Now that your new site is live blogged, socially connected, and search optimized, it’s time to monetize the thing. The site is now a bulletin board on the information superhighway, so make it pay.
Much of the income received from websites is passive. Someone clinks on your site, buys something, and you get a piece of the action. Easy.
Active methods require some engagement with your readers/customers, but in those cases, you are getting a whole or major cut of each transaction.
Here are the top ways to monetize your site.
Monetize Actively
Payments
Make it easy for people to give you money. The first thing to do is open an account with PayPal, since it seems to be the easy way to transfer money online. A secure credit card system requires the use of a Payment Gateway to provide that third party screen. Your hosting service may have solutions for you. Any service offers code or plugins to install in WordPress.
Sell Books
Books are an obvious choice, since Amazon is such an easy program, and it’s easy to offer the books of interest to your target audience. If you review these books, you can place text links (no follow perhaps) to sell the book.
Sell Merchandise
Got t-shirts, coffee mugs, mouse pads or pens with your brand name on it? Put an ad in the sidebar using a fulfillment plugin. Or use WooCommerce to open a store.
Sell Services
Is there a service you perform that’s related to your blogsite content? Put up a splash page, a portfolio, or your CV and link to it. Create Google ads to point to your services splash page. (see below)
Sell Sponsorship
Let companies give you money or perks in exchange for ad space or mentions. Watch out with links to avoid being frowned upon by Google. Like anything else, there is a whole school of learning related to navigating the Sponsorship waters.
Run Contests
Contests can make money both for non profits as well as for profit. Give away something that you provide or get a sponsor to pay for the prize. Here’s some legal advice about running online contests.
Take Donations
You don’t need to be a non-profit to ask for donations. Write an appeal as a Call to Action and give them a link to Pay Pal. See what happens.
Monetize Passively
Google Adsense
Adsense is the mother of all pay-per-click advertising programs, allowing sites to offer text, image, video or interactive ads targeted to the site’s content and audience. Site owners are paid based on the number of clicks per ad.
Conversely, to advertise with Google Adsense, use Google Adwords. That is where the keyword tools live.
Affiliate Advertising
Affiliate advertising is somewhere between Adsense and sponsorship. It’s an automated program, but you pick the advertiser. They give you the code to put in sidebars or on the page and pay you when your link is clicked and a sale is made.
Blogsite Studio is affiliated to companies with which it works, like Bluehost, Harvest, and Themeforest because it’s easy to recommend them. Each of these has a program I applied to individually, and they give me ad code to post and online reports to check.
Affiliate Networks will hook you up with advertisers that suit your site. I’ve worked with LinkShare and Commission Junction. Amazon sells everything these days and offers a good program. Here is a good review of affiliate networks.
Paywall
You’ve got to have some kind of reputation and offer a lot of exclusive information to make people pay to read your stuff. Big city newspapers are still dipping their toes into making readers pay for information, but if you are Jancis Robinson to the wine world, you’ll find people will pay for reviews and ratings that the hoi polloi won’t. Good luck with that.
Start with Subscribers
Passive or active, the first thing a site needs is subscribers. They are the base from which to build a following to which you can sell. All a subscriber need do is enter an email address, confirm via an email and boom! You have opt-in subscribers.
Links
Put Subscribe Now! links around your site. The easiest way is to put code in a Text or Image widget and slap it in the top and bottom of the sidebar. Or in a footer. Or, in a plugin on the bottom of your page. Jetpack will give you code, as will any outside email services.
Pop-ups
I recently started using a pop-up plugin, Lightbox Pop-up. I set the message down low on the screen and about 10 seconds into page load time. It works.
Free Ebook
Everybody likes free gifts, so if you have an Ebook to give away, offer it as an enticement to subscribers. This series, Create a WordPress Website, will be an Ebook soon, to be offered to my subscribers. There are plugins to handle delivery of various types of files, like Paid Downloads http://wordpress.org/plugins/paid-downloads/, which I have used at Tasting Room Confidential.
Next Steps
As always, this is not the end of ways to monetize your site. New opportunities arise every day. But it’s a beginning.
On Saturday August 17, I will present this Create a WordPress Website series as WordPress in 10 Steps at WordCamp Vancouver. Hope to see you there!