After building a fancy website. Many people ask themselves. How do I make money from my website? Well, depending on your type of site, the crowd you attract and to some extent the number of resources you have, there are dozens of ways you can make money. Let’s dive in, shall we?

Ad revenue

One of the most famous ways of making money through your website is selling ads. If your website has some good traffic you can bet on this monetization practice used by a good portion of websites on the internet. For your site to make ad money, you need to get a good flow of traffic. This is because the amount of revenue generated is dependent on how many ads you serve, click-throughs and a bunch of other factors that make the conversion matrix. Most of the site that makes ad revenue are news sites, entertainment sites, education/how-to video sites or a self-service site e.g. an online pdf maker. That said, if you have a blog offering gossip posts or an online photo resizing website, you can consider this monetization method. The biggest players in the game including google, facebook, twitter e.t.c. use ads as a monetization tool.

Premium subscription

Another way of monetizing your site is by offering paid subscription services. This advertising mode requires that you offer your clients premium content or services e.g. unlimited content otherwise limited to free users, new content not available to the rest of the users e.t.c. The most popular subscription-based websites are video streaming services.

E-commerce

If your site can’t sell ads or offer premium content, you can choose to sell physical or digital goods online. Websites like Amazon, Jumia e.t.c. make millions in sales by targeting the massive online crowd. The advantages of an e-commerce website are that most of the limitations of a physical store are averted. You get wider coverage, you don’t have to stock and you don’t need to pay for storefronts and warehousing.

Promote your business

Sometimes, your nature of business won’t allow you to sell online. If you are running a salon or a tour company, you can’t possibly offer your services online. But, there is something you can do with your site. You can promote your business and services. This is one of the most popular ways websites are monetized. For this to happen, you will need to attract customers to your site by promoting your site on social media, ad sites or Search Engine Optimization. This is an example of a website we built that promotes print on items

Donations

Some sites don’t sell ads or sell subscription services, but they make money by accepting donations online. Wikipedia is one of the most trafficked sites in the world. It offers factual information on virtually all topics. It’s a popular go-to site for schoolers or people doing research. To maintain such a site, you need a lot of money. Without ads and premium subscription, such sites solely depend on donations to run. Using this monetization method is not very reliable unless your product or model requires it. Some popular sites that use this method are movements, courses or event sites.

Crypto Minings

Although this is not a popular method, some websites are are monetized using crypto mining. In a nutshell, they harvest visitors’ computing resources and sell to 3rd Party vendors. The problems associated with this monetization method are security and user experience implications. An example of a crypto mining vendor is coinhive.

Website as a platform

Another category of websites that make money online is platform websites. In this model, a site creates a meeting place for 2 parties intending to do business. An example of such a site is eBay, Airbnb, 99designs e.t.c. In order to build and run such a site, you need to identify a gap between buyers and sellers and create a platform they can meet. Most of the revenue is made from fees collected when a purchase is made.

Storage Service Websites

Websites like 4shared.com, Google drive and web hosting websites like Kenyawebexperts monetize their platform by offering storage or bandwidth to users.  Building such a site requires quite a substantial investment. Once set-up, however, you can earn a lot of revenue from users who purchase your services.

Sell websites

Finally, you can make website revenue by selling your site on popular platforms like Flippa.com. If you have a website that is popular or has made some good business before. you can sell it for some good money. There are even people out there whose work is to design and sell websites online.

Hopefully, you have learned a thing or two on how you can monetize your site or blog. You can even combine 2 or more monetization methods in the same site as long as you don’t overdo it and compromise user experince. 

At Truweb solutions, we design exquisite and functional websites at amazing prices. We also help you set up your monetization.