… Standpoint. You want to use it to promote your own things, things that you don’t just get a commission on and things that they further your business.
Today, we are going to talk about making money on your website without advertising and make a website profitable. And I know that’s a little bit weird, because a lot of blogs, rely on advertising to generate revenue. I know when I first started, I did. I was using AdSense like crazy. And Text Link Ads was another one. And then there was some other kind of weird little networks. But Text Link Ads and AdSense were my two bread and butter platforms before I got into selling our own products and affiliate marketing.
5 Ways To Generate Revenue
1. Product Reviews
The first way to make a website profitable without ads is to just review products. I did a lot of this back in my SEO days. We would do product reviews, and rather than get paid for the product reviews, we would actually get paid as an affiliate.
I would go and review three or four digital products a day, or I had writers review these products. Then we got paid whenever somebody read the review and then clicked through and bought the products, we would get paid commission. Worked out really, really well. Some of the largest affiliate revenue sites were generating… We were using this model, marketing hacks, net hacks, some of the old ones. But we had websites that were making $20,000 a month just reviewing products for the most part.
The difference is, rather than take a hundred dollars to review the product, we would embed our affiliate link in there and then somebody would click it and then ultimately go through and buy. One of the biggest affiliate opportunities that we kind of played with was Amazon had a wireless carrier. It was like wireless.amazon.com. And they paid a $60 bounty for a while for every new person that you sent signing up for a cell phone. And we were sending four, five, six people a day. This is really where I first kind of got my feet wet on product reviews and affiliate marketing and stuff. And it was all free traffic. So that worked out really, really well.
2. Offer Services
The second way to make a website profitable without ads is thru services. If you have a business and you offer services, it can be freelance writing, it can be video editing, it can be anything that you can do really with a computer. If you can do that service, you might be able to offer it on your website. We encourage our clients to make services, to bill for more expensive services. We’re looking for a thousand dollars a month that gives you five hours worth of time, that gives our clients, customers five hours a month for a thousand dollars, whatever.
So whenever we’re coaching or helping people in that direction, something that is a little bit higher ticket. Because it’s just as hard to sell somebody at a thousand dollars a month as it is to sell somebody at a hundred dollars one time. What would you rather have? Would you rather have to sell 30 people your service every month to pay your mortgage? Or would you rather sell three people every couple of months because it’s a monthly recurring?
Just think about services in that light. Do something that it links up to your business or what you do and it links that up with the person, with a buyer. Because your blog, your website should really be where that transaction happens. Your potential, your prospect should come to your website, read a blog post, and then say, “Oh shit, he’s got this service. Well, I’ll just fill out the contact form or call him on the phone or watch his webinar or download his lead magnet,” and you’re off and running. Now you just have to make sure that the service that you’re going to be fulfilling is worthwhile.
3. Writing Ebooks or Provide Other Resources
The next thing to make a website profitable is writing eBooks or providing other resources. I kind of already touched on this, but if you’re knowledgeable in something, you can actually create a course. You can write an ebook. You can write a report. Typically how it works is when you are offering a product for sale on your website, like a report, like a six to eight-page report you’re going to give away for free in exchange for somebody’s email address. That’s pretty typical. If it is a 30, 40, 60, 100-page ebook, then you’re going to charge somewhere $27, $37 for it if you’re selling it on your website.
If you’re selling it as a Kindle book, then you’re probably going to charge nine bucks or 10 bucks or four bucks or whatever, just because the Amazon marketplace drives everything down. And also on Amazon, you’re splitting some of the money with Amazon, which is one of the reasons why whenever our clients want to sell eBooks, we always try to make sure that they’re selling it on their website too.
4. Video Course
Your video course, if you have a video course, and that can be just literally made up of videos like this to make a website profitable, you can put those all in a video course or a screencast where you’re recording with ScreenFlow or you’re recording with Camtasia. Those videos can be put together in a video product and sold for anywhere between $97, and we have clients selling their video courses for $2,500 each. So selling these products on your website is really just such a great way of monetizing the space. In fact, I can not tell you the last client or the last website that we have built that we ran ads. Because all of our clients have their own stuff to sell.
We have our own stuff to sell. So your screen real estate, your website, the banner, the sidebars, the headers, the footers, everywhere in that website is so damned important from a real estate standpoint, you want to use it to promote your own things, things that you don’t just get a commission on and things that they further your business. So if you did all the hard work of getting a prospect there, you also want to sell them something. That’s the idea.
5. Affiliate Marketing
On the flip side, you might want to give affiliate marketing a try. If you do not want to create your own products, you don’t want to create your own videos and your own audios and all that other stuff, then give affiliate marketing a try. There are all kinds of affiliate products you can sell that you can get paid a commission on. You don’t have to sign up for some weird MLM downline or any of that stuff. You can go to a site like ClickBank or a site like Commission Junction, cj.com, and you can find a product or multiple products on there with banner ads and everything.
So, if somebody buys, then you get a commission. For a digital product, you might get a 50% commission or 75% commission and for a physical product or a more traditional product, you might make a 10% commission.
Amazon has an affiliate program. Amazon also, when somebody clicks your link, you get paid on everything they buy for the next 24 hours, which is also super cool. So affiliates marketing might work really well for your pages to make a website profitable if you do not want to sell your own products, if you don’t want to put the time in to write your own eBooks or to create video courses or coaching programs or whatever, affiliate marketing might work really well. And if you liked this video, make sure to like it, subscribe, and comment wherever you are. If you’re on the website, that’s awesome.
