There are many websites that monetize their content with Google Adsense ads. These ads however do not pay much per click and sometimes the products they link to are not suitable for your site’s readers. Some websites take other approaches. These methods might not be as easy as slapping on Adsense ads, but are much more profitable in the long run.

Personally I like the idea of building up a relationship with your readers. Getting your readers to subscribe to your email list, delivering a lot of value and then promoting products. With this approach you are much more likely to convert your readers into buyers.

I will start out with the simpler ways of monetizing traffic and then I will also go into the lesser known ones. Lesser known these methods may be but they are definitely not less profitable.

eCommerce

Everyone is aware of online stores where you sell stuff. The only thing I would like to add to that is the idea of drop shipping. Drop shipping is when you don’t carry your store’s stock. If someone orders something from your store, you send the order to a drop shipper and they send the product to your client. That saves you the cost and effort of carrying stock.

Affiliates

The way affiliate income works is that you refer people to a seller. When someone who you referred to them buys something, you get a percentage commission on the sale.

Affiliate networks are digital marketplaces where sellers and people with traffic come together. Examples are Clickbank, Amazon and CJ Affiliate.

Affiliate commissions work well with targeted traffic. It is possible to make x 10 more with affiliate commission than with PPC advertising, on the same web page. An example of targeted traffic would be if someone searched for “great tennis rackets”. Through the search engine they find your page where you review different tennis rackets. On your page you link to Amazon where they can buy the tennis rackets that you review.

Clickbank

Clickbank specializes in digital goods like subscriptions, eBooks, video courses, software and so on. With digital products you can see very high commission rates, as high as 75%.

Clickbank product example

Amazon

Amazon pays between 4-8.5% commission (depending on how much you sell in a given month) on most products and 4% on electronics (lower commission rates are normal on electronics). Mostly Amazon converts regional traffic. Some products like the Kindle and their eBooks converts global traffic.

Their commission percentage is relatively low, the thing is Amazon is a machine when it comes to converting traffic. On my best month with Amazon I made $5869.53 . Amazon earnings tend to spike over Christmas as people spend more.

I would recommend Amazon’s affiliate program for beginners.

I am not recommending the product above it’s just an example of what an Amazon affiliate ad looks like, you could use an iframe like that or just a text link.

CJ Affiliate formerly known as Commission Junction

CJ Afffiliate is a very old and very large affiliate network. CJ Affiliate is popular with website owners because it pays reliably and has many advertisers. The drawback with CJ Affiliate is that you need to handle each advertiser separately, where with the other 2 networks it doesn’t matter who the advertiser is.

CPA (Cost per Action or cost per acquisition)

This is where you refer someone to another site and if they take a specific action you get paid. In some cases this action may not involve money changing hands.

An example would be if when someone opens a free account on a dating site. If you referred this person you could expect to make $1 – $2.  So you are making less than with an affiliate sale, but because it’s free or cheap it’s easier to convince people to try the service.

Another example might be a free 30 day trial on an online video service.

Create your own Product

Many websites sell their own digital products like eBooks, videos, audio books or software. eBooks and audio books are easier to create while videos and software are more difficult. Digital products are popular because after the initial cost of creating them, you can keep selling them without any additional per unit cost.

When creating a product for your niche audience it helps to really know what they are looking for and what they are willing to pay for.

You can test the market with different affiliate products. Then create something new that better satisfies your readers’ needs.

Many websites cultivate a following of loyal readers through social media and an email list.

Sponsored Posts

A sponsored posts is when someone pays you to put a specific page on your website to promote their website or product.

In order to make good money with sponsored posts your site needs to be targeted to a niche and be popular. The more regular readers you have the more you can make with a sponsored post.

The post can either be written by you or by them, but I recommend that you write all sponsored posts, to keep the content uniquely you.

Buying and selling links is sponsored posts’ ugly stepsister. Here you are clearly trying to trick the search engine into ranking certain pages. The search engines of course don’t want you to do this. The problem is that it’s hard to identify bought links. So if you don’t sell many you are unlikely to get caught. The search engines look for suspicious patterns in the links to find and penalize link farms. Google punishes the sellers of links, but not the buyers. If they did, a competitor could just buy dodgy links and point them to you to your site. I recommend learning everything about selling links before you consider trying it.

Solo Ads

Many websites focus on actively building their email lists, because a good email list is worth a lot. A solo ad is when someone pays you to send an email to your email list. Generally you make around $40 per 100 clicks with solo ads. So say you have a list of 10,000 subscribers (a fairly good size list) you send out a solo ad and say 20 % of people click on it. That’s 2,000 clicks, divide that by 100 and multiply by $40.  That’s $800. I wouldn’t send out more than 1 solo ad every 15 days.

Conversely if you have a new website in a niche and are looking to build a list, approaching the older websites with active email lists and buying solo ads may be a good tactic.

Speaking Engagements and Consulting

Having a successful website with a lot of content in a specific niche may establish you as an authority in that niche. Being an authority may lead to speaking and consulting jobs coming your way.

Of course speaking, doing panels and interviews will introduce your website to new readers.

Here is a link to a YouTube video about monetization methods: How do websites make money?

Tutoring and Mentoring

What some websites do is to have their own product, as I mentioned before. But then they may also have an enhanced version of their product that includes spending personal time with the buyer. An example in the “make money online niche” would be if someone followed your method and then you spent time going over their work and answering any questions they might have.

This will generally be a big ticket item around $1,000. There will always be a small percentage of buyers willing to spend a lot more and you don’t have to sell many big ticket items to make a large profit.

Asking for Donations

Many bloggers will tell you to stick to affiliate commissions and stay away from donations. Generally what bloggers try to do is to give their followers something like an eBook and then ask for a donation. This may or may not work. On the other hand people donate more than a billion dollars every year to various causes. So asking for a donation may be worth trying.

In my opinion the 2 most important things you need to have to succeed with donations is a worthy cause and a very good understanding of your donors.

Selling your Website

A website is a business like any other and hundreds of websites are bought and sold every day for thousands of dollars.

Most websites are sold by auction on Flippa a digital market place. I haven’t sold anything on there, but I have bought a website on Flippa and I am happy with the service they provided. The only real exception to using Flippa is if your website is worth more than $150,000 in which case you should consider using a broker.

When selling a website you generally pay capital gains tax which is taxed at a lower rate than normal income tax in most countries.

Websites generally sell for 12-24 months income. However if it has a lot of age (5 years) and is in a well defined niche, in which people spend money, the price can go a lot higher.

So naturally the next question is: “What method is the best way to make money?” There is no easy answer to this question. You can only really figure out the combination that works best for your site by doing a lot of testing.

I this article I will walk you through the process of setting up and optimizing a WordPress blog, step by step. However let’s first consider the possible benefits of having an outstanding blog.

• Business networking – If you use your blog as a showcase for your professional skills, it may open doors and build business relationships that you can only dream of.
• Ongoing income – Blogs are great at attracting traffic, traffic that you can turn into dollars through advertising. I make a steady flow of money from posts that I wrote years ago.
• Capital gains – Many WordPress blogs sell for tens or even hundreds of thousands of dollars every day. Like with selling other businesses the income from capital gains is taxed at a lower rate than normal income.
• You may enjoy blogging – I wouldn’t say I love writing blog posts, but I certainly like doing it. Writing changes up what I am doing and it also lets me wrap my mind around some important concepts.
• It definitely improves your writing and communication skills.

Why WordPress?

WordPress is the most popular blogging platform with over 60 million websites (half of the websites on the internet) using it. The reasons for WordPress’s popularity is that it is powerful, easy to use and free.

The first mistake

The first mistake new bloggers make is to cheap out on hosting. The problem with cheap hosting is that hosting companies make it cheap by putting a lot of sites on each server. That makes the websites very slow. The search engines don’t like sending traffic to slow blogs and people don’t like browsing on them.

You can avoid the mistake by hosting your blog with one of the larger more established web hosts.

2 Types of hosting you need to understand

The 2 types of hosting are domain and web hosting. The domain hosting just maps your domain name (for example enfuzed.com) to your web hosting where you have your blog installed. Domain hosting is cheaper than web hosting (around $13 per year).

Picking a Domain Name

Don’t use more than 3 words in the domain name, it makes the domain hard to remember and too long. If you are doing a blog for a business, BusinessName.com is a good option. If you are the brand (In the same way as say Donald Trump has made himself the brand) YourName.com is a good option.

When it comes to the last part of the domain name I recommend going with .com , .org or .net. Stay away from the stranger ones. Unless it’s a regional website, then use the regional extension.

Strong domain names are memorable, brandable and catchy.

Web Hosting

HostGator link, I do my hosting with HostGator. They have 3 plans to pick from: The Hatchling, Baby and Business plans. I use the Baby plan. With the Baby plan you only pay for web hosting once. So say you have 3 websites, you pay for hosting once and 3 times for domain hosting. It works out much cheaper in the long run. If, however you think you will only ever have one domain the Hatchling plan is cheaper.

To save some money use the coupon enfuzedcoupon, that will give you a 25% discount.

During the checkout process HostGator tries to sell you 3 optional extras:

1. Secure and Accelerate Your Site for $1.67 a month. I don’t use that. I do not really think that’s a feature a blogger needs. Maybe if you have some kind of controversial site where someone might try to hack it, to take the site down temporarily, it might be useful?
2. Constant Contact. They are an email marketing business. I am in favor of having an email list of subscribers. Constant Contact is however not the business that I use or recommend for that.
3. Daily Site Backup for $19.95/yr. I backup my own stuff. Backing up your blog regularly is very important, but not difficult to do yourself. If you want to save the time, using this service is a good idea.

cPanel

cPanel is what you use to manage your website. Once your account is setup, log into your cPanel. Click on the QuickInstall button under the Software/Services section.

Next click on the WordPress tab. There are some paid options to have someone install WordPress for you. Ignore that, find the “Install WordPress for Free” part and click on ‘Install WordPress’.

Then you will see the form to the right:

You select your domain name from the drop-down list. The box next to that shows the folder in which WordPress will be installed. If you want people to see your blog, when they enter your site, just leave that blank. Certain notifications will be sent to your Admin Email address. It is also what you use to reset your password, if you forget it. Your Admin User is the name that will be shown as the author on all the posts that you write. You can change it later if you need to. After installation HostGator will try to sell you on a premium theme, ignore that and go to your email box. Log into your administration account from there, using the password that WordPress created for you.

Optimizing WordPress

Permalinks

Say you have the web address http://enfuzed.com/how-to-research-a-competitor-online/ your permalink settings determines the last part “how-to-research-a-competitor-online”. You want to setup your permalinks first, because if someone links to a page and you change the permalink settings that link will point to an error page.

Per default your post permalink contains the date of the post and the post name. I prefer to only have the post name in my permalinks. To change it select ‘Settings’ >> ‘Permalinks’ from the menu. Click on the ‘Post name’ radiobutton and click on ‘Save Changes’.

Plugins

Plugins are an easy way to ad functionality to your blog. There are a lot of good free plugins the problem is that there are also a lot of bad ones. Bad plugins have sloppy script, slow down your blog and possibly even have security holes. When you install WordPress with HostGator it comes with certain plugins pre-installed, so let’s talk about these first.

To view the currently installed plugins select ‘Plugins’ >> ‘Installed Plugins’ from the menu.

• MOJO Marketplace – This plugin just tries to sell you stuff. Click on ‘Deactivate’ to stop it.
• WP Super Cache –  This plugin speeds up your site by caching your posts. That sounds good in theory, but the plugin doesn’t always play nice with themes or other plugins. Also if you are setting up your blog some of the changes may not be visible right away. So I would deactivate it initially. Later you can try it and see how it works with your setup.
• Jetpack – Jetpack is a multipurpose plugin. It tracks your traffic and stores the data offsite. The traffic data reports are nice to have. Jetpack also ads some security features to your blog. My favorite Jetpack feature is the social sharing buttons. When you look at a healthy blog, I would expect 33% of the traffic to be from social media sites. Having easy to use social media buttons makes sharing the content much easier. I would prefer it if they focused on fewer features, but regardless you will find some of them useful. To use the plugin you need to open a free WordPress.com account and link it to Jetpack.
• Akismet – Blog post comments are great. They allow your readers to engage with your posts and they also make your posts more attractive to the search engines. The problem is that there a number of bots that try to use your comments to advertise to your readers. Akismet checks comments against its database and filters spam into a spam folder. From there spam is periodically automatically deleted. It makes managing your comments a lot easier. You need to open a free account with Akismet to use their plugin.

To add a new plugin go to ‘Plugins’ >> ‘Add New’. From there you can search for and install new plugins.

• Yoast SEO – SEO is the process of optimizing the visibility of your posts for the search engines. WordPress is pretty good at it, without this plugin, but Yoast SEO takes things even further helping you attract even more search engine traffic.
• Contact Form 7 – This ads a contact form to your blog. The plugin uses a Captcha to protect you from contact form spam.

Themes

Free Themes

Your theme controls what your blog looks like. It would not be very interesting if all blogs looked the same. You can use either a free or paid theme.

To install a free theme go to ‘Appearance’ >> ‘Themes’. Then click on ‘Add New Theme.’ You can do a keyword search and/or use filters to find a theme that works for your site. There are a lot of themes, but eventually you will find a good one.

You should make sure that the theme you pick is responsive. A responsive theme looks good on both a PC screen and on smaller devices like a mobile. You can test a web page to see if it is responsive by using Google’s mobile friendly tool . You can also test a page by reducing the width of your browser window.

Generally these free themes will have a link in the footer to the creator’s website. They use the link as an advertisement for their premium products.

Premium Themes

I use a premium theme on both of my blogs. I bought them on a digital marketplace for themes called themeforest. A premium theme costs around $59, so not cheap. However I do think it was good value for me.

The features good premium themes offer:

1. They give you far greater control over every detail of your blog’s design.
2. They greatly improved your control over where the ads you use are placed. Making your blog more profitable. You can do testing to see how ads placed on different places attract more or fewer clicks. I have found that ad placement can make a significant difference in click through rates and therefore earnings.
3. A good premium theme handles responsiveness much better than a free one does. That means it looks better and is better monetized than a free theme on smaller mobile devices. This is important because more and more people are browsing the internet on mobile devices.

Editing your sidebar

Most themes have a sidebar, normally on the right side of the posts. You can edit and change the order of the elements or widgets in the sidebar. To do so go to ‘Appearance’ >> ‘Widgets’.  To add or remove widgets you drag them into and from the Widget Area. You also drag the widgets in the Widget Area to change their order.

Adding content to your Blog

The content on your blog is divided into pages and posts. Examples of pages are your About Me page, Privacy Policy and Terms. Your posts feature your everyday content. When you install WordPress you start out with a ‘Sample Page’ and a ‘Hello world!’ posts. You can edit or delete these.

Pages

To create a new page go to ‘Pages’ >> ‘Add New’ on the left hand menu. That will load an editor page. You can input text and post images in this window.

Add your page to the menu

Steps for adding pages to the navigation bar

1. Save changes to the page by clicking the ‘Update’ button
2. Click ‘Appearance’ >> ‘Menus’ in the WordPress admin menu
3. Now we need to create a menu. Do so by giving the menu a Name for example “Top Menu” then click on ‘Create Menu’.
4. Next we add a page to the menu. You should see your page’s name with a checkbox next to it. Select it and then click on ‘Add to Menu’.
5. Next you need to attach the menu to a location in the theme. The location options with the default theme is ‘Primary Menu’ and ‘Social Menu’. Then select the ‘Primary Menu’ box and then click on ‘Save Menu’. The menu should then show your page when you open the blog.

Posts

You can create a post in the same way as a page. Because you can have many posts you should organize them into categories. To add a category go to ‘Posts’ >> ‘Categories’.