People are often quick to assume that making a profit from a non-eCommerce website is next to impossible. In reality, it’s very much doable—-but here’s the catch, you’d need an epic dose of hard work and time. Sounds too good to be true? Generating income from your website hasn’t got anything to do with selling products or services and instead involves common sense hidden in plain sight. Think about it like this: the internet is a global community of people who look for information on a specific topic online—which itself can generate interest among people, as long as you’re sharing your expertise or experience on those topics. If updated regularly with relevant and original content, you may be able to make enough to cover the basic charges of keeping your website up and running––like the domain and web hosting. In time, you may find opportunities to scale your revenue and even earn a profit.
Using ads or affiliate marketing are some of the most popular ways for non-eCommerce websites to make money, but there are several risks involved in reality. To begin with, you’d need to have a sound following of your website to generate any substantial revenue from the ads. It may sound completely harmless now, but know that ads are why many viewers bounce off your website.
Ads can even cause your website to have slower loading speeds, lower design quality, and therefore may make a wrong impression on your target viewers. All of these can cause more issues and roadblocks than that of monetizing your website.
Instead, here are some of the steps that you can get started with:
Table of Contents
1. Members-Only Content
Curating paid content can be one of the most effective ways to generate revenue. Such content generally comes from your specialized domain. It, therefore, has a specific target group who may want to participate or learn about the content via your member-only blog posts or online classes. However, you’d also have to keep the right balance between the content accessible by all and the other paid content; to generate awareness amongst your new visitors about your expertise on the subject matter and to not give everything away.
Paid subscription content is perfect for blog owners who have grown a genuine subscriber base over the years, whose readers already know that their content is worth paying money for. On the other hand, for the education market, informatory blogs and webinars can be a part of a paid package, with free introductory courses for interested individuals.
If you’d like to convert your existing website to a members-only subscription-based site, you have a couple of good options. The first, for WordPress users, MemberMouse is a plugin for WordPress that allows you to do exactly that. If you’re a Shopify user and are looking for an alternative to a Shopify subscription app, Unify Checkout is your answer.
2. Cross-promotion of Your Content
As a content creator, learning to identify and generate several revenue channels is smart. You can kickstart your subscriptions via influencers in your domain on social media websites to create more engagement among your viewers. This can also generate new traffic mediums to your website.
In case you don’t want to invest money for other mediums of revenue, you can start your own YouTube channel where you can host free events and podcasts for different demographics. You can also share previews of your paid content online for creating interest among new users to reach out to your website and sign up. With time, you can eventually create a funnel across several platforms, self-promoting your website. As these grow over time, such platforms can also help you generate revenue from the original content curated specifically on each of these channels.
3. Buying, Flipping, and Selling Websites
For website owners who are skilled in the design and development process of a website, you can get involved in the scheme of buying websites, improving them, and then selling them for profit margins. Now, it may seem to hurt to sell something that you’ve invested so much time and energy in, but if your website has a certain following, it can sell for an exorbitant sum of money. Something that can be considered a fair deal for a website that you cannot keep up to date.
However, if you don’t want to let go of your website, you can also buy and improve websites online affordably via several popular marketplaces for websites. Professional developers who want to multiply their income can do so easily by flipping websites in their spare time.
Conclusion
To efficiently run a website takes more than just your thoughts and expertise on a subject matter. Instead, it can be more about understanding the unique content of your website and then monetizing it in various ways, which can, over time, evolve into different branches of revenue.
