How To Make Money From A Website Without Selling Anything
Welcome to this guide on how to make money from a website without selling anything.
Selling physical products such as eBooks, courses, or printables is not the only way to make money from a website.
In this post, we are going to talk about how to make money with a website without selling anything with simple methods like advertising with Google AdSense and affiliate marketing among others.
In other words, you are going to learn tips on how websites make money from traffic they get from search engine optimization or from Pinterest marketing among other platforms.
If you are not planning to create your own money-making niche website, I recommend you check out these free and simple websites that make money.
This post might contain affiliate links. I may earn some commission if you click on such links. You shall not incur any extra cost if that happens. Please read our full affiliate disclosure here!
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How To Make Money From A Website Without Selling Anything In 3 Ways
1. Affiliate Marketing
What is affiliate marketing?
90% of online entrepreneurs use affiliate marketing to make money from their websites.
It is the process of promoting other people’s products in exchange for a commission every time a customer makes a purchase from your unique referral link.
For example, if you promote a web hosting company such as Bluehost, and someone uses your link or affiliate tracking ID to purchase you will get 50% commission, which is half the sale.
Thus, to earn money online with this method of monetizing a website you must work hard to drive high sales resulting in more commissions.
In case you are wondering how the affiliate company will know that the customer used your affiliate link, read more on affiliate link cookies to understand how the tracking works.
Parties and Terms involved in Affiliate Marketing
Merchant/Advertiser: This is the main retailer, producer, or manufacturer of the product you want to promote. For example, Bluehost is a merchant in the example provided above.
Affiliate/publisher: This is now you who want to promote the merchant products. Also known as publishers, and in the real business world, these can be likened to retailers.
Affiliate Networks: This acts as a middleman between the merchant and the affiliate. Some merchants host their affiliate programs, while others manage them through networks, such as ShareASale, Amazon Associates, and CJ Affiliate among others.
Consumer: This is a buyer who will purchase the product either directly from the merchant or indirectly through the publisher’s tracking ID.
Commission: This is the percentage of the money the affiliate will earn in the case of a successful sale.
Affiliate tracking ID: This unique identifier is given by the merchant or affiliate network to the publishers used to track purchases.
Affiliate materials: These can be links, banners, or any other method that the publisher will use to promote the affiliate products.
How To Make Money From A Website Without Selling Anything with Affiliate marketing?
To make money online through affiliate marketing, you must use the right strategies and tips for success.
Below I have compiled a list of 8 tips you should consider when you choose to monetize your site through affiliate marketing.
a) Find a Niche
Most online entrepreneurs who make money online through affiliate marketing have a specific target market and the audience they sell to products that meet their needs.
You cannot promote every product under the sun, and it is even more challenging to do so on the online platform.
For this reason, begin by picking a niche market if you want to succeed in monetizing your website through affiliate marketing and making money online.
For example, fitness, SEO, weight loss, personal development, and health are all examples of niche markets.
b) Do keyword research
The secret to making money online through affiliate marketing is selling the right products to the right customers who are willing to buy from your online business.
Keywords are the words or phrases that people enter into search engines to find information.
Keyword research will help you know which search phrases buyers in your niche use most before they make a purchase. For example, a common keyword that reflects buying intent is “best weight loss pills for men.”
To monetize your site right with this method, the best keywords to use are long tail search phrases, which have low competition and high click-through rates since they represent the buyers intent.
c) Find the right products
Your ability to make money online with affiliate marketing will largely depend on your ability to monetize your site effectively by selling the right products.
There are many ways you can find products to promote on your website like;
Promote products you already use in your online business, such as themes, hosting, SEO tools, social media tools, and any other product you use in your life.
Find products relevant to your niche in affiliate networks, such as ShareASale, Amazon Associates, and CJ Affiliate.
Borrow your competitor’s products. I know you visit other entrepreneurs’ websites in your niche and find out the products they promote while you are there.
d) Create highly converting selling copies
By a selling copy I mean the method you will use to monetize your site with the affiliate products.
These can be text links in blog posts, banners on sidebars and other website locations, landing pages, video marketing, social media campaigns, product giveaways, and email marketing among others.
The only way you are going to monetize your site effectively with affiliate marketing is by being valuable to your readers and customers.
Those customers will only buy from you if they can trust you or look up to you as an influencer or someone in a position to give an expert recommendation.
For example, if you are a blogger who wants to monetize your site with this method, you should consider writing detailed how-to guides, review articles, and comparison posts, which help customers to make decisions.
Therefore, to earn money online with affiliate marketing you must always create content and products with the following characteristics.
e) Promote your website and content widely
Affiliate marketing is not a get-rich overnight make-money online strategy.
Affiliate income takes time to grow, but the good thing is that you can accelerate this growth by promoting your content widely across many networks for it to reach a broad target audience.
The more you reach your target market niche and audience the higher the chances of making many affiliate sales, which will result in high commissions.
Therefore, to monetize your site effectively with affiliate marketing spend 20% of your time creating unique selling copies and use the rest 80% promoting the content and your website or online business in general.
f) Create SEO-friendly websites
SEO is the process of making websites user and search engine friendly.
It involves all the activities performed on a website design, architecture, social profiles, and content among others to make it more crawlable by search engines and easy to use for your customers.
Therefore, SEO will help you to create a website that will attract more customers and also give them a reason to stay and buy from your online business.
Search engines are a source of free organic traffic, which you need to earn money online because this can only happen if you have customers buying from your website and online business.
SEO is divided into two: on-page SEO and off-page SEO factors.
Therefore, if you want to earn money online and monetize your site right with affiliate marketing, then you must take care of all the SEO ranking factors in the two categories above.
g) Track, Evaluate and Measure your performance
The truth is that affiliate marketing is tedious and time-consuming.
For this reason, you do not want to waste time with the wrong products with poor conversions and sales returns or even destroy the reputation of your online business by monetizing your website with the wrong products.
Tracking is vital to know which products your customers want more, and which ones are poorly performing.
These data will help you to decide which products to promote more or which ones to leave behind.
Affiliate Marketing Quick summary tips
Sell what you use and know about to build more brand loyalty with your customers.
Research your market, niche, competitors, and The only way to promote the right products is through understanding their market and buyers well.
Measure everything and do not be afraid to change goals or drop any irrelevant and under-performing product along the way.
Cloak your links and use a no-follow attribute to avoid messing up your SEO reputation.
Be useful and valuable to your customers. Write articles, produce courses and create videos that are informative and help them in their buying decisions, such as detailed guides and how-to posts.
Long-term success in affiliate marketing begins with SEO best practices. Take care of on-page SEO, off-page SEO, link building, and Keyword research to succeed in affiliate marketing through free search engine traffic.
Promote promote promote and again promote your website and its content like crazy. The only way customers will buy from you is when they know you exist and where to find you and your products.
Use the right tools to increase productivity and remove time wastage.
2. Advertising
Types of Ads
These are the main ads, but not the only ones you can find a detailed list of all kinds of ads in this article
Text ads: They contain text describing a product or place that is being advertised.
Video Ads: These are playable video media ads.
Image Ads: They operate with the model that, a picture is worth 1000 words.”
Link Ads: Are clickable hyperlinks
How To Make Money From A Website Without Selling Anything with Advertising
To earn money online on your business website you can use any of the ad types above or a combination of two or all the formats in every campaign.
Advertising is a broad topic when it comes to monetizing a website with ads.
There are many different advertising models/campaigns that you can use to monetize your website.
Your online business or website will make money online effectively only by choosing the right advertising model that suits your business niche, audience, and type.
Below are 8 advertising campaigns/models you can use to monetize your site and begin to make money online like a billionaire.
a) Cost Per Click (CPC) advertising
Also known as Pay Per Click (PPC) is the most common type of advertising you can use to monetize your website, and you earn when people click on the ad.
The more clicks you get, the higher the payout, which means that you must have high website traffic to earn money online effectively with this type of ad.
The upside of these types of ads is that they are easy to set up, while the downside is that they have a low payout, especially when you have low traffic to your site.
The most common advertising network that offers this type of monetizing method is Google AdSense.
To learn more about Google AdSense use these three resources, how to set up Google Adsense in WordPress and how to make money with Google Adsense.
Yes, Google Adsense is the best and most common way to monetize a website, but sometimes your account may get rejected or banned, or even you may not be making the money you want due to low click rates.
In such a scenario, you can use these alternatives to Google AdSense, such as Media.net and Infolinks to monetize your site.
b) Cost Per Mile (CPM)
These are ads where you make money online for every 1000 impressions. By impressions, it means the number of times the ad appears on your site.
Thus, if you monetize your site with these types of ads, you will earn a commission every time the advertisement is displayed 1000 times on your site.
This means that you will still make money from CPM ads even though your website visitors do not click on them like in the CPC model.
The upside of this model is that it is less risky, and it’s easy to make good money with it, but the downside is that there are few advertisers and it is limiting because you do not make money if people click on the ad.
There are many CPM ad networks out there, such as Propeller Ads, Conversant Media and Casale Media.
c) Cost Per Action (CPA)
Also known as cost per acquisition is a model where you get paid when people click and perform an action on the advertiser’s website, such as buy a product or sign up for the newsletter among other actions.
Therefore, when you monetize your site with CPA ads, you only make money online when your website visitors click on the ad, which redirects them to the advertiser’s website where they have to complete any action, such as purchase a product for you to earn your commission.
The upside of this ad campaign is that it has high payout margins, but it is riskier because you can quickly fall victim to a publisher’s fraud.
There are many CPA networks, which you can try today, such as MaxBounty, CPA Lead, and Dynamic Yield among others.
d) Private/direct Ads
This is the best method to monetize your site if you have high decent traffic.
If you are ready to have control over your ads, you can use this campaign method in the following ways to make money online.
Firstly, sell ad space. You can create an “Advertise with us” page that will attract interested advertisers in your niche to place ads on your site. You must conduct a market hunt and intensive website promotion for advertisers to find your services among other activities described in that article.
Secondly, you can save yourself the hustle of selling the ads yourself and sell them through several networks, such as BuySellAds and BlogAds. These networks take 20-30% of the commission, which is fair because they will help to display your customer’s ads to a broad audience.
The advantage of monetizing your website with private ads is that you have direct control over the ads and the payout commission is high, but the downside is that they require more effort to manage.
e) Create a Paid Directory
A paid directory is a form of advertising model where you make money online by creating a website where people advertise several things, such as jobs in exchange for a fee.
Job boards and event calendars are two common examples of paid directories that you can use to monetize your site today.
This guide will provide all the relevant information you need to get started on how to create and earn money online with paid directory websites.
f) Text Link Ads
When you monetize your site with these ads, you will make money online by adding links from advertisers in your niche to words and phrases within your content.
You must always use no-follow links with this type of advertising to avoid search engine penalties, find more tips here.
There are many networks that offer this model of advertising, such as LinkWorth, Skimlinks, Infolinks, and VigLink among others.
g) Sponsored Content
This model works where an advertiser looks for a website with decent traffic and approaches the owner to publish or feature their content on their website.
There are many examples of sponsored content, such as posts, interviews, webinars, and videos among others.
If you choose to monetize your site with these advertising models consider the many factors you should consider when setting the price for sponsored content, such as word count and visibility time among others.
Therefore, this method of monetizing your website earns money online only when your site is already generating high traffic.
Remember that some advertisers will not find you, and so you should not shy away from finding them in the right places.
h) Paid Reviews
This method of monetizing your site is similar to sponsored posts, but they differ in that you sign up to different networks and get paid to write reviews for products related to your website niche.
There are many networks, on which you can find these types of ads to monetize your website, such as SponsoredReviews, PayPerPost, and PayU2Blog among others.
3. Ask for Donations
You can monetize your website with this method if you are too lucky to have an engaged audience who is ready to support your efforts and sites you can ask for a donation from them directly.
It sounds spammy, right? I would not advise you to use this method, especially if you are starting out.
How To Make Money From A Website Without Selling Anything with Donations
Offer value
The only way people will donate to your site is if you are offering exceptional value, such as providing quality products and content.
Create a campaign
Instead of looking as though you are asking for money for your personal use, you should consider attaching some value to the donation motive.
For instance, you can say that the money will be used to help needy children. See the example here.
Add a donate button
You can add one with Paypal or Stripe for the best results.
Embed a donate form
This will increase your credibility and create some uniformity in all donations.
Wrapping It Up
That is how to make money from a website without selling anything using highly profitable strategies like affiliate marketing, advertising, and donations.
For tips on how to make money with a website while selling, make sure you read this guide on how to make 1000 dollars a day through selling.
Alternatively, if you do not own a website or you are not planning to build one, make sure you check out these simple websites that make money.
How To Make Money From A Website Without Selling Anything
