Make Money With A Website Without Selling

Online marketing is a complicated and competitive industry, but you can make money with your website without selling. There are three channels for monetizing your website: affiliate marketing, advertising and eCommerce.

Affiliate Marketing: This type of marketing uses online retailers as a middle man between the merchant and the customer. Affiliates advertise the retailer’s products on their site or blog in exchange for getting paid based on clicks or sales generated through their site.

Advertising: Online advertising takes many different forms including display ads, sponsorships, YouTube video ads, social media ads and more. The most common types of online ads are pay-per-click (PPC), cost per thousand impressions (CPM) and cost per action (CPA). PPC ads generally appear at the top or side of a search engine page or in an advertisement space on a website. CPM and CPA ads tend to appear in newsletters or sidebars of blogs and social media sites.

eCommerce: This channel involves selling products directly to customers from your site using shopping cart software, payment gateways, order fulfillment and shipping.

No matter which channel you choose, it is important to use both SEO methods as well as marketing outreach methods to promote your website.

SEO Methods: These are the basic strategies you can use to improve your search engine rankings without paying for ads. Doing a few simple things to make your site easy to crawl and index will greatly increase your search engine exposure.

Contribute content regularly: Make sure you have at least 2-4 high-quality content pieces per month that are unique and provide value to your readers. Without new content, search engines will not place much value on your website.

Create an XML sitemap: This is a way of telling Google and other search engines about all of the pages on your website. Tools like Google Webmaster Tools make the process of creating an XML sitemap easy.

Create a blog: Blogs rank highly in search results and are a great way to build trust with your site visitors and receive new visitors through search engine referrals.

Social media: Make sure you have accounts set up on all of the major social media sites and use them frequently, especially Twitter, Facebook and LinkedIn. Sharing content from your website will help attract new visitors to your site.

Gather contact information: Getting customer email addresses and business cards is an easy way to bring people back to your website, build relationships with potential customers, and send your content directly to them. It’s also a great way to get new people every year when your customers renew at the end of their subscription.

Build an email list: This requires more effort than collecting cards and email addresses but can be very lucrative. You’ll need to figure out how to add a subscribe button somewhere on the site, create engaging email content and deliver it regularly. All of this will take some work, but if you do it right you’ll have access to a large number of targeted visitors who are already interested in your content.

Promote: In order to get people to your website, you’ll have to promote your site. Your promotion efforts will depend on the type of business you’re in, but for small businesses, this may require simple SEO tactics like guest posting and article marketing. Make sure you have a campaign scheduled out for Google AdWords every month and make sure it is optimized for keywords related to your target market.

Marketing Outreach Methods: For small businesses online marketing outreach is a much more difficult task than SEO because it requires more creativity and effort. However, if you do it properly it will reap great rewards.

Conclusion: Go back to the beginning step and review what I have written. Read it over and over again. Take it all in. I’m sure you will be much better prepared to face your marketing challenge when you’re done.