How to generate revenue from your website

If you’ve ever wondered how to generate revenue from your website or blog then this post will provide you with a number of revenue models to consider.  Success will be largely dependent on the stage your website or blog is at so don’t expect to earn much (yet) from pay per click campaigns if your site only receives a few hundred visitors per month.

However, irrespective of the size of your audience it will pay to have considered how your site could generate revenue from each of the models below:

PPC (Pay Per Click) advertising

PPC is a great way for generating revenue online by serving up advertisements for other businesses that are in context with the content on a given page or generally for your website.  Obviously this may not be relevant if your business has its own products, you may inadvertently advertise for the competition so you need to consider if this is appropriate for your business.  There are a number of third parties that can deliver these adverts to your site, here are a couple of examples:

• Google AdSense
• Infolinks
• Chikita

Getting access to these services will vary depending on the number of impressions your website generates.

CPM (Cost per Thousand) Display Advertising

If you already have a high volume of traffic to your website it would definitely be worth allocating advertising space and agreeing with relevant advertisers a set rate per thousand impressions e.g. £25 per £1,000 impressions.  This method clearly works well for websites with a high volume of visitors.

Affiliate Marketing

Promote other businesses products or services for a commission.  A great example of this is Amazon’s affiliate program, it’s very easy to setup and integrate into your website either by linking to a standalone Amazon store or by embedding it into your site.  An example of this is my book store.

I also like:

• Affilorama – which has a very useful (and free) affiliate marketing training course.
• Clickbank – the world’s leading affiliate network.  It also has a comprehensive paid for affiliate marketing trading program called Clickbank University  which is well worth considering if you are serious about affiliate marketing.

Subscription based content

If you have a high quality digital product, magazine, training course, information library etc. you may wish to consider making this available for a monthly or annual subscription.

Pay Per View Documents

Similarly to subscription based documents you may have a quality, book, video, music or audio file which may be downloaded for a fee.

Sponsorship

A business may pay to advertise on the website of another business that has synergy with its own interests for example NatWest sponsors Entrepreneurial Spark a website for budding entrepreneurs with a view to converting them to NatWest Business Banking.

Developing a database of subscribers

If your subscribers have given you permission to send them ongoing emails and newsletters it will not only allow you to proactively promote your products and services but also enable you to sell advertising space within them for relevant third party products or services.  For example if you sell accountancy software to small businesses you could also sell advertising space to an insurance broker to promote commercial insurance.

Market Research

If your marketing permissions allow you could undertake email market research on behalf of a third party interested in your demographic in return for a fee.

Freemium offerings

If you have a product or service which would benefit from a free trial this is a great way to grow your list of prospective customers with a free access to the system for a limited time or indefinitely but with a restricted service.  A good example of this is Salesforce.com who provide a free 30 day trail which provides the user with full access to the product with a view to a simple paid upgrade at the end of the trial period.

I hope this blog post provided you with plenty of inspiration on how to generate revenue for your website or blog