Image from my recent trip to Pismo

One of the first hurdles that some newbies run into is that they worry they won't be able to "sell". They are concerned that their writing is not good enough to convince someone to buy, or that they cannot think of a topic that will be profitable for them.

Well, the truth is that your website can make money without selling anything at all. In fact, there's more than one way to do that.

Display Ads

The first way to make money without selling anything - in fact, one of the easiest ways to make money online, is simply to put display ads on your blog. That's going to be things like Google Adsense, Amazon CPM, or Bing Ads. Here's a whole list of options: Display Ad Alternatives To Google Adsense.

The upside to ads like these is that you do not have to write ANY promotional content on your website in order to make money. As long as people visit your website, you can earn. In a previous post, I reported that one website I had was earning $600 per month from ads. (Read How Much Money Can You Make With Adsense?).

Well, that website earned almost $2,000 in December 2017. The "rate" of earnings went from $7 RPM to $43 RPM in less than a year (though average is about $23). It's currently creeping up to about $50 per day, which would be $1500 per month just from using Adsense-style ads on the website. No Selling!

It's not all easy street with Adsense though! The downsides to making money with this method is twofold.

1) It takes a lot of traffic to earn "income" levels of money. The site above gets about 1500 visits per day. To earn $10k I'd probably need 10,000 visits per day or more. That's a lot!

2) People are becoming more and more aware of ad blockers, and they may become "native" to our devices in the futures. Let's face it, most people hate ads. I don't read Forbes any more because they won't let me visit their site with my ad blocker. (Yes, this is hypocritical). So, as a long term strategy, this is a potential danger to your income!

Update 2019

After another year of growth, RPMs and revenue has grown too. Here are my current stats from one website, just based on ad revenue alone (not counting affiliate revenue!).

This website is currently earning between $3,000 - $4,000 per on autopilot. Zero selling involved here. Just ads on content.

Update 2020

Despite the pandemic and an industry-wide drop in ad spending, the site is still earning good money and actually growing. I'm hoping to get this sucker up to $200/day by the end of the year, which would be $70,000+ per year income from ads alone, without counting any of hte affiliate sales!

Helping Instead Of Selling

Though this is more of a "mindset" than a strategy, I recommend you start thinking of your website as an information resource instead of a "store" or a "shopping hub". Though writing great sales copy can seriously increase your conversions, you don't have to do it that way.

People are going to spend money. They want to spend it in an efficient way that gives them the most value for their money (money = time). Instead of trying to convince them to buy something, help them decide which product has the most value.

This could mean they buy the cheapest product because it saves them the most money. It could also mean they buy the most expensive product because it will last longer. What YOU decide is the best value is up to you.

Tailor your content towards writing helpful information that people want to read instead of just trying to get a sale.

You don't have to create a giant button on the bottom of every page that says, "BUY HERE BUY NOW LIMITED TIME OFFER!". If your content is engaging and the product is compelling, people will click.

Example: The [Logitech c920] is a popular and inexpensive camera that will work for most people. However, if you are working with video editing, it seems that a lot of bugs tend to come up during the editing process. [The c930] seems to have worked out those kinks....

So which camera is better? Which one is being sold? Neither. In this paragraph I don't really care which one you buy. The c920 is the cheaper, older version and good enough for most. But for editors, the c930 will be better. I'm simply writing true (according to research and opinion) information and you make your decision from there.

I hope these two methods of making money without selling can inspire some of you to get over that hump of worrying that your niche cannot make money or that your writing isn't good enough to run an online business. It can make money, and your writing is good enough!

Additional Writing Resource: How To Write A 500 Word Article The Easy Way

Are you using Google Adsense or other display ads on your website?

Are you happy with the earnings?