Monetising your website is a great way to turn it from a cash drain into a money maker. Here are some of the ways you can get money from your site without turning it into a bazaar or smothering it with pay-per-click adverts.

Affiliate links

We’re used to clicking links inside content – any Wikipedia page has them all over the place. They’re unobtrusive – they’re blue but they’re not underlined until your mouse hovers over them (easy done with CSS if it’s not already part of your site design).

Most of the time I use a WordPress plugin called WP Shorties that handles everything and makes it look like the links are on my own site.

Amazon is one of the first places people turn to find affiliate links and due to the wide product range it stocks that’s often a good choice.

Clickbank can be a good choice if you’re talking about things that lend themselves to being digitally downloaded but it’s worth vetting the products before offering them to your visitors as the quality can be variable.

Beyond that, sites like Commission Junction, Shareasale, Affiliate Window and lots of others work as ways to join lots of different affiliate programs that are paid out from one place.

Or there are private affiliate programs – I like these in specialist markets as there’s usually less competition. Just do a search for your niche plus the word affiliate and you’ll normally find quite a few. Or check the main page of the site – it’s usually a link somewhere, sometimes called a partner program instead.

Teach something

This is often overlooked.

If you know enough about a subject to create a website on it, you almost certainly know enough to teach about it.

There are various ways to offer teaching (sometimes called coaching) including:

• A simple offer on your site with an email or Skype link
• Specialist sites that join teachers and students together
• Create a tutorial and put it on Udemy
• Create an ebook and offer it for sale on somewhere like Kindle or from your own site or places like Fiverr
• Create a series of videos
• Put up guest posts on various sites

Or, it those seem too difficult initially, start with posts on your blog like this one.

It’s teaching you what to do but is less formal than the other methods.

You’re not limited to your own site – article directories, document sharing sites, video sites all work as places you can teach.

And if you find article writing daunting, check this out and you’ll soon be writing top quality articles fast.

Add a donate option

Wikipedia do this every now and then – it’s most of their funding.

Other sites do this – you can easily set up fixed amount payment buttons on Paypal and just put a comment above them saying something along the lines of “if you found this page useful…”

Build a list

A few years ago, I’d have said the only real way to do this was with an autoresponder service like AWeber,

And you can certainly still do it that way – it’s how I create and communicate with my lists.

But you can also let other people host your lists by encouraging people to subscribe to your YouTube channel, follow you on Twitter, like you on Facebook, connect with you on LinkedIn, follow you on Pinterest, etc.

Those are great ways of building your list without having to pay a monthly subscription fee and without having to worry about deliverability, double opt-ins or all the other things associated with building a list the “normal” way.

Just a thought!

This is just scratching the surface but I hope it’s encouraged you to think outside the box of just putting up banners or blocks of adverts.

Feel free to add other ways you monetise your website in the comments box below.