Making money online is really not that hard as you think. It’s fully doable, and almost every one could make some via website. It might be able to make everyone rich but at the very least, you should be able to make money to cover your cost of hosting or domain. In the following tutorials, we will share the methods to Monetize a Website.
Make Money Online via Affiliate Program
Affiliate program has become a new trend for webmasters who wish to make money online easily and quickly. You just need to spend some time promoting services or products offered by the companies you affiliate for and add links to those items. When your visitors click the link or pay for an item through the given link, you can get paid from the affiliate program.
As we all know, there are many sorts of affiliate programs in the market provided by various brands, among which we select the best five options which can help people make a lot of money online. Check more details as below.
LinkShare
LinkShare is a leading online marketing services provider in this field, especially for the affiliate marketing, paid search and customer acquisition. Two affiliate marketing solutions are available to you, including Advertiser Solutions and Publisher Solutions. The only responsibility for the advertisers is to determine which service level is most suitable to make the affiliate marketing successfully. For publishers, the network is free to them, from which they can choose any affiliate marketing program as you want.
If you wish to earn commissions online, you need to play a role as a publisher to display ads, product links or text links from an advertiser. When making a sale though the link published on your website, you can be paid a certain amount of money by the providers.
Commission Junction
Since founded in 1998, Commission Junction has been regarded as the largest affiliate marketing network in North America. There are many tools available for partnerships to do the revenue sharing successfully, with which people are able to drive higher sale conversions and monitor transactions in real-time at your fingertips. In this way, you can earn too much money without making any effort.
Commission Junctions makes a promise to provide each partner with affiliate commission payments on time because this provider has its own platform used to deliver reliable conversion pixel tracking. And also, it offers two payment methods including check and deposit, available in multiple currencies.
Amazon
The affiliate program of Amazon is named as Amazon Associate, from which you can earn up to 15% in referral fees by advertising Amazon products on your own website. As one of the largest online shopping sites, Amazon sales various kind of products, such as books, toys, music, DVD, jewelry, apparel and many more. To push the sales of each product, it launches an affiliate program to encourage more people promote its items online.
This program has made a detailed description about the advertising fees rate on different types of products. For example, if you advertise an Amazon electronic product which is purchase by your visitors, you will get 4% of the pricing.
ShareASale
Having been 14 years, ShareASale has grown as a professional affiliate marketing network in the industry, always aiming at providing an advanced and reliable affiliate marketing platform to help customers grow their own affiliate programs with ease. This service provider are willing to provide some constructive advices on your seasonal, dynamic and promotional ads banners as well as offer some developing affiliate tools, like datafeeds, videos, widgets and so on.
Make Money Online PPC (Google Adsense)
Google AdSense is one of the most effective tools that allow you to make money online. In this article, we just come out the detailed guidelines about how to add Google AdSense ads to WordPress sites for money generation.
In order to increase revenue, bloggers are expecting to position ads on different places of the websites, especially the attractive places that have high click-through rate (CTR). As the better design gets better CTR, we suggest adding Google AdSense ads on the right places. In general, the recommended places are:
- Top Banner of your website(468 x60 px)
- Sidebar (Varies from 125×125 px up to 300×250 px)
- Content (468×60 or 300×250)
No matter where you want to place the ad on, you need to make it consistent with the website design as well as not to be intrusive for readers. In this article, we show careful steps to add Google AdSense ads to WordPress website header, menu bar, and sidebar.
Create Your Ads
In the following, let’s begin to create your ads.
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- First of all, you need to log in the existing Google AdSense Account, or register a new one directly on the website. Note that if you register for the first time, you should wait for the verification email in about 6-8 hours, making sure that you have already passed the reviewing process.
- Then, click “My Ads” menu to create your own advert for the website. And then, you need to hit the New Ad Unit option. Here, you can be redirected to generate the new ads page. From this screen, you should choose the size, type and style for your advertisement. Note that you should enter the name of this ad for the internal management. As for the Ad Size option, Google AdSense gives you a lot of options for the certain situations, including the Medium Rectangle, Large Rectangle, Wide Skyscraper, Mobile Banner, Horizontal Banner, Vertical Banner, Square Banner and many more. The next selection is for the Ad Type. In the most cases, we recommend you to choose the Text & Display Ads option.
In addition, you also should decide the Backup Ads option. Here, you can display the blank space or showcase with your own ads when there is nothing to show. The last option is the Ad Style. By choosing the proper option, you can control the showcase of your advertisements matching your website design the most.
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- Feel free to play around with the remainder settings, and click “Save and get code” to complete. You can copy and paste the available code into your Notepad properly for the utilization in the next step.
Add Google AdSense Ads on Website Header
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- Log into WordPress dashboard, go to Appearance-> Editor and find header.php file.
- Open and edit hearder.php file, and paste the AdSense code into the file, like the following:
- You’d better use the center tags like <center>Google AdSense Code</center> to make the ads in the center location.
Add Google AdSense Ads Under Navigation Menu
Many people also like to add Google AdSense ads under the navigation menu as it’s quite easy to mislead customers to click on ads and make huge money. If you want to use the Link Unit, then we recommend you making it look like navigation bar. You can easily make this by customize the background and text link color based on your navigation menu. Just like the following:
As for the Leaderboard, we suggest you use rich media ads because they are better eye-catching.
You can easily add ads by log into WordPress dashboard and go to Appearance-> Editor to find the header.php file. Then paste the AdSense code into the bottom of the file. The process is quite similar with adding AdSense ads to website header.
Add Google AdSense Ads to the Sidebar
As well, some people also place ads on the sidebar. It is also easy to manage. You can simply paste the ad code into the widget.
In the WordPress admin panel, go to Appearance -> Widgets.
Click and drag a “Text widget” into the sidebar.
Paste the AdSense code into the widget and click the Save button to complete the process.
Add Google AdSense Ads using the AdSense Plugin WP QUADS Tool
The process of adding AdSense ads is not difficult for some experienced webmasters, but for newbies, this is still complicated. Luckily, there are some best WordPress plugins which can help you manage the process easily and fast. Here, we’d like to take the AdSense Plugin WP QUADS as the example.
This is a free plugin that allows you to insert and to show the AdSense ads in an easy and customized manner. Before everything, you should enter the settings page to make the following configurations.
General Settings – AdSense Code
From this part, you firstly need to navigate to the AdSense Code part to connect your generated AdSense ads with your WordPress site. Here, you can connect 10 ad options using the Google AdSense code or the plain text/HTML/JS. For the Google AdSense connection, you simply need to click the Copy/Paste AdSense Code link, paste the code you have saved in your Notepad and hit the Get Code button.
This way, the Ad Slot ID and the Publisher ID can be added automatically. Next, you can choose to showcase the ad in the fixed size, coming with your determined width and height. Or, you can choose the responsive option to make the ad adapt to difference screenshots and devices.
Also, you have the freedom to choose the layout, aligning your ad in the left side, right side or the center location inside your web content, along with the proper margin.
General Settings – Widget Code
If you want to show your AdSense code in the sidebar, you also can choose to generate the Widget Ad. For this, you can go through the same process as you do to the AdSense Code – enter the AdSense code, choose the ads type and decide the display layout.
General Settings – Position
Now, you can go back to the General & Position part. Here, you should decide the following aspects.
- Choose how many ads can be displayed on a single page.
- Assign the particular or the random ad option in the beginning, the middle or the end of a post. Also, you can choose some other showcase locations, such as after the More tag, before the last paragraph and after the certain image.
- Decide the ads visibility on homepage, categories page, archives page and the tags page.
- Choose the post types for ad showcase.
Showcase the AdSense Ads
Now, you can save the settings and the specific advertisement will appear at the corresponding location with the style you determine. For the sidebar display, you need to drag your ad widget to the proper sidebar place.
Even, you can add the AdSense ad manually via the post editing screen.
Some Other Google AdSense WordPress Plugins
In addition to the above-mentioned option, below are some other WordPress plugins for AdSense, which are gathered to help you implement, control and overview AdSense ads with ease.
AdRotate
AdRotate is one of the most popular WordPress plugins for AdSense, coming with the best way to put ads on your website. It has understandable and intuitive interface, allows you to add and to manage the ads from the dashboard. AdRotate also supports unlimited groups for banners, which allows you tie certain banners to different areas of the website. Note that this plugin requires running on PHP 5.2 or higher, and compatible up to the latest WordPress 3.6 already.
To show your Google AdSense advertisement, you simply need to add and edit your Advert by entering the title and the ad code. Here, you can choose the useful tags if you want and upload the banner asset optionally. From the same screen, you can get a live preview of your ad.
In addition, you can decide the showcase schedule of the advertisement, including the exact starting and ending time, day, month and year. Even, you can set up the advanced options to show the ads on some specific days on each week or hide the ad when the maximum clicks or impressions are met.
The best part is that you can get the clear statistics of your displayed ads, such as the showing devices, weight, shown report, clicks report and the click through rate.
Quick AdSense
Quick AdSense is WordPress plugin for ads management. It is popular for the quick and flexible method to add AdSense code into a blog post. Featuring a simple page with simple configurations, it doesn’t require much coding knowledge. It provides default ads position settings. Moreover, it can also allow you to display the ads anywhere within a post randomly. It is more likely to catch attentions for regular visitors.
The concept of this plugin is the quick and simple way to showcase the ads. In this case, you can make the bulk creation and display settings from the single plugin settings screen. After clicking the Settings > Quick Adsense button, you can do the following.
- Decide the maximum number of plugins shown on each page.
- Assign the particular ad at the exact location of a page, such as the beginning of the post, the end of the post, the middle of the post, after the More tag, after the exact paragraph and more.
- Determine to show the ads on posts, pages, homepage, categories and many more only.
- Enter the ads code along with the exact margin px and alignment.
In addition, this plugin will generate 10 ad widgets options. You just need to enter the ads code and drag the exact widget option into your sidebar.
Google AdSense Plugin
Google AdSense Plugin is a professional WordPress plugin that allows Google AdSense implementation into your website. In addition to the general features that allow you to insert the ads’ code into your blog or site, it also allows you to customize them easily. Besides, you can choose to insert the ads automatically, or you can decide the place where they appear. As this plugin has been translated into 8 languages, it is welcomed by users worldwide presently.
The utilization of this plugin requires you to authorize your Google account for the proper management of the ad blocks.
After that, you can easily add or manage the new and existing ad blocks you have created in your Google Adsense account.
Easy AdSense
Easy AdSense offers an easy solution to produce revenue from your website by applying Google AdSense. It has a lot of options that allow you to put links or AdSense Block in the footer or header, and display AdSense ads based on the length of the post. With flexibility and easy control, you can make money easily from your site.
To use this plugin, you simply need to go through the following easy steps.
- Get the ad code from your Google AdSense account.
- Copy and paste the code into the boxes based on your needs.
- Determine the alignment and other display options.
- Check the Google policy options.
Here, you can find that the location of the ads is determined in advance, such as the beginning, middle and end of the post, the widget text, the link-units text and the Google Search widget. You just need to enter your target ad code and decide some showcase options like the position and title, and the ad content can be displayed properly.
Google AdSense Ads Manager
This option can be regarded as one of the simplest Google AdSense WordPres plugins for configuration, with which you can easily get the maximum revenue by using this ad service in a correct way. There is a simple interface available, along with the option to add HTML in the text area so you can specify the AdSense code. In addition, some other important options of alignment specification and condition determination are also available. While there is no extra code, this plugin will not impact your website performance.
Here, you can directly enable the ads display on the top, middle and end of the posts. Each option allows you to determine the CSS floating property and the exact showcase pages. If you enable the middle post ads, you can even choose to add the ads after the particular paragraph.
Some Other Tips about Adding Google AdSense Ads in WordPress
- The best size of the ads – Frankly speaking, it is true that different websites might be suitable with different sizes of the ads due to the exclusive design and layout. However, as researched, the ads with 336×280 or 300×260 px can fit on almost all the screen sizes.
- The ads placement – This also depends on the website layout. However, as your final goal is to get more ads clicks, you’d better place them at the most prominent location of the whole page.
- The Self-clicking – Some of you may click your ads for more CTR. Please never do this again. After all, Google is smart and they know it is you who click on the ads. If you do this too often, you may face the risk of being banned.
Sell Products Online
WordPress is powerful to build online stores. So you can easily make money by selling products online. Just as opening a store on eBay.com, you can sell products on your own website as you like. As well, you can determine the profits and sale prices at a reasonable level, so it’s really easy make money from the store.
On the other hand, you can also sell music, photos, e-book, app, articles, and other digital products on the website. Although each one is cheap, you can simply make a lot of money when there are thousands of downloads.
Below we will share how to build an online store using WordPress.
Install e-Commerce Plugin
As you have a WordPress website already, now you can install an eCommerce plugin to build an online store.
Log into your website admin panel, and go to Plugins, click Add New to upload your e-Commerce plugin. In this case, we take WooCommerce as example. So you can upload your plugin or search WooCommerce as the following.
Click Install now, and the plugin will be automatically installed, and then click Activate plugin to complete.
After activate the plugin, you can see the Welcome page as the above. You can just click the Install WooCommerce Pages, and then configure your store with the following settings.
After configure your store, you can add your actual products or services to sell. By cliking the Products -> Add New, you can easily complete this process and have your store online.
Use WordPress e-Commerce Themes
The other effective method is using WordPress e-Commerce theme, which is 100% compatible with WordPress application and comes with some online store necessary features like payment gateways, shipping module, etc.
You can achieve it by logging into dashboard, go to Appearance -> Themes, and then click Install Themes to upload your eCommerce theme. Only note that you should make sure your theme is completely compatible with your plugins.
As we take the theme of StyleShop as example, the shop appearance is as the following.
Offer Services
Offering services is one of the most lucrative methods of making money via website, for you don’t need to make any investment, but leverage your knowledge only. To put it simply, once you have the valuable skill for some specific requirements like graphic design, website building, and some consultancies, then you can provide a relevant service via your site.
Unlike merchandising online that require you to spend a lot of time and energy in front of computer, this method only needs you to create a “Hire Me” or “Service” page, and then you can make money with the expertise you have gained.
Note that this method is most suitable for college students and freelancers.
Write Paid Posts
Yes, you can also earn money by publishing paid posts on your website, containing some professional contents like SEO techniques and specific product reviews. You can do this only when you have built an authority in your niche, and have a large reader base in your site. If you are new to this money-making method, then pay attention not to alienate loyal visitors who used to reading everything for free on your site.
Custom Design Work
If you are a designer or good at designing, you can start custom design work on WordPress websites. You can design for websites, products, and brands online. As well, you can also sell your design work in the online store. Even if you earn a few dollars per work, you can make a large amount of money when hundreds of customer purchasing it.
Moreover, you can design WordPress theme to make money. Based on your own website, you can easily learn about the theme and create a stunning theme with your own design. Then, you can sell it on your website or on the professional marketplace like Theme Forest.
Do Donations
Asking for donation is also an effective way for income acceleration. You can add a donation button to your sitethat ask readers to make a donation to keep this blog alive. To grab visitors’ attention, you can put an interesting tagline such as if you like this site, why not buy me a piece of cake?
This works well even you don’t have good traffic. What you need to focus on is to write something valuable and helpful to the readers, so that they would like to donate.
To ask for donation, you could put a paypal donation button on the page or create a dedicated page as Donation page.
Include RSS Feed Ads
If you are using traffic-based ads, which get you paid according to the number of page views you receives, then you’d better include ads in your RSS feeds. This is because RRS offers great convenience for readers to know the latest update happened in your site, without the need to check the site constantly throughout the day. If they are interested in what you have added, they’ll go for it immediately.
There are a lot of advertising options within feeds, among which we highly recommend Feedburner.
Build and Sell Your Blog
We have found that many professional webmasters also make profits by selling their popular sites to large companies or famous brands. They just set up a site and build a large audience base with their professional techniques. Then, they turn around and sell it at a profit.
Tips to Turn Post Readers into Paying Customers
As surfing on the Internet is the daily activity for the majority of people all over the world, online business has become a trend nowadays. Many business owners sell and promote their products and services by setting up the online platform that comes with the attractive and informative content. Most of them believe that if they can enlarge their loyal reader base, they can boost up the daily sales and generate more revenue. Here, we have to note that this is a misconception. The large reader base cannot benefit your business if none of your visitors are willing to turn into the real customers.
Now, you might be wondering how to turn post readers into paying customers. Here, we have listed some useful tips in the following.
Tip No.1 – Know Your Audience and Write for Them
First of all, you need to realize that you are blogging for the growth of your business but not for your interests. In this case, you need to analyze who are your potential customers and plan ahead to blog for them with the right writing styles and topics. For instance, you cannot use the same language to target the first-time moms as you do for the experienced nursing professionals.
To get the thorough understanding of your target people, you can consider several aspects that include gender, age, profession, interests and even marital status.
Tip No.2 – Come Out the Object-Oriented Content
Customers are willing to check some object-oriented posts that can answer them some questions or help them resolve some pain points. Note that this kind of content can turn your readers into real customers effectively. After all, the main aim for them to check your words is to seek for the solutions to their issues, thus, they may already have the “buying” emotion in the mind.
Once your readers believe that your products or services can help them overcome their problems effectively, you can entice them to make a purchase or download a freebie at least.
Tip No.3 – Solve the Puzzle of Your Potential Customers
Generally, your audience might have below confusions after checking the introductions of your selling items.
- Which version, model, color scheme or size is suitable for me?
- Can I get the cheaper price elsewhere or can I get some discounts?
- Is this platform a secure one? Will my personal identity and bank account be kept safe after placing an order?
- Is this service or product the best one? Can I find any better option?
- And many others……
Now, you need to deal with these puzzles with the best answers. In this following, we have listed some topics you can write to deal with the above-mentioned confusions.
- Version A vs Version B for Newbies.
- Why Is the Service Expensive?
- How Can We Ensure the Most Worry-Free Online Deal using SSL?
- 5 Reasons as Why You Should Try Our Product.
As researched online, 79% of readers will become the paying customers if you can resolve their puzzles perfectly. In this case, you can start doing a survey via your website or social platforms to figure out what people want to know the most for your products.
Tip No.4 – Encourage the Purchase on Emotions
This might be a little bit irrational and crazy, but the truth is that most purchasing decisions we make, especially for women, are driven based on the emotional factors. It is true that you might have a reasonable idea of what you want actually along with the maximum budget. But sometimes, the sudden momentum can win over the logic thinking. What you need to do is to stimulate this kind of momentum.
For instance, you can use some rhetorical questions with the strong mood to evoke the positive emotions for your readers. You can showcase the before-and-after comparison chart or image to tell your readers what they can be benefited after purchasing your offerings. You can display the call-to-action button that encourages people to make a click whenever they want.
In addition, most people will make the impulsive shopping after knowing that they can get the money back guarantee which is 100% no reason asked. In this case, you can showcase a special banner just like the below screenshot on your blog posts. Once your readers are interested in what you offer, but hesitate to buy or not, this kind of banner will give them a great push.
Tip No.5 – Remove All the Distractions
This is a common mistake made by a lot of webmasters. They simply put a lot of call-to-actions on a single blog post or webpage, such as the advertising banners, widgets for social media platforms, badges, outbound and in-site links and many more. Here, you have to know that if you ask your readers to do multiple different things, they are likely to do none of them.
In this case, if your goal is to encourage your readers to become the paying customers, you need to focus on this aim and make it as clear as possible to your visitors.
The famous hosting review site of BigCheapHosting.com has done a great job in this aspect. Their initial goal is to introduce the best hosting solutions for different webmasters and encourage them to make a purchase. To achieve the initial purpose, they have done the below efforts on the homepage.
- The obvious advertising banner showcased in the header section encouraging you to sign up with BlueHost.
- A list of the top 5 web hosts along with the Visit button.
- The brief comparison chart of the top 5 hosting providers.
- Showcase the Hosting category into the main menu bar.
Looking at their homepage, you can find that everything is related to the purchase of the quality web hosts without even a minor distraction.
Tip No.6 – Create A Sense of Urgent
In fact, this is an effective way to encourage some hesitant readers to make a purchase right now. Generally, if something is on sale, many people will believe that the price must be the best and this chance is only available for an every short time. In this case, most of them will place an order immediately in a fear of missing out.
In this case, you can incorporate a sense of urgent into your blog content. For instance, you can provide some seasonal services and products or some time-limited promotional deals and coupons. Even, you can sell some items that coming with the limited edition.
Tip No.7 – Showcase Some In-Content Testimonials
Customers are likely to read the feedbacks and reviews of many other users, from which they can figure out whether the products is worth buying or not. Therefore, you can showcase some written testimonials into your website, giving your readers more confidence in becoming your paying customers.
Tip No.8 – Do Not Overuse These Strategies
You know that the purpose of your blog posts is to sell and market, but you cannot make this goal too much obvious for your readers. After all, being overly promotional may destroy your online credibility and alienate your current visitors.
Always bear in mind that people are likely to make the online deal from someone they trust. Thus, you need to try your best to make yourself trustworthy by offering valuable and meaningful information to strengthen your position in a specific niche.
Top 5 Online Monetization Signs
As investigated, more and more people now choose to make money online using their personal websites, for this kind of monetization triggers a high profit with low risk and investment. However, not all the webmasters can achieve the financial goals successfully as they fail to monetize their websites in a good time.
Therefore, if you are willing to earn your living or get some pocket money via the internet, you’d better make sure that your site has all the components that your potential sponsors or customers are looking for.
In the following, we have listed the top 5 online monetization signs, with which you can know clearly when you can make money via your website.
Good Traffic
Without doubt, whether you decide to make money through advertisement, affiliate program, or net sales, the prerequisite is that your website has a good traffic every day. If you fail to achieve this, there is little or even no value for advertisers, merchants, and manufacturers to spend time and energy on your website.
Therefore, you need to keep track of the detailed statistics about your site traffic and traffic source. Once you have gotten a good result of more than 500 visits, then it’s time to start your online career.
Here, we highly recommend Google Analytics – a powerful and user-friendly tool that allows you to know everything about your site from all referrers like search engines, social platforms, direct visits, and referring sites.
Right Audience
Target the right audience is very essential. If you are going to build an online store selling cosmetics and some skin care products, you’d better make sure that the majority of your visitors are female or young people.
In fact, there is no tool to help you figure out whether your readers are the ones you want, but you can get some indications from your comment section. If you get a highly active reader base that actively comment on your posts, discuss with you, and share your content within their own social groups, then it means you have gotten what you want.
High Internet Exposure
There is no need to emphasize the importance of online visibility, and you can achieve this by leveraging the power of popular social media like Google Plus, Twitter, Facebook, and Pinterest, etc. If you have a large number of followers of at least one platform, then your chances to be exposed on the Internet increases much higher. This results in more revenue and earnings.
Let’s take Google Plus as an example. To have a good follower base, you need to complete your profile in the very beginning to give people a sense of humanity, along with the personal information like education, physical location, working place, and a head portrait.
Then, find people and add them to your circle. Generally, they will follow you back if they feel your posts are interesting or meaningful.
Generally, people are more interested in eye-catching FIG picture, useful tutorials, and attractive teaser content. Therefore, you’d better publish these kinds of contents and relate them with your website.
Besides, if you have seen something now and unique, you’d better share, +1, and comment on these posts to stay active, and earn potential followers.
Authority and Professionalism
Once your readers have built a tight mental link between your website and the niche you are in, then they will come to your site whenever they need some certain information. To be honest, this kind of authority and professionalism can be a huge attraction for advertisers and investors, for it indicates a solid daily traffic and online popularity.
To achieve this, you can showcase your expertise by posting some high professional articles. Also, you can strive to build a close relationship with some popular websites that are in the same field as you.
High Ranking
The last sign is that you have a high ranking in the searching list result. There is a common sense that people are more willing to click on the posts that are ranked on the top 3 in the first searching page. Thus, the ranking of your webpages can never be ignored. There are so many methods to help you achieve this, among which the correct utilization of keyword is the most effective way.
Conclusion
These are the most common methods for making money online with WordPress websites. No matter you just want to earn a little income or make a big splash on the website, it’s all possible on WordPress websites. Most importantly, you need to make clear that only has a famous website with a lot of visits, you can easily make money through the website.