest posts - articles published by the interested party at your website with a dofollow link back to their targeted page. It’s a good choice for anybody that runs a blog but don’t have time to write for entire days. The most important thing that decides the payout are the stats of your website: its domain/page authority and age, trust flow and, of course, average monthly traffic.

Paid Reviews

If you prefer to write your own content, you may want to write paid reviews of products/services for companies that may want to reach to your audience. This is also a good choice when you have fewer but very loyal readers or when you write about very niche topics. Naturally, the traffic will be lower, but the potential conversion rate for the interested company will be much higher. After all, they are presented in front of people of very refined and specific taste. Just remember to always be honest. Some bloggers I know had to shut down their blogs when they lost their audience trust because of too much one-sided up-selling.

Referrals

Somewhat similar to affiliate marketing, making money depends on your personal charisma. In short, you present certain tools, systems and third-party services that have any referral programs. When your readers sign up for these services and get paid, you will get from a couple to over a dozen percent of their payment for yourself as a referrer. Nowadays, almost every service has such referral programs. At Shorte.st we have one of the better-paying referral systems in the industry, so be sure to check it out if you’re interested.

Test all options

Doesn’t matter which type of traffic monetization you’ll choose. Always remember to test new options, try new ad networks and ad placement; you can always, in some configuration, earn more than you do now.