[GUIDE] How to make money with your website

Whether you’re a stay-at-home mom looking to earn money while spending quality time with your kids or you’re a young professional looking for flexible, innovative ways to shape your career, you can earn a solid income from your website.

However, you have to approach your online business as, well, a business. All the strategy and careful planning that would go into a board meeting should also be applied to your online earning.

If you’re figuring out how to make money from your website, here are three tips to help you establish steady cash flow.

1. Write Great Content

First and foremost, you need to write great content.

It does not matter what you sell or how long your website has been live. Great content is the cornerstone of any successful website. As the SEO adage goes, content is king.

Why?

Because when people go online, they’re looking to answer a question. Maybe they want to know how to fertilize their lawn. Maybe they want to find the best price for a new pair of red high heels. Either way, they want content that best addresses their need.

Great content is the best way for you to answer your customers’ most pressing questions.

If you’re looking into how to get paid for blogging on WordPress, at the end of the day, the answer is simple: provide value. When you provide value, your readers are more willing to buy from you because you’ve already proven yourself as a resource. You provide value by offering great content.

2. Build and Sell to Your Email List

Writing great content goes hand-in-hand with building (and selling to) your email list.

Email marketing gets the short-shrift these days in comparison to social media marketing. That’s a real shame, considering that the average person checks their email 15 times per day.

In other words, email gives you direct, regular access to your would-be customers.

Plus, unlike social media, users of all ages check their emails on a regular basis. And email gives you the unique opportunity to address readers directly.

If you’ve done a good job of creating value with content, your readership is ready to receive more great content. In fact, if they’ve opted into your email list, they’ve already told you that they want to receive great content from you.

Why not take them up on that request?

3. Affiliate Marketing

Finally, a popular way to make money in the age of influencers is affiliate marketing, which is when you promote products from other people and earn a commission on sales made through your affiliate links.

However, you have to do affiliate marketing the right way.

Your readership expects you to provide great content. However, they don’t have the patience for shameless sales. They know that you’re trying to sell them something, but they don’t want to be bashed over the head with it.

Instead, only do affiliate marketing on products you’ve tried yourself which have an actual relationship to your own site and content. If you’re a fitness website, for example, you can do affiliate marketing for a line of workout clothes – if you try them yourself, give your customers an honest review, and share your links.

Figuring out how to make money from your website is all about persistence. You have to find what works for you and you have to be willing to think big to see the results you want.

If you’re looking for more ideas to take your site to the next level, check out our Lifestyle section for more useful posts, like these WordPress tips every online entrepreneur needs to run their website like a pro.