What is monetization for websites?
Website monetization is a way to make money using the activity of its visitors.
As a rule, talking about monetization, people imagine advertising banners, but this is not the only way to have passive income from the website. Keep in mind that an advertisement does not necessarily look like a banner.
The success of earning from a website depends on traffic or the number of visitors. The more visitors some source has, the higher the potential income that a publisher can get.
In this article, we’ll mostly use the term Publisher. A publisher is a person who places ads on their site.
Before getting into monetization, it is essential to understand that this is not instant money. The process takes time, and its success largely depends on the correct choice of method.
Which websites can be monetized?
Various sites and blogs of any subject are suitable for monetization. Of course, except illegal ones.
Any legal site can bring additional income, even initially a commercial one (online store, for example). Nothing prevents their owners from receiving additional benefits from advertising.
Which websites can give passive income?
- Commercial websites: online stores, learning platforms, streaming services, etc.
- Information and entertainment resources, personal or professional blogs.
These are the rules established by the world’s largest advertising platform Google Adsense. One-page landing pages or sites with 30 or fewer pages of unique content are not suitable for adding to Adsense. Websites with less than 1,000 visitors per day too. The ad network thinks that they will not be able to bring money.
But other ad networks may have very different requirements or no requirements at all. We will talk about them in detail below.
How to prepare a website for monetization?
Monetization is the case when you invest in a project first and start to make a profit later. But any site’s owner may take several steps from the beginning, and then, it will be much easier to monetize the site in the future.
We have already mentioned that you need traffic to be successful in this process.
What can you do from the beginning?
- Post valuable materials that will attract a loyal audience to the website.
- Grow your brand and build trust in it.
- Optimize your site to become more visible in search.
- Attract visitors from social networks, use advertising or collaborate with popular resources.
- Leave links to your site in sponsored articles, participate in listings (lists of websites on a specific topic), give interviews to third-party resources.
When to start earning from your website?
There are different website monetization strategies. When it comes to placing advertising banners, you should focus on traffic volumes. When it reaches several thousand visits a day — it’s time to start.
If we talk about a professional or personal blog, it is more important to get a loyal audience who returns to the site. It doesn’t matter if it’s achieved the coveted 2,000 – 3,000 visits a day or not. You can earn passive income through affiliate programs close to your blog’s topic or post sponsored materials.
Some ad networks, for example, RichAds, removed traffic restrictions to support new publishers.
At RichAds, you can set up monetization using push notification subscriptions. The subscription window does not take up space on the site and generates good income.
What is RichAds?
🔝 Push and pop ads,
🔼 Direct click traffic,
🔝 CPM for domain ads starts from $1.5,
⏫ CPC for push ads starts from $0.005,
🔼 CPM for pops — from $0.5 in Tier 3, $1 in Tier 1,
⏫ large volumes of available traffic in more than 200 GEOs.
12 ways to monetize your website
There are at least 12 ways to monetize your website. These, of course, are not all options available today. We are going to explore the simplest and most profitable ones.
We have prepared detailed instructions on how monetize website traffic in different ways. But first, a quick overview of all the options.
Here are website monetization strategies available today:
- Sale an advertising space on the website.
- Place display ads.
- Add banner ads from ad networks.
- Use teaser ads.
- Add subscriptions to push notifications.
- Use popunder ads.
- Join affiliate programs.
- Place paid materials or sponsored posts.
- Accept Donations.
- Build an email list and use it for sending email newsletters.
- Sell access to premium content or membership.
- Sell your own courses/merchandise/ ebooks/consultations.
The easiest way to make money on the website stands on placing advertising banners. The process can be organized by yourself or using sing up in advertising networks.
Selling ad space to advertisers on your own is not difficult, but the method requires specific skills and abilities. You need to find advertisers, allocate space for the banner, and then place it in a particular place on the website.
You can also add different kinds of banners using advertising networks. They are ready to do all the work instead of you. Networks have already found advertisers and prepared banners. All you need is to sign up to the network and place a piece of code on the website for ads to appear.
It’s up to you which way to choose: organize everything yourself or use advertising networks. Both methods can be profitable.
1. Sale advertising space on the site
If you have a large site with stable traffic of more than 1,000 – 2,000 visits per day, you can easily find an advertiser on your own.
To do this, create a separate page with the offer on the site and place a link to it in the “footer” — many resources put it there.
On the page itself, you can describe your terms of cooperation:
- where the banner will be exactly located;
- what size it will have;
- who should make the banner;
- terms of payment and duration of the placement.
This way of earning on a website will make you get active, but you can decide with whom and under what conditions to work. In this case, you can receive a fixed payment for placing one banner within a month or agree to pay for clicks on it.
Read how to create an effective ad banner here.
2. Place display ads
The most popular and easiest way to monetize a website is to use display ads from Google AdSense.
The best part about this system is how simple everything is. For the site owner, this option is good because there is no need to search advertisers or place ads. It is enough to register with the provider and add a small piece of code to the site. The advertiser network did all the work to find the ads relevant for the website.
For example, if your site is about cryptocurrency, Google AdSense will show your visitors ads about cryptocurrency.
When a user clicks on the banner, the site owner will receive a payout. The cost of a click depends on the niche: more popular ones will bring more, rare requests less.
Not less than 1,000 people a day — these are the rules set by the world’s largest advertising platform Google Adsense.
The disadvantage of such advertising is strict restrictions on the site’s content. Be very attentive; if you break AdSense’s rules, the advertising cabinet will be blocked, and you will not be able to fix it.
3. Add banner ads
Advertising in banner networks is not much different from display ads. They look identical and also can be in a graphic or video format. At the same time, banner advertising can bring no less money than Google AdSense ads.
Banner ad networks have more loyal rules. There will be no restrictions on the topic of the site or the size of the audience as in the Google AdSense. And the process is also very simple.
In addition, you can choose exactly where and in what format to show ads, disable ads on inappropriate topics.
Networks cooperate with site owners on a pay-per-click (CPC) or cost-per-click (CPM) model.
Typically, ad networks help you calculate the potential income based on your site visits.
4. Use teaser ads
Advertising on teasers also refers to banner advertising. The only difference is that its main goal is not to sell but to attract attention, get people to click and go to the site.
Teaser ads are ads designed to surprise. If you see a flashy headline, most likely, in front of you are ads from teaser networks.
Teaser ads are not suitable for all sites. When posting it, you need to think about how it can affect the loyalty of your visitors. In addition, the payment for it will be much lower than for a banner or display ads.
5. Add subscriptions to push notifications
If you are interested in advertising that will not take up space on the site, then collecting subscriptions to push notifications will work for you.
To do this, it is enough to contact any push ad network and place a small pop-up window on the site offering to subscribe to notifications from the site.
As soon as the user agrees, they get into the ad network base and start receiving push notifications from it. The user does not need to stay on the site: the algorithms of the advertising push network will send a push notification to their device, regardless of whether they are on the site or not.
Big plus: the user will not associate this advertisement with your site. And it will not interfere with the space on the site.
Publisher will be paid for each click of the push ads of their subscriber. It means that push ads networks don’t pay for subscriptions, they pay for clicks.
The RichAds ad network is looking for website owners who want to monetize with push subscriptions right now.
What is RichAds?
🔝 Push and pop ads,
🔼 Direct click traffic,
🔝 CPM for domain ads starts from $1.5,
⏫ CPC for push ads starts from $0.005,
🔼 CPM for pops — from $0.5 in Tier 3, $1 in Tier 1,
⏫ large volumes of available traffic in more than 200 GEOs.
6. Use popunder ads
If you are looking for a way to monetize a website without AdSense, look into popunder ads.
This is one more option for advertising that does not take up a place on the page. Popunder ads show on separate tabs that open under your website page.
It is enough for the user to go to the site and click on any area to see another page. That one will contain advertising and will open under the active tab. This new window is exactly the popunder itself.
Such advertising does not prevent the user from interacting with the site.
Popunders can also be added as a monetization method with popunder ad networks. They pay for the number of impressions you collect. Payment is calculated in thousands of views (CPM), so the more visitors you have, the more passive earnings you will receive.
7. Join affiliate programs
Affiliate marketing is the advertising of products of a specific brand on your website. Cooperation takes place through affiliate programs. They allow you to get a percentage of the sale of someone else’s product or service.
Products and services can be promoted through reviews on the site or by including ad advice in videos. You can use a banner that leads to the partner’s landing page — there are no restrictions for promoting affiliate programs. Except using some specific ad formats (this is usually stipulated in the conditions).
The main thing is to choose an affiliate program that suits the audience of the site. Program choice is vast: from antiviruses to baby stores or giants like Amazon or iherb.
After connecting to the affiliate program, the partner receives a personal link or promotional code that will help the system to highlight exactly those buyers who came from them.
Learn more about affiliate programs here.
8. Place paid materials or sponsored posts
Paid articles can be of two types: native ads and sponsored content. Both types are non-aggressive to the reader. They are usually formed like articles, interviews, or reviews for a certain product.
Such materials are marked as “partner or sponsored material” for the reader to understand what they are dealing with.
The advantage of sponsored articles is that they are helpful to the reader and bring income to the site owner.
Depending on the agreement, a paid article can be written by the advertiser or created by the site owner.
You can search for potential advertisers on your own or contact special services, for example, Valued Voice, Sway Network Tomoson, Cooperatize, or PayPerPost.
9. Accept donations
Non-commercial sites or free helpful resources and blogs can be monetized with donations. If the information is valuable to users, they can donate a small amount of money to develop the project.
You won’t earn much money this way, but you can cover hosting costs.
To collect donations, just place a button on the site. This is not difficult to do. You can use free WordPress plugins (GiveWP, Charitable) or easy-to-install templates from PayPal.
10. Build an email list and use it for sending email newsletters
You can also place a small block on the site where you offer to subscribe to the newsletters. Then you can send newsletters to a collected database. Very cunning site owners can sell their mailing list to others and get additional profit.
Next to useful materials or updates in the newsletter itself, you can place affiliate links or advertising banners. In addition, newsletters can be used to sell your products or services.
The main thing is to balance the benefits of the newsletter and the advertising component not to make people unsubscribe from it.
The advantage of this monetization method is that it is absolutely free: users leave their emails, newsletters can be set up on their own while receiving payments from partners mentioned in them.
11. Sell access to premium content or membership
This method is suitable for resources with valuable information or knowledge. You can offer some content for free and block access to more valuable one.
To monetize your site with paid access, you need to be sure that it is really so valuable to your readers that they will be willing to pay.
One example of successfully locked content is paid forums for affiliate marketers. For example, STM or affLIFT forum.
The sphere of affiliate marketing is very narrow — no one wants to share information until they collect all the cream from the invented method of promotion. Not surprisingly, interested users pay to participate in forums where they can get helpful information.
If you are sure that your content is worth paying for, this is the way to monetize your site. Any site owner can do this by adding a script on the page. This script can be added via RichAds.
12. Sell your own courses/ ebooks/consultations
During the pandemic, many realized that knowledge and competencies can be sold well online. The other discovery was that sharing knowledge did not require a class. You can make money on online consultations, courses, ebooks.
Selling your products or services is the most obvious way to monetize your website or blog.
What products can be offered to buy on the site:
- Consultations,
- Ebooks,
- Webinars,
- Courses,
- Merch,
- The products that you make or ingredients that are needed to make them.
Conclusion. How to monetize your website
Now you know how to use your website to make a profit.
Monetization takes time and needs a smart approach to choosing a method. Nothing except common sense prohibits the owner from using several monetization methods at once. The main thing is that the site does not look like a Christmas tree decorated with many banners.
To avoid this effect, you need to combine any advertising in banners (display, banner, or teaser ads) with advertising framed differently. For example, any type of banner ad can be used with paid articles, email newsletters, or donations.
One of the popular options for website monetization in 2024 is to combine banner ads with collecting push notification subscriptions.
You can start to monetize your site with push subscriptions right now.
RichAds is a unique advertising platform for monetizing your websites with push notifications subscriptions.
Even at the very beginning of cooperation, our tests show an increase in the income of the site owner by up to 30% compared to other push providers.
What is RichAds?
🔝 Push and pop ads,
🔼 Direct click traffic,
🔝 CPM for domain ads starts from $1.5,
⏫ CPC for push ads starts from $0.005,
🔼 CPM for pops — from $0.5 in Tier 3, $1 in Tier 1,
⏫ large volumes of available traffic in more than 200 GEOs.
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