What's Inside
Creating Multiple Income Streams On Your Website
Once you’ve created your master content blueprint with over one hundred ideas for articles, products, books, etc., you can regularly publish content to your website and leverage that content to attract traffic and income.
The method I teach on this site is about tapping into your inner expert to discover the ways life has prepared you to help others, then finding the urgent pains and desires of the people you want to help most, then creating products and solutions that help them and get paid for it.
8 types of knowledge products you can create
These products include:
- One on one coaching
- Group coaching/training
- Home study course
- Books
- Signature talks (get paid to speak or use speaking to attract clients for coaching and other products)
- Consulting Services
- Freelance Services
- Niche content websites
Monetizing Niche Content-Based Websites
It’s the last type of “product” that I want to talk about. One of the biggest ways I’ve earned money on the side has been through creating websites with helpful information people are searching for and monetizing them “passively” with advertising.
The key is you need traffic in order to really make significant revenue this way. I feel the methods above work well and will create an income for you WITHOUT tons of traffic, which can be
The first 7 methods above really work well and will create an income for you WITHOUT tons of traffic, which can be time-consuming to build (and is the not so passive part of online marketing).
That said, if you have a website that has struck a chord with an audience and people are actively visiting your site looking for answers, then you might as well monetize it if you are not ready to (or have not plans to) create your own products and programs:
Three free ways to monetize your high traffic website in the next half hour
1. Adsense
In less than 30 minutes, you can create a free account on Adsense, and put banners on your WordPress website using a plugin like Ad Inserter.
You’ll have to experiment with which ad units perform the best (although mobile responsive ads work well for the increasing number of people who surf the web on their phones. If your traffic is primarily mobile, definitely use responsive ad units). If you’re not using responsive ads, you’ll have to experiment with which ads work for you.
Figuring out which ad units would work best for your site
I can tell you the three types of units that have worked for me: 356×280 image/text ad, the wide leaderboard banner 728×90, but in your main content, under your headline or after your first image or paragraph (NOT in the header, where people tend to have banner blindness). The last thing I’d say is to try text units. Although most articles on the web downplay them, they have consistently been top earners for me. I’ll place text ad units in the header, near the top menu, and a weird little button site unit near the image in the header, and as a small banner (you can do 468×60 text/image units) after your title, first image, or in between paragraphs. The 468×60 size is good if your content width is not wide enough for a leaderboard.
A couple more Adsense tips…
Two other tip for Adsense is to make sure you assign a Custom Channel to every add you create, where you assign a unique id to the unit to be able to track how it performs. I’ve found it helpful to name the channels based on where on the site you will place the ad and include the site name (e.g. for this site, I might say ThinkSidebar to track an ad unit in my sidebar). Once you create the channel the next thing you MUST do is to select the “Show this custom channel to advertisers as a targetable ad placement checkbox,” and enter the details so that your custom channel appears to advertisers as a targetable ad placement. That step alone shot my Adsense revenue up on all my sites, once they were getting high amounts of steady traffic (visitors). See Google’s help on creating ad units here.
2. Amazon
While some folks make a killing on Amazon, my earnings have been modest but consistent. Again, you can create an account and in minutes by going to Amazon’s affiliate portal. You then set up a tracking ID (hint: use your site name or something similar). You can also fine tune your tracking by also making your ID unique to where you place the adsense code or type of content you place it on, so you have a better sense of what’s converting. All tracking ids end with a -20. Just an Amazon thing).
Amazon has all kinds of banners and widgets you can place on your site, but I’ve never had success with those. The only kinds of affiliate links with Amazon that have worked for me are text and image links in the middle of content.
Now, your links must closely match your site content to get people to click. For example, if yours is a content website, find books on Amazon to promote and talk about how that book will give your visitor more or complete answers to solve their problems. Better yet, review books (or products) as links from those types of articles tend to get clicks. Also, embed Amazon links in images on those same articles.
Amazon is like an affiliate superstore
You can find just about anything to promote on Amazon that would match your content: books, software, music, products, etc. Now, the beauty of their program is that you earn commissions on whatever people place in their cart and buy after clicking on your link, whether or not the other products bought were on your site! I’ve had months where people click on a random link then buy hundreds of dollars (or more) in products and I make a nice commission.
Two more Amazon tips…
Two more Amazon tips I can give you is (1) Use the Native Shopping Ads code. Those are the only banners I’ve had success with, and they work really well. Basically, you can do a search for a keyword related to your niche and generate a banner that displays closely related products and a search bar. People click on these like crazy. Now, Amazon commissions are not high (starting at 4%); however, making money from the whole shopping cart without any additional effort on your part is a nice bonus.
That brings me to my second tip, which is to pay attention to the affiliate promotions regularly announced in your affiliate portal. Often, you get higher commissions for promoting products in certain cateories, or promoting gift cards, or new services (like Audible audiobooks), and more.
3. Affiliate Programs
This is a pretty amazing way to earn money online and can be a good way to monetize your site until you are ready to create your own products and programs. Like Amazon links, with affiliate links you earn money by promoting other company’s products and services. The difference is you usually make 50% or more per sale, or a nice dollar amount per sale for affiliate programs.
There is also a variation of affiliate promotion based on promoting leads (e.g. getting people to sign up for an offer or fill out an inquiry or application).
It’s really worth trying out affiliate marketing. On one site I hadn’t touched in a while, I visited ClickBank and found a high gravity product (ClickBank’s metric for products that have sold by affiliates in the last week) and stuck some banners on my site (using tracking Ids so I could see which banners performed) and earned $30 in commission from a sale within a week. I haven’t done much more with that site, but I could work on promoting my affiliate links.
There is also a variation of affiliate promotion based on promoting leads (e.g. getting people to sign up for an offer or fill out an inquiry or application). It’s really worth trying out affiliate marketing. On one site I hadn’t touched in a while, I visited ClickBank and found a high gravity product (ClickBank’s metric for products that have sold by affiliates in the last week) and stuck some banners on my site (using tracking ids so I could see which banners performed) and earned $30 in commission from a sale within a week. I haven’t done much more with that, but I could work on promoting my affiliate links with content and text based links as well.
Promoting affiliate products with integrity
You can also add occasional affiliate links in your emails. (Just make sure they are quality products that you have tried and feel comfortable vouching for.
Most vendors will provide review copies for you to check out the product or membership so you can recommend it. If a vendor won’t provide a review copy, another option is to interview the vendor and ask them questions about the product. If neither of those options is a possibility, then do your own research on the vendor, their past products, what others say on the web, and use those as the foundations on which to base your recommendations.)
Finding affiliate offers for your market
ClickBank is not the only option. Major affiliate portals include CJ Affiliate by Conversant (used to be called Commission Junction when I started out), Rakuten (used to be called LinkShare) and ShareaSale.com. Another cool source of affiliate products is E-Junkie. While it’s mostly known as a shopping cart software, many vendors who sell through their software and marketplace also make their products available for affiliate promotion.
If you sign up for one of the networks above and don’t find any products, the best thing to do (and you should do this anyway) is to Google your “niche keyword” +affiliate program. Sometimes the companies have theor own standalone affiliate program, or will use a network. I’ve successfully earned commissions promoting standalone products. Software is a great option, especially if your site is B2B (business focused vs consumers).
One more tip for affiliate marketing…
Any product or service you use likely has an affiliate program. Promote it, if you like it! You’ll recoup your investment.
Remember, you need traffic…
I wouldn’t really bother with these forms of monetization until you have a website that’s getting thousands of visits per month. So, let’s say you want to build up your traffic and try out this strategy. There is no one way that works, and you have to be ready for a lot of failure before success.
My #1 traffic boosting strategy
After nine years of online marketing, I would say the most robust strategy that has withstood the test of time is to put popular, quality content on your own site and promote it. This is the subject of another post, maybe the next one, but by going the content route you are adding to your own and your site’s credibility and positioning, creating content that you can repurpose in many ways, and pursuing a strategy (providing helpful content to your visitors) that the search engines (and all of us!) naturally like. If you’re worried about writers block and wodnering how to generate more content than you’ll ever need, optin for our steady and abundant cash flow guide which tells you exactly how to tap into the deep well of knowledge inside you to generate content for your platforms, books, products, public speaking and more.
A final note…
There are a number of other ways to generate income with your site if you are not planning to create products, but the above three options are a great place to start, especially if your site is attracting lots of visitors from search engines, direct visits, social media, or your email promotions (e.g. traffic that you are not paying for). So, if you have a site that gets visitors, start monetizing it today!