How to Monetize Your Website: 12 Proven Strategies

Got a website, but it's not bringing in the bucks? Relax; you're not alone. Many websites are in the same boat.

However, that doesn't mean you're stuck. This article is all about transforming that scenario.

In this blog post, I'll show you how to monetize your website using simple and effective strategies.

Whether you're just starting out or a seasoned expert, there's something valuable for you here.

Let's kick things off!

How to Monetize Your Website

Because many of you constantly search for ways to monetize a website with or without adverts, I've outlined both criteria here to assist you in comprehending and applying the ideas to your website.

So, let us look at some website monetization strategies, 

How to Monetize Your Website Without Ads

Here I have aligned some of the website monetization strategies that are without ads. Let's read on—

1. Affiliate Marketing

Affiliate marketing is performance-based marketing where a company pays for each visitor or client brought in due to your affiliate's marketing efforts. 

The following are some actions you may take to monetize your website via affiliate marketing:

Choose Niche-Relevant Affiliate Product or Service

Decide a specific product or service for your website according to your niche. Relevant products or services will help you to bring a particular audience and make it easier to identify appropriate affiliate programs. 

Investigate and Join Affiliate Programs

Look for affiliate programs looking for partners similar to your website's niche. You can find recurring Affiliate programs by searching online or contacting firms directly. For example, Dorik offers up to 40% recurring affiliate commissions to its affiliate partners.

When you find a program that interests you, you must apply to join.

Integrate Affiliate Links Into Your Website

You may begin promoting items or services after being accepted into an affiliate program. You can accomplish this by including affiliate links on your website. These special links contain a unique tracking code that allows the affiliate program to track sales generated by your website.

Promote the Products or Services

After adding affiliate links to your website, you can begin pushing the items or services to your target audience. You can accomplish this via blog entries and email newsletters.

Track Your Results

Tracking your results allows you to see which items or services are doing well and which are not.

For example, you can track your visitors and sales using tools like Google Analytics.

It is easier to build an affiliate marketing website with Dorik; why not try this now? 

2. E-Commerce

E-commerce is a commercial concept involving purchasing and selling goods or services over the internet. 

Here are some actions for leveraging e-commerce to monetize your website:

Find Items or Services to Sell

You can either build your own products or find items from other firms to offer as an affiliate according to your niche.

Add Products or Services to your Website

After establishing your e-commerce site or store, you may add products along with product descriptions, photos, and pricing information. 

You must also promote your website to increase engagement and purchases.

3. Sponsorship 

Negotiating sponsorship partnerships with other companies is another approach to utilizing your website traffic. 

For example, you can charge for publishing a relevant post with a link to the sponsor's website, reviewing one of the sponsor's items in your existing blog, or incorporating the sponsor's material into your email newsletter.  

The following are some actions you may take to monetize your website with sponsored content,

Determine Your Target Audience: 

Determine the type of people you wish to reach with your website. This target audience will assist you in attracting organizations looking to acquire a comparable audience.

Produce High-Quality Content

To attract sponsored content opportunities, you must first produce high-quality material that engages and attracts your audience. Examples are blog entries, videos, podcasts, and other forms of content.

Develop your Audience

To maximize your chances of receiving sponsored content opportunities, you must first develop a large and engaged audience. Social media, email marketing, and other means of communication can accomplish it. 

Connect With Brands and Businesses

Once your website and audience are established, you can contact brands and companies to offer sponsored content services.

Again, email, social media, or other types of outreach can perform this. 

Negotiate Terms and Generate Content

If a brand or business is interested in your sponsored content services, you must negotiate terms and develop material following the agreed-upon terms. This may involve content requirements and revenue share.

You can build a blogging website to monetize your website via a content sponsorship strategy.

Creating a blog website is way more accessible with these best no-code website builders we have covered in our latest blog post.   

4. Membership/Subscription mode

You can use several strategies to monetize a website through a subscription or membership model:

Offer Exclusive Content or Access to Certain Features for Subscribers

This can include premium articles, videos, podcasts, or other types of content that are only available to subscribers.

Alternatively, you can offer access to certain features or tools on your website that are only available to subscribers.

Charge a Recurring Fee for Access 

This can be a monthly or yearly subscription fee that gives users access to your content or features. You can use a payment gateway such as PayPal or Stripe to handle the transactions and manage the subscriptions.

Offer a Free Trial or Discounted Introductory Rate

This can attract potential subscribers by allowing them to try out your content or features before committing to a full subscription. You can also offer a discounted rate for an initial period to encourage people to sign up.

Upsell Additional Products or Services: 

You can offer additional products or services to your subscribers at a premium price, such as coaching, consulting, or professional development courses.

Cross-Promote with Other Businesses or Partners

Partnering with other companies or organizations to offer special deals or discounts to your subscribers can help you drive additional revenue for both parties.

It's essential to carefully consider which monetization strategy is best for your website and audience and to test and optimize your approach over time to maximize revenue.

With Dorik, you can build a membership website where you can easily generate revenue. 

5. Donations

If you have any expertise in any discipline, you can showcase it through your personal website. But it might cost you high enough to keep paying for the domain and hosting continually. 

For this concern, ask for a donation from your followers who would love to enjoy your expertise through your website more. And there is no shame here in asking for a donation. 

Every after your content (a blog, video, podcast, or anything else), you can include a “buy me a coffee” request and a note explaining why you require the money.

For example, if you do a travel blog on your website, you can ask for donations from your visitors to encourage you to travel more and share more information. Like HMSBlogs did.

To attract visitors to your contribution page and encourage them to make a gift, you can also set up a support us page on your website.

Receiving donations with PayPal and other donation platforms like Patreon, ko-fi, and other alternatives is much easier. 

At the very end of this process, remember to promote your website and its value to the community. 

6. Consulting or Coaching

Offering consulting or coaching services is another approach to monetizing a website. Consider the following options to monetize your website via consulting or coaching services:

Provide One-On-One Advising or Coaching

Individual consulting or coaching sessions can be provided to website visitors via video conferences, phone calls, or in-person meetings. You can charge a fee for these sessions based on your knowledge and expertise.

Sell a Workshop or Course

If you have extensive expertise and experience in a specific field, you can develop a course or workshop that educates others about it. This course or workshop can be sold on your website or through an online learning platform. 

If you have access to Gumroad, you can sell your services via Dorik CMS builder. List your service there and market it using a CTA on your website, connecting the users directly to the listed product on Gumroad.

Create a Membership Program

You can offer members continuous advising or coaching services for a monthly or annual charge. This could involve group coaching sessions regularly, one-on-one coaching, or access to particular tools and materials.

Offer Group Coaching or Consulting

Another alternative is to offer group coaching or consulting sessions in which you work simultaneously with a group of people. This is a less expensive alternative for participants and allows you to serve more people simultaneously.

Whatever path you take, it's essential to demonstrate the value of your consulting or coaching services to potential clients. And to have a system to manage appointments, payments, and other administrative responsibilities.

How to Monetize a Website With Ads

7. Google AdSense

Google AdSense is a platform that allows you to display advertisements on your websites and earn money from ad clicks.

To monetize your website with AdSense, you must first join Google AdSense.

Then, you will receive a code to put on your website once your website gets approved for the advertisements.

AdSense allows you to customize the types of advertising that appear on your website and where they will appear. You can change these settings in your AdSense account to ensure that the adverts are appropriate for your website and its content.

You'll start earning money as visitors click on the adverts on your website. Remember to keep an eye on your AdSense profits. Google will pay you once your earnings reach a particular level.

To maximize your AdSense profits, you must have a high-quality website with a lot of traffic and use ad formats and placements that are appropriate to your audience.

If you are looking for a Google Adsense alternative, you can look into Mediavine and Ezoic. 

Check out this in-depth comparison between Google Adsense and Mediavine.

8. Infolinks

Infolinks assists you in monetizing your site by placing contextual advertising in your content based on specified keywords. Rather than creating fresh content, Infolinks matches adverts with keywords already in your content. It's more than just a link; visitors will notice the ad when they hover over a highlighted term.

In addition to in-text adverts, Infolinks offers advertisements in the notification bar, between page views, and so on. 

9. Taboola

Taboola helps you monetize your site by displaying suggestions after your site's content - you've likely met this form of monetization with many well-known publishers and online publications.

Taboola is a popular alternative for content recommendation ads, but you must have at least 500,000 monthly visitors to be accepted. 

10. Outbrain

Outbrain is another ad network with a monetization structure similar to Taboola. In addition, it contributes to using "sponsored links" or "tales from the web" by many prominent publications and news organizations.

Outbrain claims to collaborate with "high-quality publishers of all sizes." However, Outbrain, like Taboola, often only accepts more extensive publications, so it may not be a good alternative if you have a small site.

11. Amazon Associates

Amazon Associates is a well-known affiliate marketing program.

While you can use Amazon Associates by manually inserting product links into your content, Amazon also has a contextual advertising technology called Native Shopping Ads that allows you to take a more hands-off approach.

Using Native Shopping Ads, you can automatically show contextual Amazon products on your site. Then, if visitors click on those products and make a purchase, they'll receive a commission.

The disadvantage is that you only get paid if they leave. However, you can earn commissions on different things consumers add to their carts after clicking through your site, not just the product in the ad.

The compensation threshold for Amazon Associates is a minimal $10. Just be aware that Amazon Associates' regulations and procedures may be harsher than those of other ad networks.

12. Selling ad Space

Selling ad space enables you to monetize your sites by allowing organizations or individuals to post adverts for a price. 

To monetize a website by selling ad space, you may follow these steps: 

Blogging websites are the one which are ideal for selling ads and increasing revenue. Producing high quality content has become crucial in case you want to monetize your website. With AI, producing high quality content isn’t a challenge anymore.

For example, you can use ChatGPT or Claude to generate content. You can go one step ahead for enhancing the quality of content along with its tone and structure.

Case studies of successful website monetization or examples

The Huffington Post

The Huff Post is a news and blog website that makes money from advertising, sponsored content, and subscriptions. 

Here are a few case studies highlighting some of The Huff Post's traffic monetization strategies:

Like many internet businesses providing free content, Huffington Post makes money by selling advertising on its website. However, the fact that the Huffington Post functions as a news aggregator, that is —  

It is adding new and diverse information as rapidly as this implies, attracting more and more visitors to the website to read it as soon as possible. This, in turn, instantly and massively places the adverts of companies that buy website space in front of their potential target audience. That is, according to the theory.

This is another approach the Huffington Post uses that offers free services to create money. In addition, they attract more people to their website by making its features and content accessible. 

However, this allows potential investors to estimate how lucrative it would be to run the website to generate cash from advertising space sales.

When America Online (A.O.L.) purchased the Huffington Post for $315 million U.S. in 2011, they concluded it had outlived its usefulness.

TechCrunch

TechCrunch is a popular technology news website that monetizes its traffic through advertising, events, and sponsorships. 

Here are a few case studies highlighting some of the approaches taken by TechCrunch to monetize its traffic:

CPM ads pay a set amount for every 1000 ad views and are not affected by cost per click or cost per action. 

Instead, the advertiser pays for every 1000 ad views, with earnings per CPM varying. 

Unfortunately, CPM rates for many small publishers are pitiful, ranging from $0.10 to $2.0 per CPM and changing by country and site.

TechCrunch earns between $19.25 and $36.50 per CPM (Cost Per Thousand), which is a hefty sum for each CPM.

TechCrunch also sells weekly and monthly fixed-price advertisements.

Furthermore, they sell their 125×125 ad space for fixed prices as well as larger size advertising such as 728×90, 300×250, and 300×600 banner ads at CPM rates.

Advertisers spend $5000 every week for ad space for 125×125 px banners of TechCrunch. Again, a massive lot.

Mashable

Mashable is a news website that covers technology, digital culture, and entertainment. Its traffic has been monetized through advertising and sponsored content. 

Here are a few case studies highlighting some of Mashable's traffic monetization strategies:

It's all about marketing. The blog must be interesting enough to attract sufficient readers to persuade marketers that purchasing its advertising space is profitable. The more popular your blog is, the more advertisers want to get involved. The more they will be ready to pay.

Advertisers typically focus on the subject of a blog, so companies that advertise on Mashable are typically technology-related.

Week-long sponsorships are also available for Mashable's syndicated feed, which has over 580,000 subscribers.

Mashable also communicates with its audience offline and offers sponsorship possibilities.

Mashable Connect, launched last year, is an annual invite-only conference with influential, high-profile speakers.

Companies can also purchase advertisements on Mashable on a CPM (cost per mile) or weekly or monthly basis. 

Furthermore, the adverts vary on the website's size and location.

Social Media Day and the Social Good Summit are two offline Mashable events organized by Mashable.

Since 2007, it has also hosted the International Open Web Awards, which honor the best online communities and services. The winners are announced at an offline awards ceremony after online voting concludes. 

Furthermore, the International Web Awards was renamed the Mashable Awards in 2010.

Buzzfeed

Buzzfeed is a news and entertainment website that makes money from advertising, sponsored content, and e-commerce. 

Here are a few case studies highlighting some of Buzzfeed's traffic monetization strategies:

BuzzFeed monetizes its traffic in a variety of ways, including display advertising (pay-per-click and cost-per-sale), video content (through commercials and production fees), native advertising (promoting products or brands inside editorial content), and podcasts (through ads and fixed costs).

Several elements, such as the number of views, ad rates, and listeners, determine the revenue generated by each source. 

As a result, BuzzFeed has diversified its revenue sources and attempted to reduce its dependency on specific revenue sources.

BuzzFeed generates revenue through affiliate marketing by promoting products on behalf of other companies and earning a commission when users purchase through the website. 

The company has strict quality requirements for the products it enables, including a high rating, multiple verified reviews, and a competitive price.

BuzzFeed promotes affiliate products through its Shopping section and has partnerships with companies such as Amazon, Shopify, Walmart, and Hilton Hotels.

BuzzFeed News, the company's daily news section, offers a paid subscription model that allows users to access exclusive content and features in exchange for a monthly or annual fee. 

In addition, subscribers receive member-only emails about the company's top stories and have the opportunity to provide feedback on products. 

BuzzFeed News covers various topics, including politics, business, sports, and celebrities, and has a team of over 250 reporters worldwide.

BuzzFeed generates revenue by selling its own products, including digital and physical items such as cookbooks, food products, seasonings, kitchen appliances, and cooking sets for children. Most of these sales come through the TASTY brand. 

BuzzFeed partners with other companies in the industry to manufacture and distribute these products and receives a portion of each sale. 

The company has strategic collaborations with partners such as Walmart, Wilton, and McCormick, and the deal with Walmart is rumored to be worth over $20 million.

The Daily Beast

The Daily Beast, a news and opinion website, has adopted a new approach to subscriber acquisition that aims to monetize readers more efficiently. 

According to the Chief Revenue Officer, Mia Libby, the company's subscription business now accounts for 20% of total annual revenue and has grown by 30% yearly. 

The Daily Beast's goal is to turn passive readers into "true loyalists that are willing to pay" and to collect revenue throughout the reader-to-subscriber funnel. 

To do this, the company plans to market products to known users or regular readers who have signed up for newsletters, the Daily Beast app, or desktop push notifications based on which product they are most likely to convert. 

The Daily Beast will also use a registration wall called the Access Pass to offer access to articles in exchange for personal information from readers who are unlikely to pay for a subscription.

FAQs 

How much money can I make from a website?

However, there are specific broad ranges to be expected. What exactly is this? You can expect anywhere from $500 to $5,000 per month if you have around 10,000 to 100,000 monthly unique visitors. 

What Should be the priority?  Traffic or Monetization?

The first priority for a website owner should be building a solid and engaged audience, as this is essential for generating income through monetization strategies. Without an audience, it isn't easy to effectively monetize a website. 

Therefore, building traffic and engagement should be the primary focus for a website owner rather than solely focusing on monetization. 

Once a website has a solid and engaged audience, the owner can consider different monetization strategies and determine the most effective for their website.

Wrapping Up

As we go over several monetization tactics, it is time for you to create your website, pick a strategy and monetize your website. To create your money-making website, you can use dorik.com to do it yourself without writing a single line of code affordably.

However, let us know which monetization options appeal to you the most and should be pursued further.