Personal Websites:
A personal website allows you to create a website about yourself. It can be used as a portfolio, resume or even a blog. You can make a personal website pursuing your passion and sharing something with the world. You can also use it for enhancing your business engagement and gaining an audience. Here at Strikingly, we are all about empowering people and providing them with the right kind of tools to enable them to share their passions to the world. Our platform is helpful in providing every individual the opportunity to create a personal web page where they can pour their thoughts and creativity for everyone to see. And over the years, we have seen a lot of people starting websites because of the sheer love for writing, photography, art, music, or creating something. Eventually, they grew their online spaces and these sites turned into income generating platforms for them. In this article, we would be discussing how you can monetize website and make money on the internet with a personal website.
Features of a Personal Website:
Some of the features of a personal website are:
- Your professional story
- Message to the readers
- Work samples
- Social networks presence
- A blog about your passion or something you want to share
- Testimonials
Steps Before Monetizing Website:
It is possible to do something you’re passionate about and earn from it at the same time. With the right kind of strategy, you can monetize your personal site. Here are a few guidelines to think about.
Traffic
If you wish to monetize website, the first thing you should look forward to is increasing the website traffic. The more number of people navigating your website, the more options you would have to monetize website. Increasing the traffic largely includes search engine optimization (SEO) and a good, consistent content that provides value to the visitors.
Building Content
Content building is the first phase to monetize website. Your site needs valuable content to attract a following. People are more likely to keep visiting your website if they find something useful and life changing in your content. The more traffic your website gets, the more successful you would be in the process to monetize website and earn money from it.
Content drives a greater portion of monetization strategies. It might be time-consuming but if you have been working on your website for quite some time now, you probably just need to create or rewrite your content to cater to your target audience, by optimizing the content.
Content Distribution Strategy
To build quality content, it’s important to find out what kind of material your target audience is looking for. Serve up your information in different formats to cater to varied consumption preferences. Rewrite your content according to the various distribution channels. For instance, a blog article on social media strategy can be rewritten and converted into an infographic for sharing in Pinterest and other infographic platforms, or into an image set for Instagram. Share the link on Facebook and selected bookmarking sites. Create a content marketing strategy every time you put up new material on your website. Content distribution is a good way to spread your website’s links all over the internet, directing interested users and increasing your online visibility.
Let’s now have a look at the methods by which you can monetize website and make money with or without ads. Although it may take some time to get results in most of them, choosing a profitable niche, building an organized website using a good website building platform makes the process easier.
How to Monetize a Website:
- Google AdSense
From the past decade, one of the best ways to monetize a website has been Google AdSense, and it continues to be the same. Once you’ve established a decent audience for your website, you can start earning from it through different ways to monetize website with ads. The most common method is by adding Google AdSense to your personal site and running ads on it.
Essentially, you turn your site into a “publisher website” by allotting some space where other related brands can post Google Ads. All you need to do is sign up for an account with AdSense, add the code that it sends you to your site and you’re good to go. AdSense will assign ads to your site that are relevant to your content and help you make money with ads on your website. For instance, if you’re a travel website, you’re most likely going to get ads from airlines or online ticketing sites.
Tips:
- Make sure to place the ads at good spots on the website, so that nothing looks confusing to the visitors, and they can still see the content on your website clearly.
- Do not forget to go through the terms and conditions of Google Adsense.
- Affiliate Marketing
Another way to monetize your personal website is through affiliate marketing. You become an affiliate for a brand related to your niche and promote their products on your website. The brand gives you an affiliate link or discount code where you earn a commission when your readers follow the link or use the code to purchase products. There are a lot of different affiliate marketing programs that you can use. Amazon and Share-A-Sale are some of them.
With affiliate marketing, you should be careful to choose products or services that you truly believe in. Remember that your reader relies on you for credible information. If you associate your site with shady brands, you might risk losing your visitors and, in effect, traffic to your site. Choose the brands and affiliate marketing programs you adopt wisely. We also have an affiliate program for you, where you can earn upto $619 for each customer you refer!
Here are some useful tips:
- Do not forget to clearly mention the links in relevant places and content, otherwise the visitors might disregard them considering your content to be of lesser value, only intended to make money.
- Recommend the products or that you actually believe in and which you think would be appropriate for your visitors.
- Before recommending anything, you should do a background check as well.
- Sponsored Posts
The question of ‘how to monetize your website’ often gets answered with the above two responses. But, we have also included some other methods, including this one. You can explore even more to help you build passive or active income streams with the help of your website. You can look for sponsors that would pay you to talk about their product or services. Similarly, you can look into product reviews, as there are several businesses that would pay you to use their product and review it on your blog, so that more visitors can be converted into their customers.
Some tips:
- Do not sponsor a completely irrelevant product or service as it would not be of any interest to your audience (who follow you for something else).
- Try to include the sponsored product post or review in your article.
- If you have a decent number of visitors coming to your website each month, you can mention the product in a weekly or monthly newsletter.
- Always disclose if a post is sponsored.
- Selling a Product
If you want to know how to monetize a website without ads, and do not want to use sponsored posts of other businesses or individuals, selling your own products is a great option. In fact, even if you want to include sponsored posts for a side income, you can also sell your products through your website or blog.
Selling a product online gives you the option of choosing between digital or physical products. Digital products are good sources of passive income as you do not have to keep creating it and it would not need any stock. Whereas, physical products would also give you a good choice of outsourcing some of the roles including manufacturing and inventory management, while using your platform to sell. For instance, you can sell ebooks as digital products. If you have expertise in a particular field or have an experience that you feel would be helpful in adding value to people’s life, you can write a book and sell through your platform. Other choices could be selling photographs, illustrations, etc. For physical products, you can make handicraft products or your curated recipe books doing something you love.
Some helpful tips:
- Take your time in building a product. You must have patience if you want to use this option to monetize website.
- Make use of social media as well, to market your products.
- Do not forget to add value to the customers. If you feel a product you made adds value to someone’s life or solves a problem, it is more likely to sell.
- Donation
If you are looking to monetize website, this could also be an option. You might have seen several youtubers asking to become a patron on their patreon. This is a good way to ask your loyal audience to support you. You might feel at the beginning that this might make you seem quite needy, but don’t forget that you are putting in time and effort to create content for your audience. Also, donation is not a prerequisite to access your content. You are letting the visitors view your content or read your blog as usual, but asking them to help you financially if they wish to do so willingly. And if you have a big audience that values your content, this becomes easier.
Tips:
- To monetize website with donations, make sure to build a loyal audience first.
- Do not ask for it aggressively, simply put it out there on your website so that those who choose to donate, can do so without feeling obligated towards it.
- Membership website
Last, but certainly not the least. Building a membership website counts as one of the best website monetization strategies. You can build a specific feature on your website and make it accessible to only those who pay the price for it separately. You can also make private discussion communities or pages where you sell your premium content with videos, courses, personal coaching groups, etc.
Tips:
- Make sure that the part you are asking membership for, is actually special and different that adds value to those visitors and makes them feel that they have paid for something valuable.
- Do not undermine your other visitors while looking to monetize website with membership benefits. Product content for them timely and stay in touch.
While building your website using Strikingly, if you want to add membership feature to monetize website, you need to click on the option of Audience > membership to select among any of the three features.
Strikingly Website Building and Support:
So, now that we have discussed ways to monetize website, it is important to note that optimizing your website and increasing the traffic is still one of the most important prerequisites to start monetizing your website. When you create your website with Strikingly, we offer you a SEO checklist to help you organize your website to gain more traffic and rank better on Google.
While you work on optimizing your website, you should also make it a habit to analyse the results. You should regularly check the number of visitors, the website trends and what the visitors are looking for. This will help you in making the process better ahead and gain more traffic by shaping your content according to the needs of the potential customers. Google Analytics is a great way to do so.
Following are some of the websites of our users that have built great personal websites while also managing to optimize the content appropriately to monetize website:
Hence, the key takeaways for you would be:
- Optimize your content to drive more traffic towards your website
- Look forward to provide the content that adds value to the visitors
- Monetize your website with the help of ads, affiliate marketing, sponsored posts, selling products, donation and adding a membership feature to your website.
Start your journey with Strikingly today and build amazing websites!
