How to Make Money with a Website - Top 15 Ways

One of the things that confuses people the most about making money online is how to make money with a website. I’d say this is the most common question I get from friends and family because most people don’t realize all of the options there are to monetize a website (or blog). So with that said, here's how to make money with a website:

1) Pay Per Click Advertising like Google AdSense

• You place code that Google AdSense creates for you onto your site
• Google automatically creates ads that are relevant to the content on your website
• AdSense generates the ads from that code
• When people click on these ads on your website, you make money! 

It's that easy! *to see and in depth video about how to sign up, setup, and use Google AdSense effectively on your website or blog click here.

Other good PPC companies are Azoogleads and bidvertiser

2) Affiliate Marketing and Affiliate Programs

There are many affiliate programs on the internet and many people make great livings just creating websites that promote affiliate products. In fact, affiliate marketing is how I make the majority of my money on niche websites I start (and this may be my favorite way "how to make money with a website").

There are three important parties in affiliate marketing:

   1) The customer 

   2) The product creator/seller

   3) The affiliate.

The way affiliate marketing works is a customer goes to an affiliate's website (your website) and the affiliate (you) advertises the seller's product on your website. When the customer clicks on the affiliate's link to the seller's product and the customer buys the product, the seller and the affiliate both make money from the sale. The affiliate makes a set percentage of the total cost and the seller makes the rest (the percentage the affiliate makes from the sale is a fixed amount determined by the original seller/product creator). *if this sounds complicated--don't worry, it's not.

There are actually digital affiliate products that pay the affiliate well over 50% of the total purchase sale when the affiliate sends a buying customer to the seller. This is to encourage affiliates to actively sell the products!

You can also take the role as seller and use affiliates to advertise a product you created. In this case, you pay a set percentage of the product’s sale price to the affiliate whenever the affiliate drives paying customers to you. This is a no risk way to make money online because you only pay your affiliates when they sell something for you! So, basically, there are two ways to make money with affiliate marketing:

1) Create a product and use affiliates to sell your product

2) Be an affiliate for product creators/sellers and advertise their product on your website

Here is a chart to help better explain this:

 Below are my two favorite affiliate marketing programs:

Clickbank is the internet’s largest market of digital products. Often times Clickbank products pay the affiliate up to 75% of the sale price! To get started with Clickbank just sign up for an account, find products in your website’s niche that have products on Clickbank, generate affiliate links for those products, put the links on your site…and start making money when people click on those links and buy the product!  Many affiliates make a full time income by producing niche websites and promoting just Clickbank affiliate products on those niche websites. This is actually one of my favorite ways how to make money with a website.*note—if you develop a digital product you can get ClickBank affiliates to promote it too.

CJ.com works in a similar way to Clickbank except that CJ.com has physical products that affiliates can promote on their website (not digital products like Clickbank).  They have large fortune 500 company’s products to smaller company’s products. Also, unlike ClickBank, you have to get approval to promote some of these products on your website (this is pretty easy normally). Besides that though it works very similar to Clickbank because you browse their website for products in your niche, produce affiliate links for those products, then place those links on your website and make money when people click the links and buy the product.

3) RSS Feed Ads 

• Feedburner

It adds advertisements to your feeds and website.

• Pheedo

This turns your RSS traffic into money by including ads with your RSS feed.