When you make the decision to create a website, it naturally means you want to earn money from it. So let us discover together the 10 best tips for making money with a website!
1. Create a Website
It is obviously essential to create a website if you want to make money from it. However, it is important to start with the right foundations when creating your site. This involves choosing the CMS, a good hosting provider, and even, if possible, calling on a professional. Indeed, if website creation is a trade, it is not for nothing.
2. Choose the Right CMS and the Right Host
We could debate for a long time about which CMS to choose to have a functioning website, but the answer is undoubtedly WordPress or Webflow (see WordPress vs Webflow). If you sell products, solutions like Shopify or Prestashop are not optimised for creating a blog. Yet a blog is one of the best sources of income.
If you do not know why to use WordPress, I invite you to browse my article. Otherwise, to summarise, WordPress is the best CMS for referencing. It is also the most flexible CMS, which has magnificent themes for design. If you wish to use this solution, I strongly invite you to use a theme like Elementor or Divi. As for hosting, I recommend Kinsta without hesitation (put my URL here), especially if you want to make money.
As for Webflow, the best CMS for web design, it is undeniable that your site will work. The only negative points are that it will be slightly less flexible than WordPress and that it is rather difficult to get to grips with (it has free training available online directly if needed). As for hosting, Webflow is an all-in-one solution, meaning you get both the website creation software and the hosting. It is also possible to start creating a site on Webflow for free.
Note: For your site you will also need a domain name (the name of your site). Think of something very simple and easy to remember. You can buy the domain name on Google Domains for WordPress; as for Webflow, the platform takes care of everything.
3. To Make Money You Need to Convert
Whatever the type of website — an affiliate site, a product sales site, a service sales site, or otherwise — it is essential to have a site that is appealing and that enables conversion, meaning the person wants to perform an action that will allow you to make money. This involves several optimisations but above all through the design of your site and the user experience it offers.
4. Design: The Most Important Element
If you want to make money with your site, virtually everything comes down to design. According to Blue Corona, 48% of people mentioned design as the number one factor for
deciding the credibility of a website. If internet users do not trust your site, they will not make purchases and will not click your affiliate links. Design should therefore be one of your main criteria when choosing your CMS. The same applies to the theme you choose if you are using WordPress.
User Experience
User experience is probably the 2nd biggest factor for a good site. There are many different practices to improve it. We can notably highlight:
- Think about the user, not about yourself
- Smooth and logical navigation in relation to your conversion funnels
- A design that accurately reflects your field of activity
- Good fluidity in scrolling, well-segmented and spaced text
- Carrying out tests such as A/B testing, heat maps, etc.
- …
5. Other Conversion Techniques
To cite a few other techniques for optimising conversion, it is important to:
- Create good CTAs (calls to action)
- Maintain contact → Newsletters, email follow-ups…
- Use testimonials
- Do copywriting → guarantee successes, etc.
- Use analytics tools like Google Analytics
- Https
- …
6. Do SEO
A site that really makes money is one that ranks on search engines. If you are present on Google for every possible and imaginable query related to what you offer, your revenue will reach great heights. No social network (Instagram, Facebook, Ads…) or Google advertising will be as profitable as SEO. Explaining all the possible reasons would take too long, but know in any case that the average conversion rate of a page on Google displayed organically achieves a score of 10% conversion, whereas for other traffic channels it achieves far less than 1% (moreover, advertising is paid and costs a great deal).
Beyond the constant and continuous traffic that your site will obtain thanks to referencing, here are many other advantages of this practice:
- Targeted traffic that converts (since people are searching for what you offer)
- Internet users have enormous trust in a site that appears every time they search for something on the same theme
- A site visible on search engines means optimising it for user experience
- …
7. Create a Blog
To begin with, creating a blog allows you to optimise your referencing — it is one of the most important pillars for gaining SEO. Moreover, using a blog regardless of the type of your site enables you to obtain traffic on many different keywords and thus obtain a considerable flow of traffic. Furthermore, your blog allows you to gain more potential clients but also to use other forms of remuneration, such as affiliation if you wish, or other forms of advertising.
8. Affiliation
One way to obtain income from your website is to create affiliate links. Affiliate links are links to other sites that you place in your content. If an internet user clicks on the link and purchases a service or product on the other site, you receive a certain percentage of commission. This method allows you to earn a not insignificant and recurring income without having to deal with products, their creation, their delivery — simply by handling the marketing, exactly as a content creator / influencer would do.
9. Advertising
There are other forms of income used on a website to generate money, such as advertising spaces. Here is an example on the Yahoo site:
In general, the platform used is Google Adsense, which automatically generates adverts on your site. But there are also other alternatives, such as Bing and Yahoo’s platform called Media.net. One could also note Amazon’s: Amazon Native Shopping Ads. These platforms offer to insert advertising on your site allowing you to generate money if someone clicks on the advertisement in question. Unlike affiliation, these forms of advertising do not require the purchase of a product or service but only the internet user’s click on the advertisement to earn money. This method does not require presenting the brand since it is created automatically based on the internet user; you simply need to display them.
10. Call on a Professional from the Start
The best advice I can give you is to call on a professional for the creation of your website or a web agency. This allows you to start on the right foundations, avoid a multitude of mistakes, and not waste time unnecessarily. Indeed, you are not a designer, you are not an SEO specialist either, and it will take you several years if you wish to do it alone. Once you have called on a professional, all you will need to do is publish new articles and activate other levers while benefiting from a well-built environment for referencing and a site that converts through its design.