What’s the Best Way to Monetize a Website?

7 years ago · 5 minute read

AMA question #3:

“I’m brand new to trying to start a website and voraciously reading everything I can about how to monetize a website. What’s the best way to monetize a website, and if it’s advertising, is there a website of people/companies looking to advertise on sites and willing to pay for it?”

Here’s our answer.

Key points:

• If you can build a website with traffic, monetizing it is not necessarily the hard part.
• Google’s Adsense program might be the easiest way for website owners to quickly make money off of advertising.
• Affiliate marketing, via networks like Commission Junction, is a great way to earn more money than a basic “click program” like Google Adsense.
• Build your email list! Many website owners regret not collecting emails from visitors early on. An email list is a great way to monetize a website’s traffic long-term.

AMA #3 Video Transcript

Dana Robinson: I’m brand new to starting to try a website and voraciously reading everything I can about how to monetize a website. What’s the best way to monetize a website? And if it’s advertising, is there a website of people or companies looking to advertise on sites and willing to pay for it?

Nate Broughton: Of course there is, yes. I mean, good question. I like when we get these ones that are people just starting out, because that’s an exciting place to be, and I can certainly sympathize with it. So yes, there is a place to research this, and yes, there are many different ways to monetize a website. I want to walk through a few of the easiest ones.

Nate Broughton: Google AdSense. Dana has a great SideGig example, his kind of classic one about free legal aid, which is a website he started in 1996 or something like that and publishes content on it. He monetizes it primarily, almost exclusively, through Google AdSense. What is that? That is a simple program for people who publish sites to install a little snippet of code, and it will read the content on your site and serve up relevant ads, and do a rev share with you on the clicks on those ads. Very simple, anyone can do it, even if you’re just a beginner.

Nate Broughton: Beyond that, you can get a little bit more creative and potentially make more money by doing affiliate marketing and also direct advertising. Affiliate marketing is a little bit easier once you kind of talk through. You can go to affiliate networks. One of the most classically referenced is CJ, Commission Junction, whatever it’s called these days, cj.com. Another one is called HasOffers. Basically, these are places where advertisers come and publish kind of an offer for publishers … that’s you now with your website … to pick up their ads, their links, their banners and spread those around your site. If people click those links, they go to the advertiser’s site, buy the product, you get a rev share on that. You’re probably going to make a little bit more money than that on just straight AdSense rev share, but it also kind of has to fit what you’re building.

Nate Broughton: Beyond that, I suggest building an email list early on. No matter what you’re publishing, you should start building an email list. Give them a compelling offer. Well, give them a free guide or something like that, or I don’t know what. Figure it out. But get people’s emails, because over time, if you’ve got tens of thousands of people coming to your site, even over the course of a couple years, you could have thousands of email addresses, and that’s a great way to monetize down the line. So do that early. Everybody who’s built a site regrets not doing that earlier.

Nate Broughton: And yeah, I think those are the three easiest ways to think about. Definitely keep your research up. There’s plenty of blogs and gurus and whoever out there that can explain this stuff, but when I hear this question, I also kind of want to say, show me you can build a website and get some traffic, because that’s really hard. The monetizing is not that hard if you can actually figure out how to get eyeballs. If you can get eyeballs, people are going to come to you. People are going to be knocking on your door if they start realizing that your site ranks pretty high for returns in any niche, whether it be gardening or how to make money online or glasses or whatever. So if you build a site and get traffic, it’s going to be easy to monetize, but of course, educate yourself in the meantime.

Dana Robinson: Right. The basic starting point for most people is to build a content site, a blog. You use WordPress. You can watch videos on how to build a website in WordPress. You can easily add the code for Google AdSense. You can sign up for that account for free, and then you can add the code, and it will start showing ads. But it’s going to take some time to build an audience, and in that amount of time, keep building content. Throughout this process, you will garner more and more emails along the way, a little bit more traffic. It will grow over time. Maybe you guest-write articles that link back to your publishing website. And then monetization becomes easier as traffic grows. I mean, you might offer a course and tell people, pay me $100 or $500 and then you can buy this course. Once you have the website that brings in the traffic, monetization isn’t that difficult.

Nate Broughton: Right, and you can do lead generation, too, and that can be an outgrowth of AdSense. You got AdSense running, you start to realize who the advertisers are that are always popping up, paying for clicks, and you’re giving some of it to Google. Cut them out, go to the advertisers direct, say do you guys want to advertise directly with me? Do you want to hit my email list every month? Can we put a lead gen form on the site? And you’re making a lot more money. But step one, build a website.

Dana Robinson: Yes. Step two, add great content. And this is what a lot of people miss, is that SideGig is ultimately going to not be a lot of work, but there’s a season where you’re going to build, so when you’re laying the foundation for content, for example, it needs to be good. Is this content you would tell someone, come read this every day, every week? If it’s not, then you shouldn’t be building it.

Nate Broughton: Yeah, and I think a great place to kind of interact with people and figure out more specific monetization ideas are forums. There are still webmaster forums, affiliate marketer forums, and the Opt Out Life TRIBE, where you can come in and get access to a bunch of people who have monetized sites in the past and ask questions, get specific answers. So you can build off the one we’re giving you here by joining TRIBE or going to places like Google Affiliate Marketing Forum, and start looking through some of the Q&As there. I think that’s a great place to satisfy your curiosity.