How Do Blogs and Websites Make Money Online?

Are you wondering how websites make money? You are about to find out! There are a lot, I mean a lot of ways to make money with a blog or a website. If you are wondering how to monetize your site, you’ve come to the right place.

I’ll discuss all the strategies and methods the most successful websites use to generate income. When you are done reading this post, you will be aware of how a website can make money and you will be armed with the knowledge and tools necessary to convert your site into a cash machine.

Before we start, I’d like to reiterate as I have. First and foremost, provide value to your readership. Making money will be easy once you’ve created a loyal readership in the right niche. If you want to create a cash cow of a site, you need to pick an industry that is thriving and you know a lot about this subject or are willing to learn. It also helps if there is less competition in search engine ranking in that niche. You can use a tool like SEMRush to help you with that. But enough of that, let’s look at how to make money online!

You’ve hit the jackpot by creating a high/medium traffic site in the right niche. But we have to dig a bit before we hit gold, using the right revenue generation model can make an enormous difference to your revenue numbers.

Generally, site owners make money by

1. Selling your own stuff (services, products of their making both digital & non-digital, eBooks and other premium content)
2. Advertising & Affiliate Income (selling and promoting services and products made by others)

At the end of it all, it comes down to one of those mentioned above: You either sell your products and services or act as a conduit to sell another’s product or services.

Let’s look at how you can monetize your blog or site.

How Do Websites Make Money?

1. Sell Advertising Space

You can sell advertising space through banner adverts to businesses and people. It isn’t quite simple, though, you get paid differently by different advertisers.

CPM – Pay Per Impression Advertising

Your website receives revenue as and when you generate impressions for the sponsor. This rewards a website for every thousand impressions that it generates. Depending on your sponsor’s industry, you may get paid anywhere between $1~$7 per thousand impressions. The most well-known CPM advertising network is BuySellAds.

PPC – Pay Per Click Advertising

You make pennies every time someone clicks on a banner or link. It generally works out to a higher amount per click when compared to CPM but it might depend on your niche.

You can run adverts on your site with one of the many ad networks. Google AdSense, Monumetric, Rev Content, Undertone and AdBlade are a few options available.

For those of you who use WordPress as a platform to run their websites, you can try out BuySellAds. If you’d like a free plugin, check out Advanced Ads.

Selling advertisements via contextual ad networks is best when you have a site that covers a large spectrum of subjects. If your site targets a specific niche or keywords, you’ll find that Affiliate Marketing is probably a better money-making strategy for your site.

Also known as CPA or Cost Per Action, Affiliate Marketing is an extremely profitable way to generate revenue for your website. The section of Affiliate Marketing goes into a lot of detail, rightly employed it can make your site very profitable relative to running CPM or PPC advertisements. It’s also tougher to utilize, so let’s talk about affiliate marketing.

2. Affiliate Marketing

As the name suggests, your website is an affiliate for someone else’s product or service.

How does affiliate marketing work?

You promote a certain product on your site, your visitor identifies the product as an effective solution to their necessities and purchases the product. You get a predetermined percentage or fixed commission for each purchase made by a visitor or reader who passes by your site to discover the product or service and then purchases on the affiliate sponsor’s website. This works because the company that sponsors the affiliate program finds a new customer, your visitor found a new product and you get a commission. All three parties involved end up with something they might not have had otherwise. You work as a middleman between buyer and seller and get paid.

Affiliate marketing campaigns produce new leads for the sponsor and generate commissions for your site effectively only when the campaign’s niche is close to yours. The further the distance between your niche and the campaign’s niche, the less effective the affiliate marketing efforts.

• Tip #1: Keep the niche of any affiliate campaign as close to your site niche as possible. Ad networks ensure that the right adverts are displayed on your site with PPC & CPM, but with CPA you need to find the right affiliate to endorse.

Write honest content/reviews, never go over the top and recommend a product or service you have not used. It is okay to verify the features of a product and write a dispassionate review. To give a positive review for any product, use it first or read extensively about the product, reviews provided by domain authoritarians who have a history of being impartial and fair in their assessments (Your eventual aim should be to make your site in their image). And be informative, add value, and help your readers find the best products. If you’ve used the product better still, be insightful.

• Tip #2: Be honest & informative. And if you have used the product, be insightful. Else you stand to lose your reader’s trust and you lose revenue.

Write about alternate choices. Never recommend a single product, always offer a choice to the reader. Your site’s business is to inform your readers. Aigars writes about 20~50 themes in our collection roundups to help provide choice and that’s for free themes. The choices provided should cover as wide a net as possible when you expect your reader pay for a product.

• Tip #3: Present the reader with alternate choices. This doesn’t mean you can not recommend the best choices, but try to include as many alternatives for your reader as possible.

This is going to be a bit strange, but bear with me! People look for your opinion, put your reputation on the line by recommending one or two products above other choices, but only if you can identify them as the very best options for your readership.

Recommend what’s best for your reader, not yourself. Different affiliate programs have different commissions, some much more profitable than others. But these more profitable programs may not necessarily have the best solutions to your reader’s necessities and problems.

• Tip #4: A small piece of a bigger pie is better than, well you know how it goes!

Disclose affiliate income, always inform your reader that you receive a commission for recommended products. Let your reader know that, this is how your site generates income to pay for writers, website development and hosting. I am sure they’ll understand.

• Tip #5: Disclose affiliate marketing on your site on pages with affiliate links.

Do not push products on your readers. Stop cramming your content with multiple links, try to keep it to a minimum. It might turn off someone, allowing your reader to be skeptical about someone who profits from their suggestions. Never allow anyone to feel you are merely trying to sell them things.

Always attempt to connect with your audience by being informative, insightful and helpful. After you’ve described the problem that you’re attempting to solve which should be one that your readers can relate to, only then should you proceed to promote a product as a possible solution. I think subtlety is underrated.

Remember that affiliate marketing can help make much money if you target the right niche. Your site should be relatable to that niche, but your niche should have sufficient traffic from the specific niche. Affiliate marketing tends to be very targeted, it will not work if there is no money in that market, to begin with.

Before you run an affiliate marketing campaign on your site, try reading about the affiliate programs offered by the ten biggest players in your industry. Look at their customer numbers and their commission percentages. See if the numbers make sense and whether affiliate marketing is right for your site’s niche.

MyThemeShop offers a 55% commission on any new customer you bring to them. We use their affiliate program on our website and highly recommend it.

In comparison, Elegant Themes offers a 50% commission, and StudioPress offer a commission of 35%. If either of them had sales exceeding MyThemeShop greatly, they would make for better affiliate options. Still, given that there isn’t too much of a difference, you will be better of using all three affiliate programs. This way you can present your readers with multiple choices.

Check out for how long the tracking is valid when you bring new traffic to these sites under affiliate programs. This also known as the tracking cookie period. Most reasonable affiliates have periods of 60 days or greater. After that any sale made as a result of traffic your site brought them, doesn’t earn you a commission.

My examples may have been specific to the WordPress niche because I am familiar with WordPress. The commissions vary from sector to sector as the size of the deals vary. Look at all affiliate programs and identify the likelihood that they will generate a sustainable cash flow that builds over time. And test a few of them out before you settle on one or two of them.

Bluehost has a great affiliate program for many reasons, rather than boring you with “Why?”. I’d like to talk about Pat Flynn who made $424,800 which accounts for about 40% of his site’s revenue in 2022 via BlueHost’s affiliate program and about $670,000 from all affiliate programs. Now remember his website has multiple sources of income and apart from his BlueHost affiliate program all his other income sources are at best $50,000 and not more. I’d recommend that you look at Pat’s site and his income statements, you’ll notice that despite the diversity in his income sources he makes about 65% of his income via affiliate programs. This should quite clearly illustrate the power of affiliate marketing. Remember that we might receive a commission if you purchase through these links.

A Few Things About Advertising – PPC, CPM and CPA

• Tip #6: Banner adverts are not your best option, their click through rates are rather low compared to in-content links. But if you aren’t using all the space on your website, you could add banner advertisements to your revenue.
• Tip #7: Cut out the middleman, many ad networks take out a chunk of your revenue. Remember direct deals are always better than going through an intermediary. It’s also a lot harder.
• Tip #8: Never crowd your content out with too many advertisements banners or in-text links.
• Tip #9: Use a heat map plugin to determine which parts of your website attract the most attention. Place your adverts appropriately.
• Tip #10: While plain banner adverts (Not based on PPC, CPM & CPA) pay on a monthly or bi-monthly basis and offer some income security, even if your traffic doubles or triples, you still get paid the same. PPC, CPM & CPA based advertising on the other pay based on how well your site does and how well it converts traffic into sales/impressions.

3. Sell Your Product/Service

Creating a website to generate revenue is primarily based on projecting yourself and the people who post content on your site as domain experts. Sometimes it is very easy to prove that you know your stuff, an example would be a WordPress theme developer and writer. Aigars writes a great deal about themes and gets a lot of interaction because he is a pretty awesome web developer.

Projecting yourself as a domain expert is crucial as it is what your site relies on to generate revenue. It is aided by creating products in that particular niche or the alternative offering services in the same niche or even a related niche.

Of course, this works both ways web developer turns writer and the other way around, the same applies to any niche.

We publish great content about WordPress – Caching plugins, Themes, Hosting, etc. You can read more about it here. It helps boost credibility and therefore helps with product sales.

• Tip #11: Generating good and most importantly useful content will help project authority and domain expertise and bring more sales.

This is not limited to digital products like themes, it can be extended to almost any industry for which there is sufficient interest on the internet. Companies of any niche or sector can sell their own products via the internet.

• Tip #12: Selling stuff services/products and generating good content on the same industry/niche/sector brings in more visitors and as a result more prospective customers to your site.

You may have noticed by now selling products and generating useful content go hand in hand. One aids the other and vice versa.

While selling your products and services creating an affiliate program will help sell your product better. You will obtain a greater reach by sharing a percentage of your product’s price for a sale that may have gone unrealized otherwise.

Some people may be reluctant to share their profits, but they fail to realize that the profits you share would not have been realized at all had there not been an incentive for your affiliate to share and recommend your products.

Here you will find more about platforms that you can use to sell your products.

4. Enable Directories On Your Website

The online version of paid classifieds and an easy way to make money. The best thing about directories is you have no limit to the number of companies, businesses or freelancers who can list themselves.

You can charge a flat rate or a commission on business your site directs towards the sponsors. And depending on your blog’s primary focus, directories are a handy tool to help your users. You could create a directory for the real estate agents for a real estate blog.

• Tip #13: It can be a helpful feature for your readers, especially in primary services based niche or industry.

For WordPress users, a few handy WordPress themes to help you out. Although, I wouldn’t recommend a directory theme if that isn’t the crux of your site.

You can use Business Directory Plugin to add the functionality to your site or get some custom web dev work for your site which is preferable.

To learn more about making a directory using WordPress, please read our detailed guide.

5. Job Boards

This idea is similar but polar opposite to creating a directory on your site. Job Boards can be an extremely useful source of site revenue wherein the person who posts the job pays a monthly fee for their job posting.

Pro Blogger is an excellent example of a site with a very profitable job board system. When I checked out their job board, they had about 30 job openings advertised on 4 different pages, which means about 120 job postings. That translates to roughly $6000 revenue per month. To start your own job board you can use any of these WordPress themes and plugins.

• Tip #14: Generating revenue with directories and job boards is smart because you have very little work and get a lot of revenue. Both methods involve significant web development work but require very little effort for its upkeep.

6. Offer Sponsored Reviews

Websites with reasonable clout and domain authority often receive requests from small businesses to post reviews of their new products. You can offer sponsored reviews for a fee. We offer sponsored reviews on ColorLib. While publishing content as part of a sponsored review is okay, you should never offer your opinion for sale. Sponsored reviews bring in a good amount of cash for relatively little work.

• Tip #15: Sponsored reviews are a great way to make money! But please add a sponsored review disclosure whenever possible, sometimes sponsors make request that you not reveal that it is a sponsored review. I feel you should provide a dispassionate review with a disclosure.

Even if you do not disclose sponsored reviews, most websites will have a sponsored review section. This will indicate to your reader that you do write sponsored reviews. Your readers may get upset if you do not disclose sponsored reviews. But I guess they really can not complain much about it, if you are honest in your product reviews.

On Colorlib, we offer paid reviews at $560. Not only do we get the benefit of the cash, but sometimes we get our hands on a product that hasn’t yet hit the market, which is an added benefit. And review content generally tends to be in-depth content about specific products, which almost all readers love.

• Tip #16: Sponsored reviews help you get your hand on products that haven’t yet reached the market. Many gaming-related YouTube channels receive access to games as beta testers and some tech websites can get their hands on new laptops and graphic processing units before, they hit the market. This can offer a significant edge over your competitors.

7. Create Premium Content

You can craft content that is very difficult to come by on the internet and package it for sale. It can be an eBook or an interactive tutorial/course. You need to provide free content to entice the audience into buying your content. Also, it helps a lot if you’re specific about what the premium content will teach or reveal to the buyer.

• Tip #17: Premium content will not work if you offer something available for free on the internet.

I’m currently trying my hand at Data Science and I want to learn R. I’ve used Data Camp, they have an awesome strategy. You get access to the first part of their course for free. After that, you’ll need to pay for access to the subsequent sections.

For premium content, you can choose either one-time purchase models or recurring subscription models for continued access to content and support.

• Tip #18: With a sales models for paid content, I believe a freemium + subscription hybrid model is best for most content. They have shown tremendous success. The freemium App Store model accounts for 90% of all revenue in Asia. Many WordPress plugins & theme houses work with freemium and subscription models, again they’ve been very successful.

Write a great book

Good writers and journalists run most successful blogs and websites. This can also include web developers, programmers, search engine optimization, marketing specialists who’ve become good writers. Many highly ranked websites are run by people with years of experience in their chosen field. Sometimes a single post is not big enough to convey all the information you have to offer.

However, a book is a great channel for delivering a wellspring of useful information to your readers. After you’ve exhibited considerable domain/niche expertise and your site receives some traffic, a book can be a great idea.

eBooks are a useful idea, even if you decide not to monetize them. But,  the best thing to do would be to provide limited and full access for a small fee.

Useful information is hard to come by and a book preferably was born out of personal experience sells well. Generally, ebooks provide some form of self – improvement information (How To Get Ask A Woman Out?, Grow Your Blog By 300% With These 3 Steps) at least many of them do.

• Tip #19: These books offer actionable insight for real people to help themselves personally or professionally.

If you feel providing limited access will create a disgruntled readership, divide the book into multipart series and offer one for free. As I mentioned before the freemium model is the best way to go regarding paid content.

• Tip #20: Besides monetization incentives, books also help develop and solidify your brand. Make sure you get just right, it can be a very powerful marketing tool and enable you to reach a greater audience.

Webinars

Writing useful content for your users is great, but webinars are powerful. It doesn’t just rely on a sense of vision. Webinars can help set your site apart from your competitors. You shouldn’t underestimate how useful it can be for your business.

Webinars are way better than just plain text when educating and informing people. Connecting with people is difficult, reading content and watching webinars are worlds apart.

Host one or two free webinars and teach people something. You can then teach people something and you can proceed to sell them the remaining webinars in the series. You can use a service like GoToWebinar.

• Tip #21: Try making YouTube videos for practice, perfect your delivery and get it just right for your webinar series.

The same can be said for podcasting as well.

8. Email Marketing

Building a strong mailing list is always useful for any blog as it helps build your readership. You do not have to rely entirely on social media shares and search engine rankings. If they sign up for weekly or monthly newsletters, people will visit your site long after their first visit. Most sites with loyal readership have fat email lists.

You can employ email marketing to sell products as an affiliate or you can sell your own products. Email marketing is a powerful tool to build sustainable revenue and traffic for your site.

• Tip #22: An email list is probably a group of people with very similar characteristics and demographic features which is why they’ve subscribed to your site’s blog. You can certainly expect a better conversion when selling products via emails.

Use AWeber or MailChimp to help build your mailing list.

• Tip #23: Using pop-ups effectively will increase your subscriber count dramatically in just one or two months.

How to send professional-looking emails? You can find out here.

How Colorlib Makes Money?

We get this question a lot and there is no simple answer to this because we combine many things and here are the main ones in no particular order:

• Selling our own themes, templates, plugin mockups and other downloadable products.
• Affiliate income from theme, plugin, and hosting sales.
• Selling banner places
• Display ads such as Google AdSense
• Paid product reviews

We try to monetize our website using various methods but keep ads and other promotional content to a minimum to keep our users happy.

Final Thoughts

I hope this answers your question about how do websites make money. I’ve described some of the best revenue-generating solutions for websites and blogs. I can not, however, predict how well each advertising method will work. Only you can be the judge of that. And the only way you can do that is to try things out!

But before you start advertising, ask yourself “Am I providing something valuable for my reader ?, Is there something new under the sun in my content ? “. People will trust you and purchase the products you throw at them if the answer to the previous two questions is a resounding “Yes!”.

Remember to exceed the reader’s expectations when selling your products and premium content. I’d recommend the freemium model for all your premium content. In a freemium model, you offer a significant chunk of your content. But, you just need enough content to entice someone to purchase it. But suppose it is a digital product like a plugin or any other product that requires continued assistance, support and updates. In that case, a subscription model is a better choice.

And as for advertising on behalf of others, via any previously discussed methods. Ask yourself, “Would I buy this service/product I am recommending if I have the same requirements as my readers?”. It’s far easier to convince someone else to purchase something if you are convinced about the quality of the product you are recommending.

Don’t get stuck on any one method of revenue generation. Be sure to try out each of them for three months. Never more than three or four at a time, and make sure you give each monetization technique a fair chance, give each its own space.

If you insert all affiliate advertising in the form of in-content links, you can not possibly compare it to a banner that is always on display on every page of your site. Place all monetization techniques equally and give them a fair trial. It may take a while, but it’ll be well worth the effort!

No matter how many statistics you read about advertising, no one can predict the outcome of your website. You need to try things out and perfect your ideal hybrid of revenue-generating techniques.

I hope you found the post useful 🙂 Subscribe to Colorlib for more of the same!