How to monetize your site

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Publish date: March 24, 2023

Step #10

To do list for this page:
Start making money off your site.

Now that you have a website and have started building traffic to it, it’s time to start making some money. In this lesson we will learn how to monetize your site or make money off it.

How to monetize your site:

Affiliate programs
Advertising
Sponsored posts
Product sales

What are affiliate programs?

With affiliate programs, if someone clicks on an affiliate link from your site and purchases the affiliate’s product or service, you receive a commission. The way affiliate programs keep track of such referred sales is through cookies (small data file stored on the user’s computer). Generally there is a time limit on the cookie. For example, maybe after clicking on your affiliate link the user has to buy the product within 30 days for you to get a commission.

How can I find affiliate programs?

Look for companies in your niche that have affiliate programs. One way to start is by visiting the websites of companies that are in your niche. Scroll down to the bottom of their home page and see if there’s a link to an affiliate program. Some companies manage their affiliate programs themselves, while others hire outside companies to manage it for them.

What is the best affiliate program?

The ideal affiliate program is one for an expensive item that has a big commission. If you’re selling toothbrushes, you’re going to have to sell a lot to make a decent amount of money.

An even better affiliate program for the publisher is one with recurring commissions. These are generally services that charge customers monthly fees and pay their affiliates a percentage of this monthly fee for as long as the customer continues with the company. Even if the monthly commission is a small amount, if it’s recurring, your commission will continue to rise as you send the company more new customers.

Where should I put affiliate links?

Product reviews are a great way to include affiliate links on your site. Review the product and include a link so that if people buy it, you will get a commission. Another way is to put an ad for the product on your website and make the ad image an affiliate link.

Do I need a disclaimer for affiliate links?

Regardless of where you put the affiliate links, you’ll need to include a disclaimer somewhere on your site. Your readers need to know if you are benefiting in some way from your recommendation of the product. It’s the right thing to do, and it’s the law. You don’t need to hit them over the head with it, but you could put it in smallish print at the beginning and/or the end of your articles. See my example below.

This website contains affiliate links. We earn a commission when you buy a product or service using these links.

Don’t forget to put the nofollow/sponsored attribute on your affiliate links. If you click on a link in WordPress, an option will pop up where you can make it nofollow/sponsored.

Does Amazon have an affiliate program?

Amazon is the world’s largest online retailer and has a large affiliate program. The nice thing about Amazon is that they sell almost everything. If you have an affiliate link that recommends an Amazon product, and the person ends up loading many other products into their cart in addition to the product that you recommended, you get a commission on everything. If your website visitor clicks on your Amazon affiliate link, you will make a commission off everything that they buy on Amazon in the following 24 hours (or 90 days if they load the product into their cart within 24 hours).

Amazon pays a flat commission rate that varies according to the product. For example, they pay 8% on furniture but only 1% on video games.

What are affiliate networks?

Affiliate networks are companies that host affiliate programs for many different businesses. Joining an affiliate network is a great way to find new affiliate products. Some examples of affiliate networks are ShareASale, Rakuten and CJ (Commission Junction). There’s no limit on how many affiliate networks you can join, so you might as well join a bunch and see what they have.

How can I get ads on my website?

One way to get ads on your website is through ad networks. Ad networks are companies that contract with businesses to manage their advertising. Generally ad networks will pay publishers either via CPC (cost per click) or CPM (cost per thousand impressions).

What is the difference between CPC and CPM?

CPC (cost per click) – The publisher is paid each time a website visitor clicks on the ad.
CPM (cost per thousand) – The publisher is paid for each thousand impressions of the ad.

What is Google AdSense?

Google AdSense is the largest ad network. AdSense dwarfs all of the other networks. When you apply to AdSense, they will review your site to make sure that it complies with their guidelines. They want to see at least six months of traffic so if your site is new, let the traffic build a while before you apply. If you are approved, you can start running ads on your site. Install the Google Site Kit plugin on your site to begin to show AdSense ads.

What is Ezoic?

Ezoic is a platform to help publishers boost their ad revenue and increase their website traffic with the help of machine learning (A.I.). Ezoic is not an ad network but will deliver ads from a wide variety of ad networks. Through Ezoic you gain access to many, many ad networks which compete against one another for your advertising space. Ezoic is a Certified Publishing Partner of Google and works closely with them to deliver Google Ad Exchange ads as efficiently as possible.

How does Ezoic work?

Ezoic will test different size ads in different locations to determine which ones are more successful. It will then continue to deliver what it determines provides the maximum EPMV (Earnings per Thousand Visitors). Ezoic makes advertising decisions based on data to take the guesswork out of monetization.

Is Ezoic free?

Ezoic is free of charge if you allow them to place an ad on the bottom of your site which they profit from. If you prefer, you can opt to pay them 10% of your overall revenue.

What does Ezoic include?

Monetization based on machine learning to boost your website revenue
CDN (Content Delivery Network) to increase your site speed
Big Data Analytics to learn more about your website visitors, the performance of your site and information affecting revenue like which categories of topics are most profitable on your site
Optimization tools (called “Leap”) to speed up your site, improve core vitals, reduce image file size, lazy load your images, and minify your CSS and JavaScript code to make your site run more efficiently and improve your SEO
A video sharing service (called Humix) that allows you to display your video on other websites (and profit from advertising on it) and/or display other publishers’ videos on your site.
An SEO tool (called “NicheIQ”) that tests to determine what the most effective title tag is for your pages, suggests topics that would be successful on your site, and diagnoses site health

Direct ad sales

Another advertising option is to sell advertising space directly to businesses. The advantage of this is that you keep 100% of the profit. The difficult part is managing it and knowing what to charge.

Product sales

What products could I sell on my site?

eBooks
Online courses
Physical products – t-shirts, coffee mugs, anything!

What’s the best website monetization method?

There is no universal best monetization method. It depends on your site. Don’t limit yourself to one monetization method. Try any that you think would work for your site. Many successful sites actually use multiple monetization methods at the same time.

Do I need a privacy policy?

All websites should have a privacy policy. Remember that advertising networks and affiliate programs will most likely be storing cookies on your users’ computers. You need a privacy policy to let users know.

If you Google, there are some privacy policies out there that you can copy or privacy policy generators. I use https://legalformsgenerator.com/ to host my privacy policies and legal documents because they automatically update them as the laws change. If you use Ezoic, they will give you a free privacy policy.

Consent Management

In addition to having a privacy policy, if you have website visitors from the EU, you need to be GDPR compliant. If you have visitors from California, you need to comply with California Consumer Privacy Act of 2018 (CCPA). Both of these laws require explicit consent from the user to store cookies (data files). The easiest way to do this is through Ezoic. When toggled on, Ezoic will have a pop-up authorization that will only appear to website visitors from these locations.

What’s the difference between GDPR and CCPA?

GDPR (General Data Protection Regulation) – A law in the European Union on privacy and data protection
CCPA (California Consumer Privacy Act) – A state law to protect privacy and data protection for residents of the state of California.

While there are some differences in these laws, both require providing the option to opt out of data collection. Again, the easiest way to do this is with Ezoic. When you toggle these legislations on, Ezoic will handle everything else for you. The following message will appear only to website visitors from these areas and give them the option to opt out.

What is ads.txt?

Ads.txt is a file on your website that proves that you own it and lists the networks authorized to advertise on your site. Google requires this file for those who use their advertising network. If you use AdSense, you can download your ads.txt file from them and put it in the root directory of your site. If you don’t know how to do this, you can alternatively download a plugin to help you. Just type in ads.txt when searching for a plugin, and you will see many options. If you use Ezoic, they will handle the ads.txt for you since they work with so many ad networks. From the Ezoic dashboard, go into EzoicAds, Ad Transparency, and select Ads.txt Manager.

What’s next?

Congratulations! You’ve completed the ten steps to get your website started. Now you can learn more from our Tips & Tricks.