So far in this online course we have discussed the details about setting up your website, optimizing it for search engines and building traffic – basically getting a strong online presence through your website. With that, the foundation is in place, you have achieved a great deal of success so far.
If you are still with me at this point, you have made a tremendous amount of progress. Congratulations!
In this chapter, I am going to share the two most important things for your growing online presence. If you do these two things right, you will make a lot of passive income and create an ever growing online asset for yourself.
The topics we are going to discuss now in this final chapter are:
- Email List building
- Making money online
Let’s dive into them one by one.
Why You Should Build Your Email List?
If your intent behind your website is to make money and grow your business through your online business, you need to build an email list. You need an ever growing email list.
If you have a lot of traffic coming to your website everyday and you aren’t building an email list, you are wasting a huge opportunity.
Why? The people who visit your website, may never come back again as they may not bookmark your website right away if they landed through a Google search.
Reference: I highly recommend you to go through the following posts about building email lists and using Autoresponder services for that purpose:
- Choosing An Autoresponder For List Building And Email Marketing
- Why Email Marketing Is So Important And Effective
If they like your content and you offer them an opportunity to connect with you by signing up for your email list, they may become part of your online community. That gives you an opportunity to get them to come to your website again. Later, some of those people may become your customers or refer some business to you down the line.
You may be all pumped up about promoting your posts on social media websites like Facebook and Twitter. You may be spending a lot of time on increasing your page views on a daily basis. However, if you are not building your email list, you must realize that you are losing out a great deal of opportunity each and every day.
An email list is the most powerful asset you can create for your online business. If you don’t have an email list, you don’t have a business online.
How To Build Your Email List
The best way to collect email addresses for building your list is to create sign-up forms and place them on your website.
How do you create these sign-up forms?
For that, I highly recommend that you to use a good Autoresponder service. All these service providers provide some beautifully designed sign-up forms that you can place on your website and start collecting email address.
If you noticed on my website, I have a sign-up form on top of my sidebar where I offer this email course for signing up for the course.
In addition, I have an email sign-up form at the end of each post. If people enjoyed the post, they get an opportunity to sign-up to get email updates from my blog each time I post something new.
I have also placed an email sign-up form on my About Page. People who read about me and want to become part of my online community have an opportunity to sign-up.
You signed-up for my email list using one those forms; didn’t you? It is a powerful way to start building a relationship with your visitors.
I wrote a detailed post about choosing the best Autoresponder service depending upon your needs. In this post, I had compared some of the most popular Autoresponder companies with their features.
If you didn’t do it already, I highly recommend you pause here and go through the Autoresponder post and choose the service you like. Here is the link to the post:
With a service like this, you place the final professional touch on your website that establishes the credibility that you deserve. It gives you the power to communicate your message to thousands of people at your will.
This email list will be your biggest asset as your online influence grows. Remember, the larger the list, the larger your influence.
As we now proceed to discuss making money online and monetizing your website. you will see how the email list will help you big time.
Ways To Monetize Your Website And Making Money Online
There is a reason why I kept this topic for the last chapter. I didn’t want you to start a website and a blog for the sole purpose of making money online.
I didn’t start my blog to make money online. Later, as I realized that people appreciated what I shared and that it was legitimate to make money, I slowly started to look into that opportunity.
I realized that if I wanted to give my blog a professional image, I needed to invest money to keep up with the growing traffic and growing brand recognition. It was necessary for me to monetize to make sure that I, at least, wasn’t losing money because of my blog.
Initially, I started monetizing my blog just to make sure it paid for its own expenses. As it grew, as the traffic started to improve, I started to make more from the blog than it cost every month.
You can do it too. There are plenty of opportunities out there for you to start making money online with your website. You can even start today
Let’s discuss some of the methods that are known for producing income right away:
NOTE: For any of these methods to work, you need traffic on your website. The more traffic you have, the better your revenues will be. Note that it will be hard for you to make money with any of these methods if you do not have enough people visiting your website.
Google AdSense
This is one of the most popular and commonly used methods among bloggers of monetizing websites. It is Google’s advertisement program where you can apply to get approved as a publisher for Google and they will run live ads on your website at the locations you allocate for this purpose.
With Google AdSense, you can earn a share of the revenue that Google earns from its AdWords program by displaying ads on your website. When someone clicks on those live ads, you earn roughly up to 70% of the click and Google gets the rest. It is a pay per click program.
I do not run AdSense on my websites at present and I may consider them in future. But I know a lot of people who are using this as an avenue to generate some cash using Google AdSense. To learn more about it and to apply for a free Google AdSense account, check out their website.
Amazon Associates
This is the first method of monetizing a blog that I had employed on my website. I still have a search widget on my sidebar where people can search for products on Amazon and do their purchases.
This is an affiliate program with Amazon where they pay about 4% commission on every sale that happens through your referral. Joining this program is free and they have plenty of sales tools you can employ on your website to generate sales through your referral.
Visit Amazon Associates website for more information about this program and to apply for a free account to explore how you can benefit from this program.
You may also want to check out my blog post about a WordPress plugin to boost your Amazon sales revenues using the Amazon Associate program. I highly recommend you to take a good look at the post.
Other Affiliate Programs
One the best ways to make money is to participate in affiliate programs. Depending on your niche, you can look for some of the bestselling products and services using Commission Junction, ShareASale or ClickBank. These three are the most popular marketplaces for affiliate programs that you can participate in based on your niche.
One caution you should exercise while participating in any affiliate program is, you should only promote the products and services you absolutely believe in. I like to promote a product or a service on my websites only on two conditions:
- I have used the item and I am extremely happy with the item.
- I have someone I genuinely trust using the item and I have a solid testimonial about the item.
If the above is not true, that product or service is not going to be promoted on my website, period.
If you follow this rule, you will have a great reputation and at the same time, your affiliate links will generate good revenues for you because people have trust in you and in your promotions. Be diligent about what you get affiliated with.
Selling Advertising Space
This is another way of monetizing your website that a lot of top bloggers utilize. Basically, what it means is, you can rent a portion of real estate on your website to advertisements. For that charge a monthly, quarterly and annual fees and as long as somebody pays that rent, you let them run their advertisements on your website.
Obviously you will have to decide your rates depending on your traffic, the Alexa Rank, the Page Rank and the location on your website you plan to rent for advertisement.
As you can imagine, the larger the traffic, the lower your Alexa Traffic Rank and the higher your Google Page Rank, the more money you will be able to charge for advertisements.
Write Sponsored Reviews
The value of sponsored reviews has significantly increased in the last couple of years. Many bloggers, product and service companies across diverse industries are willing to pay a good “chunk of change” if you have a strong online presence.
Companies such as SponsoredReviews.com or ReviewMe.com are some of the top marketplaces where you can register your website and secure orders for writing paid reviews on your website. You can get paid anything from $5 to $1000 depending on the niche and the traffic rank of your website.
Why do companies pay you for writing reviews?
For one, they get backlinks when you write a review and link them in your post. And then, they get traffic from your website because of your post. That also means you will really need to have good traffic rank in order to attract advertisers to you.
Bottom Line – Traffic, Traffic, Traffic!
If you want to make money online, you need to have traffic. If you want traffic you need to follow all the best practices we have discussed in this email education program. You need to focus on writing high quality content, have a professional website, a mechanism to collect leads to build your email list, a good social media presence, good SEO and a regularly updated blog.
When you do these things meticulously for about 6 months to one year, you will begin to have good traffic and your website will start climbing the traffic ranks on all channels.
Your biggest battle will be to gain consistent traffic to your website if you have a goal to make money online and grow your business. Consistent traffic is what opens the doors for many opportunities for you, including the money making opportunities we have discussed in this last chapter.
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Over To You. Any Questions?
You have been with me throughout this course. You should have gone through all the previous chapters already. Do you have any questions that you want to ask? Maybe something that is very specific to your career or business goals?
Please let me know if you have any questions by just replying to this chapter and I will be glad to help you get your answers.
Thank you for being with me on this journey. I hope you enjoyed this course and if you can, please share this course with anybody in your network that is looking to start a new website or a new blog. They will appreciate it and you will help me help one more person.
I wish you all the best and look forward to helping you achieve your goals from here on.
