5 best ways to make money from your website in 2018

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If you are new to affiliate marketing here or are struggling to make money from your website, try following my 5 tips to improve your earnings. These are borne from experience in my 18 months here at Wealthy Affiliate.

When I first joined here I knew how to use WordPress so I had a bit of a leg up already. Once you familiarize yourself with WordPress it’s pretty much rinse and repeat for all your posts.

In the beginning, it’s difficult to earn anything especially from organic traffic. As your site starts to grow and you get traffic, you will start to see earnings but it’s a slow process sometimes.

Here are my top tips for generating money from your website:

1) Choose your niche wisely

If you are passionate about your niche it will certainly help when it comes to publishing posts. Remember, you are going to be writing articles on a regular basis and if you’re not interested in your niche it will be difficult to maintain focus.

Also, think carefully before choosing a niche. Is it desirable? How desirable is it? Are people desperately looking for items in this niche?

My niche is UK TV for expats abroad. That covers a fairly broad range of TV categories/genres but I know for sure that English and Scottish football is very much desirable for expats overseas.

It’s one thing writing about it but how can it make money?

Another thing to consider is the commissions. In the beginning, I focused on Amazon and I published a lot of reviews for TV boxes and anything else related to my niche.

Sure, I made money but it was never going to be enough to make a huge difference. This was because the commissions were so low. Don’t get me wrong, Amazon does work but it in my experience you need to make sure the commissions are worth it.

If you are in the Making Money niche then Wealthy Affiliate is one that offers great commissions. It took me more than a year before I found a similar affiliation with great commissions. Oh for hindsight!

2) Diversify your income streams

Think outside the box. Don’t be the same as everyone else. If you only have one income stream it can be difficult scaling it up and it will take a lot more effort.

I have 3 general income streams that I utilize on all of my posts (more or less). I’ll try and give you an example of this. Let’s say you write a post about watching BBC1 programs on catch up.

My main targeted income stream is my IPTV SUBSCRIPTIONS. This service offers a catch up for BBC1 programs. But there’s more than one way to skin a cat.

If the reader isn’t interested in purchasing a subscription plus hardware then they may be looking for alternatives. A VPN SUBSCRIPTION can also allow you to access catch up on BBC1 and bypass geo-blocks.

If they choose to take an IPTV subscription they will probably need hardware. This is where a TV BOX is required to connect to the TV. These can be purchased through Amazon or Shareasale affiliations.

The 3 items underlined above are my 3 income streams so you can see why it’s important to offer alternatives to suit all budgets. All 3 items above are also relevant to my niche.

3) Get busy adding content

If you’re only publishing a few posts per month it ain’t gonna cut the mustard. If you are really serious about making money you need to get busy.

Content is King. Make no mistake about that. In the first year, my target was 200 posts but I fell just short at 192 if I remember correctly. That still equates to an average of 16 posts per month.

Pretty much all my posts were minimum 1000 words but I now try to write more than that. It’s only when you add content and start getting rankings that you will see organic traffic grow.

Traffic means prizes. If you’re not getting traffic you won’t see your earnings improve. Of course, there’s other factors like gaining trust and writing style but you can learn all that here at Wealthy Affiliate in the training.

As Kyle says, some of your posts won’t rank despite you being confident that they will. Get over it. At first it’s hard to accept but you have to move on and forget about it.

I spent a lot of time trying to get one of my posts to rank and it has over 100 comments but it still wouldn’t rank. I no longer waste time like this. I prefer to add another post.

4) Build your email list

There may come a time when your sales slow down for one reason or another. It happened to me when I had to switch to another affiliation. I was at my wit’s end and considered walking away.

But I had continued to build my email list so when I switched affiliation to another company I realized I could contact all my old customers through my list.

This gave me an opportunity to reach them and tell them about my new IPTV service. Sure, not all of them wanted to change but a lot of them did and I now have more customers on my new IPTV service than my old one.

An email list effectively saved my business and allowed me to scale up. It’s true what they say, the money really is in the list. I can also offer my customers special offers when I run them and this has proved to be very fruitful.

Being in control is important especially if you have your own online shop. I can now sell my products from my shop and promote everything through my email list.

Not sure where to start? Check out Jay’s training webinar below.

https://my.wealthyaffiliate.com/training/email-marketing-2018-1st-steps-to-list-building

5) Find your focus and use it

This sounds a bit general but allow me to explain a bit more. I want to tell you about my experience and hopefully you can use it to your advantage one day.

After writing quite a lot of posts about IPTV subscriptions I suddenly realized that I couldn’t see a way forward. I was running out of ideas for these types of posts.

For example, there’s only so many times you can write about the “best IPTV subscription”. After a few posts it starts to become repetitive and that means duplicate content which I don’t like.

I was in a quandary but then it struck me. I could write about TV boxes or other posts related to TV and still advertise my IPTV service. It’s a bit like promoting Wealthy Affiliate.

You write a post about a scam and offer Wealthy Affiliate as an alternative. Call it clickbait of whatever but it allowed me to continue to focus on my IPTV subscriptions.

My email list also helps with this because my opt-in forms promote my IPTV too. For example, see my popup below. This appears on all my posts when the reader is about to exit the page.

As you build out your site and your content grows, eventually you will find a focus if you are using multiple income streams. One of them will come to the fore and you should focus on that for the future.

Wrap up

That’s pretty much all folks! I hope you can use these ideas to make money from your website and scale up your business. Remember, there will come a time when you think about quitting but you should never give up, even if it means changing your strategy.

If you signed up to Wealthy Affiliate but you're not sure about going Premium, you won't be able to scale up your business. You have to invest in yourself and signing up to Premium is an investment for the future. YOUR investment.

If you appreciated this blog please press that like button and leave a comment. Muchos gracias!

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Recent Comments

40

Spot on craig

Cheers Gerard

Very good thanks Craig...What do people say your niche is King and your content is queen. Quality content sums it all up.

You better love your nitche or she won't give you any loving...

Love to have a solid e-mail list!!! and I will...

Cheers Thomas, yes it just takes time to build that list and find a method that works for you. It took me almost a year to fine tune it.

Thanks Craig, I bookmarked it.

Cheers Nick

Thanks, Craig. I added your post to my favorites.
Grant

Great, you're welcome Grant.

Nice advice.

Thanks

Dear Sir thanks a lot for the great post its really helpful

Cheers

This is one of my main focus now. Thanks for that special information

You're welcome!

Thanks for sharing that. The great thing about my niche is that I can create my content pretty easily as I can post about my experiences with the type of products I promote and it is VERY easy to post my own images and videos rather than searching online for images.

The only downside is something that you've mentioned and that's the commission side as it is very low for places like Amazon, GameStop and Best Buy. I can't seem to find an affiliate program that offers much higher commission percentages either, but I really love this niche and I know it is something I can constantly come up with content for (keeping focus has been an entirely different matter though).

Cheers Brian, low commissions were my problem for a long time and effectively halted any scaling up. Hindsight is a great thing. If I knew then what I know now I would have done things differently.

I guess the Swag training will finally drag me into this email list building stuff:))

It saved my life ;-)

Yes, I believe you, and I believe you told me so before too:)

Working on #3 and #5. Thank you for sharing your insights.

Great stuff!

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