In the first article in the website monetization series, we’ve discussed how to make money off your website by selling ad space, creating a mailing list, and becoming an affiliate. In the second part, we’ll see how you can use content as a way to monetize your website.
Premium Content and Membership
Let’s say you already have a website that hosts some type of content. Let’s say that you want to give something really valuable to people visiting your website – valuable tutorials, valuable tips, and advice, valuable insights or analysis. That’s very good of you. What would be great, however, is if you were able to make some money off doing that, and you can easily do it by dividing your content into two tiers. The more general and easily available content is what you allow everyone who visits your website to see. You use this type of content to get people interested in what you have to offer.
The more specific, and harder to come by content, you separate by a paywall. You can ask people to pay for it directly, or you can ask people to pay for a kind of membership that allows them to access the advanced content. Either way, you use some of your content as a bait, and you use the best content you have as a monetization engine. Just remember that you have to put in a lot of work to set this up and that you have to keep up posting new and useful content. As long as you do that, you can earn quite a bit by charging for premium content, and you can also set up a network of affiliates that will send you traffic.
Sell Your Content as a Product
Of course, you can take the content you create for your website and package it as a product you’ll sell through your website. If you’ve written a report, an analysis, a white paper, you can sell it as a standalone product. It doesn’t have to be written content at all – you can create a set of videos that teach people to do something. Webinars are not content; at least, they’re not while you’re doing them. But you can record a series of webinars and sell them later as a product.
You can even write a book and use your website to sell it – it doesn’t really matter what type of content you’re plugging, as long as it’s something people will find useful enough to buy. And you can use your existing website to let people know what you’re selling, and why they might want to buy it.
If the product you’re selling is really good, it will help you build authority on a subject. This is important because it can increase the sales of your current products, make it easier to launch another product, or even open up other income opportunities to you, like paid speaking or one-on-one coaching. You can also use affiliates to make the marketing of your product easier. However, creating a quality product will eat up a lot of your time, or if you’re working with a ghostwriter, a lot of your money. It’s also possible that in some cases, especially if your product is a book, the payoff isn’t so much in the money you’ll make by selling the book, as it is in the indirect benefits and leads it might yield.
Tutorials and Promotion
If you have the necessary skills, you can use them to help people learn new things by creating tutorials. If you’re a photographer, a make-up artist, if you’re into arts and crafts, or if you’re a good writer – you can write tutorials that will teach people how to do what you do. The trick is, you’ll be using specific products to do those things. You’ll be an affiliate of the company that creates or sells that software – or any other product you’re promoting – and that’s where to monetization comes from.
Tutorials are a great type of content and can do the world of good for your search engine rankings. In the long run, they can earn you a nice sum of money, and creating them isn’t very time-consuming. You will, however, come across some limitations, like the number of companies that create products related to your field of expertise.
