How To Monetise Your Website
Your website could work for you through an affiliate program.
It has never been easier to set up your own website. All you need is to buy some UK2 web hosting with a domain name, add a template, fill it with some content and you’re on your way. Voilà, your very own website is online. If you enjoy sharing your ideas online even if it‘s not about money, we all need the first crucial ingredient to start making things happen: traffic, and preferably lots of it. Making your website visible online and generating traffic is a whole field of its own, but you can check out the basics over on this blog post.
Having a website filled with interesting content that your readers/visitors enjoy is already a great thing, but perhaps by now you are looking at your website as a potential business. Wouldn‘t it be great for it to start earning for you? The question is: how do you monetise your website? There are several ways to do this but number one is affiliate marketing programs.
What is an affiliate program?
Affiliate programs basically are a way of promoting a company‘s brand through your website, for which the website owner receives an agreed fee for doing so. Say, for example, your website is about graphic design, showing people your latest work and that of others is one way of doing this, as it is an area of interest that would naturally be associated with books on graphic design, software, courses and job opportunities. The idea of affiliation arises when businesses in the above mentioned associations show interest to display their products/services on your website, as the people who visit your site have already demonstrated their interest in the area of design; your website‘s traffic is already a powerful pool of potential customers for any brand associated with your field. What happens is that the company who wishes to advertise will form an agreement with you on how you will benefit financially from this association, or as it is known, affiliation.
To begin an affiliation with a company, you will initially need to sign up with them so they can provide you with an account. You will be assigned a unique link with your individual code which you need to use every time you are linking back to the company‘s website. This allows them to track the traffic and clicks coming from your website to their own.
The huge benefit of earning money through your website as an affiliate is that the quality of traffic on your own website is more important than sheer quantity. This means that even if you don‘t have huge numbers of visitors per day, but the visitors you do have genuinely possess an interest in your field, then these visitors make potentially better customers. The conversion rate from interested visitor is likely to be higher than from general traffic. Niche topic websites can be very profitable in this way.
Are all affiliate programs equal?
There are different ways to monetise your site through an affiliate program. The obvious way is to place a banner on your website in a prime location or hot spot (where people‘s eyes tend to gravitate towards). Every time that banner is clicked, the visitor is sent to the company‘s website and will hopefully end up purchasing something. Other ways include writing reviews on the company‘s products and linking to them through social media.
But how do you get paid for this?
There a few ways make money from your affiliation:
- Pay-per-sale: This is the simplest form where you (the website owner) get paid a percentage of the purchase price any customer spends on the website you have sent them to. For example, if someone clicks on the banner on your website (for graphic design courses, say) and continues to purchase such a course, then you receive x percent of that transaction, as agreed in your affiliate program.
- Pay-per-click: In this model the company whom you are sending traffic to will pay you for the number of clicks they receive from visitors coming from your website. This is irrespective of whether the clickthrough individuals make a purchase or not.
- Pay-per-lead: The company will pay for all clickthrough individuals coming from your website who sign up via email (to any featured campaign) on the company‘s website.
Become a UK2 affiliate today, find out more and sign up right here!