One of the best ways to Escape9toFive is through making money from a website. Websites can make money 24 hours a day, 7 days a week. They never sleep and can be used internationally to sell products and services for their owners. Even without any products or services of your own to sell, you can partner with product owners and use affiliate products to monetise a website.
There’s thousands of affiliate products which you can sell online. Amazon is one of the most well known affiliate programs and you can sell any product from Amazon and earn a commission based on the sale.
Making Money From A Website – Monetisation
To monetise a website you can use two main methods. Of course, if you have a product or service of your own, you can sell that. Most people don’t have a product they can sell globally through, which is where affiliate marketing comes in. With affiliate product you can sell to a worldwide audience and you don’t have to worry about product handling or postage. With affiliate marketing you can sell products you don’t personally own through referral links on your website. When something is sold, you earn a commission. This makes affiliate marketing one of the top choices for monetisation of a website.
Another way to monetise a website is through advertising. When visitors come to your website and click on your adverts, you earn a percentage of the advertising revenue. Google Adsense is one of the more well-known advertising platforms which offer the ability to place clickable advertising on your website. But there are several other platforms which offer this service too.
Making Money From A Website – Best Affiliate Products To Sell
There’s thousands of affiliate products you can sell online, so which are the best? I’ve already mentioned Amazon has an affiliate program. But Amazon definitely isn’t the best in terms of the commission structure. In fact, Amazon has one of the lowest affiliate commission structures going. On certain items you will earn as little as 1% on a sale you generate through your affiliate link.
Other products can earn you more and particularly subscription products are a good idea. With a subscription product you can earn ongoing commissions month after month for your initial referral. Digital products have a much larger profit margin for affiliates too. With a digital sale, there’s no postage and manufacturing costs involved. So many digital products are very profitable for the owners. This is passed on to affiliates because they are doing the advertising for these companies.
A digital product can pay out from 30-40% commission – a much higher rate than most Amazon products (1-10%).
Ideally choose high value subscription products which are already selling. The last thing you need is to try and sell a product which nobody wants. Pick high value subscription products which offer massive value.
Using An Email List
Affiliates who sell a lot of products/services tend to build large email lists and promote their affiliate links through marketing emails. They will use a website though to attain their subscribers. By attracting a lot of visitors to a website, and offering them an attractive giveaway (see the video series here), you can build a list of subscribers who are interested in your products.
With an email list you have more time to build trust and make a connection with your subscribers. With a website, your visitors are only going to stick around for a few minutes at the most. But with an email list, you can email them over a much longer period. I’ve personally had affiliate sales from subscribers who have been on my list from between 2 and 5 years!
This just wouldn’t be possible from a website alone.
Getting Visitors For Your Website
One of the main challenges as an affiliate, and to make money from a website, is attracting visitors who will buy from you. This can be done fairly quickly with paid marketing campaigns, or over a longer stretch with the organic marketing approach. Ideally, use a little of both. To generate website traffic organically, you can create content and share in regularly on social media. Over time, this builds trust with the search engines (Google, Bing, Yahoo etc.) who will start ranking your content based on the keywords you target.
You can also share content via various social media platforms and build a following that way too.
The faster method of generating website traffic is through using paid advertising. Ideally, target specific keywords which are most appropriate for whatever you’re promoting. Send visitors from paid ads to a landing page not a generic website.
Why Use A Landing Page For Paid Ads?
A landing page is a specific web page which is built specifically for collecting emails and building your email list. But why? If you’re paying for advertising, you will want to collect email subscribers because it gives you a better return for your investment. By sending paid traffic directly to a normal blog, for example, your visitors can have many options.
They can click through and read your posts, look at your pages, and generally scope your website out. With a landing page, the focus is more deliberate. The visitor only has two options with a landing page. They either sign up to your offer or leave. This forces more of them to sign up to your list, giving you more opportunity to connect with them over a longer period. See also landing page for affiliate marketing.
Summary
Making money from a website does take a bit of setting up. But once you have set up the website, and your email list, the main job is directing traffic towards your website and landing page. This can be done with paid advertising and organic marketing. The whole process of making money from a website can be automated and this is the most exciting thing about it. Once setup and running, you can make sales in your sleep!
Learn more about building your own online presence and starting an online business using the principles in this post here.
