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How Do Blogs and Websites Make Money Online?

Are you wondering how websites make money? You are about to find out! There are a lot, I mean a lot of ways to make money with a blog or a website. If you are wondering how to monetize your site, you’ve come to the right place.

I’ll discuss all the strategies and methods the most successful websites use to generate income. When you are done reading this post, you will be aware of how a website can make money and you will be armed with the knowledge and tools necessary to convert your site into a cash machine.

Before we start, I’d like to reiterate as I have. First and foremost, provide value to your readership. Making money will be easy once you’ve created a loyal readership in the right niche. If you want to create a cash cow of a site, you need to pick an industry that is thriving and you know a lot about this subject or are willing to learn. It also helps if there is less competition in search engine ranking in that niche. You can use a tool like SEMRush to help you with that. But enough of that, let’s look at how to make money online!

You’ve hit the jackpot by creating a high/medium traffic site in the right niche. But we have to dig a bit before we hit gold, using the right revenue generation model can make an enormous difference to your revenue numbers.

Generally, site owners make money by

  1. Selling your own stuff (services, products of their making both digital & non-digital, eBooks and other premium content)
  2. Advertising & Affiliate Income (selling and promoting services and products made by others)

At the end of it all, it comes down to one of those mentioned above: You either sell your products and services or act as a conduit to sell another’s product or services.

Let’s look at how you can monetize your blog or site.

How Do Websites Make Money?

1. Sell Advertising Space

Sell banner ads to make money with website

You can sell advertising space through banner adverts to businesses and people. It isn’t quite simple, though, you get paid differently by different advertisers.

CPM – Pay Per Impression Advertising

Your website receives revenue as and when you generate impressions for the sponsor. This rewards a website for every thousand impressions that it generates. Depending on your sponsor’s industry, you may get paid anywhere between $1~$7 per thousand impressions. The most well-known CPM advertising network is BuySellAds.

PPC – Pay Per Click Advertising

You make pennies every time someone clicks on a banner or link. It generally works out to a higher amount per click when compared to CPM but it might depend on your niche.

You can run adverts on your site with one of the many ad networks. Google AdSense, Monumetric, Rev Content, Undertone and AdBlade are a few options available.

For those of you who use WordPress as a platform to run their websites, you can try out BuySellAds. If you’d like a free plugin, check out Advanced Ads.

Selling advertisements via contextual ad networks is best when you have a site that covers a large spectrum of subjects. If your site targets a specific niche or keywords, you’ll find that Affiliate Marketing is probably a better money-making strategy for your site.

Also known as CPA or Cost Per Action, Affiliate Marketing is an extremely profitable way to generate revenue for your website. The section of Affiliate Marketing goes into a lot of detail, rightly employed it can make your site very profitable relative to running CPM or PPC advertisements. It’s also tougher to utilize, so let’s talk about affiliate marketing.

2. Affiliate Marketing

Make money with affiliate marketing

As the name suggests, your website is an affiliate for someone else’s product or service.

How does affiliate marketing work?

You promote a certain product on your site, your visitor identifies the product as an effective solution to their necessities and purchases the product. You get a predetermined percentage or fixed commission for each purchase made by a visitor or reader who passes by your site to discover the product or service and then purchases on the affiliate sponsor’s website. This works because the company that sponsors the affiliate program finds a new customer, your visitor found a new product and you get a commission. All three parties involved end up with something they might not have had otherwise. You work as a middleman between buyer and seller and get paid.

Affiliate marketing campaigns produce new leads for the sponsor and generate commissions for your site effectively only when the campaign’s niche is close to yours. The further the distance between your niche and the campaign’s niche, the less effective the affiliate marketing efforts.

  • Tip #1: Keep the niche of any affiliate campaign as close to your site niche as possible. Ad networks ensure that the right adverts are displayed on your site with PPC & CPM, but with CPA you need to find the right affiliate to endorse.

Write honest content/reviews, never go over the top and recommend a product or service you have not used. It is okay to verify the features of a product and write a dispassionate review. To give a positive review for any product, use it first or read extensively about the product, reviews provided by domain authoritarians who have a history of being impartial and fair in their assessments (Your eventual aim should be to make your site in their image). And be informative, add value, and help your readers find the best products. If you’ve used the product better still, be insightful.

  • Tip #2: Be honest & informative. And if you have used the product, be insightful. Else you stand to lose your reader’s trust and you lose revenue.

Write about alternate choices. Never recommend a single product, always offer a choice to the reader. Your site’s business is to inform your readers. Aigars writes about 20~50 themes in our collection roundups to help provide choice and that’s for free themes. The choices provided should cover as wide a net as possible when you expect your reader pay for a product.

  • Tip #3: Present the reader with alternate choices. This doesn’t mean you can not recommend the best choices, but try to include as many alternatives for your reader as possible.

This is going to be a bit strange, but bear with me! People look for your opinion, put your reputation on the line by recommending one or two products above other choices, but only if you can identify them as the very best options for your readership.

Recommend what’s best for your reader, not yourself. Different affiliate programs have different commissions, some much more profitable than others. But these more profitable programs may not necessarily have the best solutions to your reader’s necessities and problems.

  • Tip #4: A small piece of a bigger pie is better than, well you know how it goes!

Disclose affiliate income, always inform your reader that you receive a commission for recommended products. Let your reader know that, this is how your site generates income to pay for writers, website development and hosting. I am sure they’ll understand.

  • Tip #5: Disclose affiliate marketing on your site on pages with affiliate links.

Do not push products on your readers. Stop cramming your content with multiple links, try to keep it to a minimum. It might turn off someone, allowing your reader to be skeptical about someone who profits from their suggestions. Never allow anyone to feel you are merely trying to sell them things.

Always attempt to connect with your audience by being informative, insightful and helpful. After you’ve described the problem that you’re attempting to solve which should be one that your readers can relate to, only then should you proceed to promote a product as a possible solution. I think subtlety is underrated.

Remember that affiliate marketing can help make much money if you target the right niche. Your site should be relatable to that niche, but your niche should have sufficient traffic from the specific niche. Affiliate marketing tends to be very targeted, it will not work if there is no money in that market, to begin with.

Before you run an affiliate marketing campaign on your site, try reading about the affiliate programs offered by the ten biggest players in your industry. Look at their customer numbers and their commission percentages. See if the numbers make sense and whether affiliate marketing is right for your site’s niche.

MyThemeShop offers a 55% commission on any new customer you bring to them. We use their affiliate program on our website and highly recommend it.

In comparison, Elegant Themes offers a 50% commission, and StudioPress offer a commission of 35%. If either of them had sales exceeding MyThemeShop greatly, they would make for better affiliate options. Still, given that there isn’t too much of a difference, you will be better of using all three affiliate programs. This way you can present your readers with multiple choices.

Check out for how long the tracking is valid when you bring new traffic to these sites under affiliate programs. This also known as the tracking cookie period. Most reasonable affiliates have periods of 60 days or greater. After that any sale made as a result of traffic your site brought them, doesn’t earn you a commission.

My examples may have been specific to the WordPress niche because I am familiar with WordPress. The commissions vary from sector to sector as the size of the deals vary. Look at all affiliate programs and identify the likelihood that they will generate a sustainable cash flow that builds over time. And test a few of them out before you settle on one or two of them.

Bluehost has a great affiliate program for many reasons, rather than boring you with “Why?”. I’d like to talk about Pat Flynn who made $424,800 which accounts for about 40% of his site’s revenue in 2022 via BlueHost’s affiliate program and about $670,000 from all affiliate programs. Now remember his website has multiple sources of income and apart from his BlueHost affiliate program all his other income sources are at best $50,000 and not more. I’d recommend that you look at Pat’s site and his income statements, you’ll notice that despite the diversity in his income sources he makes about 65% of his income via affiliate programs. This should quite clearly illustrate the power of affiliate marketing. Remember that we might receive a commission if you purchase through these links.

A Few Things About Advertising – PPC, CPM and CPA

  • Tip #6: Banner adverts are not your best option, their click through rates are rather low compared to in-content links. But if you aren’t using all the space on your website, you could add banner advertisements to your revenue.
  • Tip #7: Cut out the middleman, many ad networks take out a chunk of your revenue. Remember direct deals are always better than going through an intermediary. It’s also a lot harder.
  • Tip #8: Never crowd your content out with too many advertisements banners or in-text links.
  • Tip #9: Use a heat map plugin to determine which parts of your website attract the most attention. Place your adverts appropriately.
  • Tip #10: While plain banner adverts (Not based on PPC, CPM & CPA) pay on a monthly or bi-monthly basis and offer some income security, even if your traffic doubles or triples, you still get paid the same. PPC, CPM & CPA based advertising on the other pay based on how well your site does and how well it converts traffic into sales/impressions.

3. Sell Your Product/Service

Sell your products online

Creating a website to generate revenue is primarily based on projecting yourself and the people who post content on your site as domain experts. Sometimes it is very easy to prove that you know your stuff, an example would be a WordPress theme developer and writer. Aigars writes a great deal about themes and gets a lot of interaction because he is a pretty awesome web developer.

Projecting yourself as a domain expert is crucial as it is what your site relies on to generate revenue. It is aided by creating products in that particular niche or the alternative offering services in the same niche or even a related niche.

Of course, this works both ways web developer turns writer and the other way around, the same applies to any niche.

We publish great content about WordPress – Caching plugins, Themes, Hosting, etc. You can read more about it here. It helps boost credibility and therefore helps with product sales.

  • Tip #11: Generating good and most importantly useful content will help project authority and domain expertise and bring more sales.

This is not limited to digital products like themes, it can be extended to almost any industry for which there is sufficient interest on the internet. Companies of any niche or sector can sell their own products via the internet.

  • Tip #12: Selling stuff services/products and generating good content on the same industry/niche/sector brings in more visitors and as a result more prospective customers to your site.

You may have noticed by now selling products and generating useful content go hand in hand. One aids the other and vice versa.

While selling your products and services creating an affiliate program will help sell your product better. You will obtain a greater reach by sharing a percentage of your product’s price for a sale that may have gone unrealized otherwise.

Some people may be reluctant to share their profits, but they fail to realize that the profits you share would not have been realized at all had there not been an incentive for your affiliate to share and recommend your products.

Here you will find more about platforms that you can use to sell your products.

4. Enable Directories On Your Website

Make a directory website using WordPress

The online version of paid classifieds and an easy way to make money. The best thing about directories is you have no limit to the number of companies, businesses or freelancers who can list themselves.

You can charge a flat rate or a commission on business your site directs towards the sponsors. And depending on your blog’s primary focus, directories are a handy tool to help your users. You could create a directory for the real estate agents for a real estate blog.

  • Tip #13: It can be a helpful feature for your readers, especially in primary services based niche or industry.

For WordPress users, a few handy WordPress themes to help you out. Although, I wouldn’t recommend a directory theme if that isn’t the crux of your site.

You can use Business Directory Plugin to add the functionality to your site or get some custom web dev work for your site which is preferable.

To learn more about making a directory using WordPress, please read our detailed guide.

5. Job Boards

Job board section on your website to make money

This idea is similar but polar opposite to creating a directory on your site. Job Boards can be an extremely useful source of site revenue wherein the person who posts the job pays a monthly fee for their job posting.

jobs-for-bloggers

Pro Blogger is an excellent example of a site with a very profitable job board system. When I checked out their job board, they had about 30 job openings advertised on 4 different pages, which means about 120 job postings. That translates to roughly $6000 revenue per month. To start your own job board you can use any of these WordPress themes and plugins.

  • Tip #14: Generating revenue with directories and job boards is smart because you have very little work and get a lot of revenue. Both methods involve significant web development work but require very little effort for its upkeep.

6. Offer Sponsored Reviews

make money using sponsored product reviews

Websites with reasonable clout and domain authority often receive requests from small businesses to post reviews of their new products. You can offer sponsored reviews for a fee. We offer sponsored reviews on ColorLib. While publishing content as part of a sponsored review is okay, you should never offer your opinion for sale. Sponsored reviews bring in a good amount of cash for relatively little work.

  • Tip #15: Sponsored reviews are a great way to make money! But please add a sponsored review disclosure whenever possible, sometimes sponsors make request that you not reveal that it is a sponsored review. I feel you should provide a dispassionate review with a disclosure.

Even if you do not disclose sponsored reviews, most websites will have a sponsored review section. This will indicate to your reader that you do write sponsored reviews. Your readers may get upset if you do not disclose sponsored reviews. But I guess they really can not complain much about it, if you are honest in your product reviews.

On Colorlib, we offer paid reviews at $560. Not only do we get the benefit of the cash, but sometimes we get our hands on a product that hasn’t yet hit the market, which is an added benefit. And review content generally tends to be in-depth content about specific products, which almost all readers love.

  • Tip #16: Sponsored reviews help you get your hand on products that haven’t yet reached the market. Many gaming-related YouTube channels receive access to games as beta testers and some tech websites can get their hands on new laptops and graphic processing units before, they hit the market. This can offer a significant edge over your competitors.

7. Create Premium Content

make money by selling premium / member only content

You can craft content that is very difficult to come by on the internet and package it for sale. It can be an eBook or an interactive tutorial/course. You need to provide free content to entice the audience into buying your content. Also, it helps a lot if you’re specific about what the premium content will teach or reveal to the buyer.

  • Tip #17: Premium content will not work if you offer something available for free on the internet.

I’m currently trying my hand at Data Science and I want to learn R. I’ve used Data Camp, they have an awesome strategy. You get access to the first part of their course for free. After that, you’ll need to pay for access to the subsequent sections.

For premium content, you can choose either one-time purchase models or recurring subscription models for continued access to content and support.

  • Tip #18: With a sales models for paid content, I believe a freemium + subscription hybrid model is best for most content. They have shown tremendous success. The freemium App Store model accounts for 90% of all revenue in Asia. Many WordPress plugins & theme houses work with freemium and subscription models, again they’ve been very successful.

Write a great book

Good writers and journalists run most successful blogs and websites. This can also include web developers, programmers, search engine optimization, marketing specialists who’ve become good writers. Many highly ranked websites are run by people with years of experience in their chosen field. Sometimes a single post is not big enough to convey all the information you have to offer.

However, a book is a great channel for delivering a wellspring of useful information to your readers. After you’ve exhibited considerable domain/niche expertise and your site receives some traffic, a book can be a great idea.

eBooks are a useful idea, even if you decide not to monetize them. But,  the best thing to do would be to provide limited and full access for a small fee.

Useful information is hard to come by and a book preferably was born out of personal experience sells well. Generally, ebooks provide some form of self – improvement information (How To Get Ask A Woman Out?, Grow Your Blog By 300% With These 3 Steps) at least many of them do.

  • Tip #19: These books offer actionable insight for real people to help themselves personally or professionally.

If you feel providing limited access will create a disgruntled readership, divide the book into multipart series and offer one for free. As I mentioned before the freemium model is the best way to go regarding paid content.

  • Tip #20: Besides monetization incentives, books also help develop and solidify your brand. Make sure you get just right, it can be a very powerful marketing tool and enable you to reach a greater audience.

Webinars

Make money with Webinars

Writing useful content for your users is great, but webinars are powerful. It doesn’t just rely on a sense of vision. Webinars can help set your site apart from your competitors. You shouldn’t underestimate how useful it can be for your business.

Webinars are way better than just plain text when educating and informing people. Connecting with people is difficult, reading content and watching webinars are worlds apart.

Host one or two free webinars and teach people something. You can then teach people something and you can proceed to sell them the remaining webinars in the series. You can use a service like GoToWebinar.

  • Tip #21: Try making YouTube videos for practice, perfect your delivery and get it just right for your webinar series.

The same can be said for podcasting as well.

8. Email Marketing

make money by monetizing your email list

Building a strong mailing list is always useful for any blog as it helps build your readership. You do not have to rely entirely on social media shares and search engine rankings. If they sign up for weekly or monthly newsletters, people will visit your site long after their first visit. Most sites with loyal readership have fat email lists.

You can employ email marketing to sell products as an affiliate or you can sell your own products. Email marketing is a powerful tool to build sustainable revenue and traffic for your site.

  • Tip #22: An email list is probably a group of people with very similar characteristics and demographic features which is why they’ve subscribed to your site’s blog. You can certainly expect a better conversion when selling products via emails.

Use AWeber or MailChimp to help build your mailing list.

  • Tip #23: Using pop-ups effectively will increase your subscriber count dramatically in just one or two months.

How to send professional-looking emails? You can find out here.

How Colorlib Makes Money?

We get this question a lot and there is no simple answer to this because we combine many things and here are the main ones in no particular order:

  • Selling our own themes, templates, plugin mockups and other downloadable products.
  • Affiliate income from theme, plugin, and hosting sales.
  • Selling banner places
  • Display ads such as Google AdSense
  • Paid product reviews

We try to monetize our website using various methods but keep ads and other promotional content to a minimum to keep our users happy.

Final Thoughts

I hope this answers your question about how do websites make money. I’ve described some of the best revenue-generating solutions for websites and blogs. I can not, however, predict how well each advertising method will work. Only you can be the judge of that. And the only way you can do that is to try things out!

But before you start advertising, ask yourself “Am I providing something valuable for my reader ?, Is there something new under the sun in my content ? “. People will trust you and purchase the products you throw at them if the answer to the previous two questions is a resounding “Yes!”.

Remember to exceed the reader’s expectations when selling your products and premium content. I’d recommend the freemium model for all your premium content. In a freemium model, you offer a significant chunk of your content. But, you just need enough content to entice someone to purchase it. But suppose it is a digital product like a plugin or any other product that requires continued assistance, support and updates. In that case, a subscription model is a better choice.

And as for advertising on behalf of others, via any previously discussed methods. Ask yourself, “Would I buy this service/product I am recommending if I have the same requirements as my readers?”. It’s far easier to convince someone else to purchase something if you are convinced about the quality of the product you are recommending.

Don’t get stuck on any one method of revenue generation. Be sure to try out each of them for three months. Never more than three or four at a time, and make sure you give each monetization technique a fair chance, give each its own space.

If you insert all affiliate advertising in the form of in-content links, you can not possibly compare it to a banner that is always on display on every page of your site. Place all monetization techniques equally and give them a fair trial. It may take a while, but it’ll be well worth the effort!

No matter how many statistics you read about advertising, no one can predict the outcome of your website. You need to try things out and perfect your ideal hybrid of revenue-generating techniques.

I hope you found the post useful 🙂 Subscribe to Colorlib for more of the same!

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Frontend web developer and web designer specializing in WordPress theme development. After graduating with BA he self-taught front-end web development. Currently has over 10 years of experience in mainly CSS, HTML (TailwindCSS, Bootstrap), JavaScript(React, Vue, Angular), and PHP. Obsessed with application performance, user experience, and simplicity.

This Post Has 37 Comments

  1. Hey,

    I have been trying really hard to make money from AdSense and so far I have 12 difference websites but none of them are performing good. Do you have any suggestions for micro niche websites and their monetization?

    1. April,

      Thank you for your question!

      There is a huge discussion on micro niche website that you can read on this comment thread. I have answered numerous questions and shared my insight about AdSense in general and I think this discussion will get you a better idea about small websites.

      I used to have dozens of small micro niche website myself and all of them were based on exact match domain names and I was trying really hard to make these website to rank on Google. Most of them succeeded but only for few months until Google found out what I was doing. Everything ended with a major Google update that completely destroyed my “business” and SEO strategy. Many webmasters still make micro niche websites but I strongly recommend to avoid this practice as of today. The thing is that Google have become much smarter and they are now using artificial intelligence to evaluate your website and Google can easily spot that your website is made for pure profit and you don’t care about your readers.

      It is acceptable to make micro niche website but only if you can offer content that it is not possible to find elsewhere. If you are writing a post about “how to make money” it will never ever rank on Google because there are millions of articles about this topic written before. However, you can get much more creative and write your article titled “how to make money from birch syrup”. Most likely no one has ever covered this topic and being first is a huge advantage. Another option is to offer better content than anyone else. We can use the same “how to make money” article as an example. if you write another post 500 words long it will never get noticed by Google. But you can be more creative and make a huge study out of it and write a 10,000+ long article with graphics, images, spreadsheets and much more. That way you dramatically increase your chance for getting noticed by Google. Writing articles like these will take you several weeks or even months but it’s doable.

      For Colorlib we used both of my mentioned strategies. First of all we cover topics that no one have covered before and second we do a huge research for each article and comment we write. Some of our articles are as long as 20,000 words. Which means that you could create 40 average length articles out of each post we have. But we have 200 of these articles which means that we have wrote more content than you can find on any printed book out there. The best thing about it – Google loves it and our readers loves it too as they spend hours on our website researching.

      My suggestion for you would be to kill all your website and create a one large website. From there you will have much more time to write content and promote your website because now you spend countless hours on maintenance alone and that’s not efficient. Large websites are much better received by Google and it is going to be much easier to monetize your website.

      Let me know if you have any questions about website monetization and I will be happy to help.

  2. Good day
    Here is how make money in Russia. [link removed]

    1. Alexey,

      This article is about how to make money from your website. Article to which you linked outlines local business opportunities and specially in Russia. Like I said, this is not relevant to this article.

      If you have some better ideas how to make money from website, even websites that are in Russian, please let me know. I would be very interested to know more about online business in Russia.

  3. Thanks for these tips! i have been running a WordPress blog for a while now and wanted to really start writing seriously on it and making a bit of spending money, and this was super helpful. I will definitely be keeping your advice in mind.

    1. Maddie,

      Thank you for your feedback!

      The main thing is to get some traffic before you can start to think about how to make money. Usually bloggers and webmasters create their website just to make money online and don’t care about their readers. I see this pattern on your website as well. You don’t have any traffic and have a very little content but have done everything to create a landing page and try to promote it everywhere on your blog. This approach never works as planned because users don’t like to read blogs that are trying to sell things to them. Once you gain some credibility as a blogger you can try to monetize your traffic.

      You have already made this mistake and there is no way to go back but you can still turn your website into a successful business but it is going to be much harder than before. You need to create a proper content strategy for your blog. Now you have published random articles that are not related to one another. You have to keep your articles around the same topic and link from one article to another to keep your users engaged. Also make sure to write a more unique articles because ones that you have written now can be found on thousands of other blogs with different phrasing but the same idea. For new bloggers it’s really difficult because you have to either write about subjects that no one have covered before or write a much longer article. Not just make your articles long and useless but provide valuable content such as research, scientific data and other things that can’t be found elsewhere. It’s not easy but there is no other way to get started in so competitive niche with so short keywords. It just won’t work.

      Once you have these long and informative articles out, try to avoid any affiliate links banners or links to your landing pages. That way you will gain credibility and other bloggers will want to link to your articles. Once you get those links, social shares and other mentions you can start to think about monetization.

      If you have any questions about how to get traffic to your blog please let me know and I will be happy to help.

  4. Great article. If it’s not a secret, how colorlib is making money?

    1. Ronak,

      Thank you for your question! Colorlib makes money from affiliate products, AdSense, direct banner sales, sponsored reviews and paid listings. For more information about how Colorlib is monetized you might want to read this article again as we have covered most important aspects.

  5. Hugh Campbell says:

    One thing I have to note, that will be sending you to my Personal Blocklist in Chrome, is that you push Avada in many of your lists. OK, you get an affiliate cut from ThemeForest, but I have to say that the theme’s really not worthy of a top 10 list of anything, except maybe a ’12 Most Bloated Themes of 2015′ list.

    Its inclusion weakens any other suggestions you make, as in ‘if they recommend Avada, are all these other themes as ordinary?’

    1. Hugh,

      Thank you for your comment!

      I see that you have very little to no knowledge about WordPress themes and WordPress performance. Avada is a multipurpose theme which means that you can create any website using this theme without writing a single line of code. Main target audience for this theme are non tech savvy users who want to create their own unique website without hiring a developer. This theme does exactly that and does it incredibly well. It doesn’t load unnecessary JavaScript and CSS files in case you aren’t using them. Theme is well optimized to recognize what features are used and what aren’t.

      WordPress by default is slow as there is a lot of thing that happens behind the scene. It is much more complex piece of software than Drupal that you are using on your website but it is also more fool-proof. WordPress has far better user interface and it empowers users to add additional functionality using single one click installation and updates. While Drupal has grown over the years it is still developer focused CMS and I can’t and never will recommend it for regular users.

      Like I said, WordPress is slow but it is much more non tech savvy user friendly. However, you can make WordPress fast and you can see that by checking performance for Colorlib. While we have close to 2 million visitors, thousands of registered users, tens of thousands of comments, several thousand forum threads and 50GB of images, yet our website loads noticeably faster than your tiny Drupal website. How? Because I know how server, WordPress and website performance works.

      There are three main ways how you can make WordPress fast and even when using Avada or any other multipurpose (and I quote: “bloated”) WordPress theme:
      1. Install and properly configure W3 Total Cache, WP Rocker, of WP Super Cache plugins. This is the best solution for beginners and non-skilled users. It will make your website noticeably faster.
      2. Use a proper hosting provider which has its own cache specially built to server WordPress. SiteGround and WPEngine are our favorite. This way your website will be even faster than using cache plugins because these hosting providers have server side caching using Nginx.
      3. Create your own VPS that has its own caching and optimization in place. This is what we have done with our website and this solution is not for everyone. It requires month of testing, ongoing monitoring and optimizations and lot of knowledge about how servers work.

      What I can see from your sites and your client sites you are not familiar with any of my above mentioned concepts. Your safest bet is to go with managed WordPress hosting or else you will be back blaming great WordPress themes for their performance.

      1. Hugh Campbell says:

        Thanks for stopping by, did you get a chance to read this one?

        I’m a fan of caching too, I use it on my WP deployments, and all 3 suggestions you make are valid re: improving performance. But a well-written theme shouldn’t necessarily require a reverse proxy, tuned up caching or even a hand-crafted VPS in order to perform acceptably vs the amount of traffic it serves.

        That you suggest all 3 as possible solutions for multipurpose theme like Avada seems to be at odds with their being multipurpose products pitched to non-technical users. Paying for dedicated WordPress hosting or configuring caching plugins are unlikely to be at the forefront of their mind when they make the initial purchase. Can you see that disconnect?

        1. Hugh,

          SiteGround is costs the same as any other shared hosting provider but they have it’s own WordPress caching in place. They used to have reverse proxy style caching using Varnish but recently they made a switch to Nginx caching. I believe that they are using fastcgi cache which is much better suited for smaller websites than Varnish. Varnish is great for well trafficked websites and for small websites there are little to no benefit.

          Many themes does generate numerous thumbnails that’s why I recommend to use get a hosting with at least 1GB of storage for a very small websites. I don’t know any hosting that would offer so tiny storage any more. Thumbnails are not a bloat because it doesn’t slow down your website in any way as images, once generated, aren’t touched by WordPress unless they are called by user. It is much better solution that generate images each time they are requested.

          Without caching WordPress default themes such as TwentyFifteen will load slower than Avada with a proper caching. If you aren’t using any caching with WordPress I feel sorry for your users. And there is no excuse even for non tech savvy because SiteGround can take care of you for a very reasonable price.

          1. Forgot to mention about inline styling. Have you ever viewed source of Google.com homepage? Be ready for surprise. Everything on their website is loaded inline. Because new request are much slower than already established downloaded and the entire website can be downloaded with one take.

  6. This is so helpful! I am trying to get traffic and money out of my blog and this is the perfect advice on how to do it. I can’t wait to reap the benefits of these tips.

    1. Shae,

      Your website definitely needs some work. I see that you have done an incredible job to monetize it but you have forgot about traffic and users experience. These are two things to which you should pay a very close attention to succeed in this very competitive niche.

  7. Very impressive post. I have a couple of friends, and they are selling DIY stuff online. It’s a sure way to make money!

    1. Helena,

      It is always more lucrative to sell your own services and good online than reselling something as you provide much more added value therefore can get higher margins. But still it is possible to make money from your website even if you don’t have your own product or service. There are tons of things you can do and make money and some of theme are almost unbelievable 🙂

  8. Jalel Tounsi says:

    Thank you very much for the article and all the intel you shared with us. I recently created my first website and would like to make some extra money from it as currently I am really struggling with it and am still losing money on it.
    I highly recommend this article.

  9. Really this is a must read for anyone looking for how to make money from his website or blog. One thing that I respect this article for is how truthful it is about various ways of making money online. No hype whatsover to entice anyone. It’s all about real works that pays. Thanks for the info.

    1. Amaechi,

      The main thing is to think about your website as business and not some sort of “get rich quick scheme”. Find what readers low, build brand and you will easily monetize your traffic. The time has long passed since you could publish scrapped content, put some ads and make living out of it. Now you should be a website just like you would do with a real business.

  10. Nice introduction to the topic. I have a beginners question.
    I guess the blog receives money every time someone clicks on many of the links in the text, like the one in the third paragraph. Are these links also PPC ads? Can you create them with Adsense? If not how can I create this ad/link in WordPress?
    Thanks

    1. Kenny,

      It’s not how it works. AdSense offer banner ads that are bot rich (images) or plain text but they are not incorporated inside your text but are standalone blocks in predefined sizes. You are not even allowed to trick users to make them thing that these are not ads by asking for clicking ads or placing them too close to buttons and actual links. You will get banned really fast.

      However, there are few ways how you can monetize links. First is by doing affiliate marketing but in that case only small number of any of visitors will convert because they have to actually buy something from that site for you to get commission. Or there are Infolinks and other similar services that offers in-context advertising. The problem is that they almost nothing for clicks.

      Therefore I would recommend to create a real website that is not meant to make quick profit but instead offer some added value and you will find a way to monetize it. Build website just to get money from advertising is now how it works.

  11. Are there contractors that will work on commission to monetize websites?

    1. Leora,

      We don’t offer this kind of service but it would be a problem to find some freelancer or company on Upwork that will help you with this task.

  12. Md Dalour Faruque Thalukdar says:

    Starting an affiliate marketing it’s important to know the niches which are most earn-able.
    We get information about that’s.
    Thanks.

  13. John Adam says:

    Hey Vishnu,
    First of all I would like to thank you for the informative post.
    As far as online make money concern I think affiliate marketing is a very good to earn comprehensive money.

  14. At First i really appreciate your blog post. But please tell me. I have a blog which is related to music distribution. So can i apply for ads on adsense. Thanks in advance.

    Thanks
    Jammi

    1. Jammi,

      AdSense can be run on music related websites and your account will get approved as long as your content is unique and well written and don’t have any other ads on the site as well as you are not over promoting affiliate products.

  15. Rayko Tase says:

    Thanks for the great article, I learned some useful things that I’m going to try right away.

    Building wealth doesn’t happen overnight but you can speed it up with the right information.

    Four years ago, I lost my home and had to go back to live with my parents…not fun 🙁

    Slowly but surely I got back on my feet and this year I’m on track to make my first six-figure year (I left my parent’s house long ago LOL)

    Articles like this helped me a lot.

  16. Morgana Chang says:

    Good read and thanks for the article!
    I found some of your ideas very refreshing, but making themes is so competitive now. Making a mega theme is too time consuming (I found submitting a theme on Themeforest now takes forever to approve.) and it might end up losing time = losing money.
    (Btw is it just me or the font size is a little bit too small to read??)

    1. Morgana,

      The review process on ThemeForest takes up to one month if your theme gets approved with the first take. Which is not that long considering how much time you need to create a decent multipurpose theme. A review on w.org takes around 6+ months these days which is ridiculous, and I wouldn’t recommend doing that. This way of distributing themes is dead until w.org finds a way to reduce theme review queue but it doesn’t look like they really care.

  17. Thanks for mentioning these ways to freelancing online,I think this is an informative post and it is very useful and knowledgeable. therefore,
    I would like to thank you for the efforts you have made in writing this article.

  18. Nishat Mahmud says:

    Hello mate,
    I have been looking for this article for a very long time. Finally, I have found your article and it helped me to build up my own blog. Honestly speaking this is the best post I have ever read about making money online. I recommend everyone to follow this procedure.
    Thanks for sharing this useful article.
    Keep up the good work.

  19. deepak raj says:

    Hi,
    You have mentioned a great post about the ways to make money online. This information will help to so many newbies and professionals too. I am also working as an online internet marketer and continuously looking for the other methods which i can learn. I have learned so many things at the course i had and got a free training course from where i have learn’t a lot and start making from first day with emailearning.cf

  20. Vinay Prajapati says:

    Adding job board in a great idea. Thanks for letting me know about this.

  21. As you’ve mentioned finding the right products to market is difficult. Especially in niche blogs, you have to be careful with affiliate links. You can lose the trust of your readers really quickly.

    I struggled with choosing the right things to link to at first. It was also hard to make my readers pay attention to the things I market. Travelpayouts with their interactive widgets and search forms saved me in that regard. Now my readers can search for plane tickets without leaving the article, and since they don’t think about it as an advertisement, they are more likely to use it. I am currently trying to get into the Travelpayouts’ webinar as well. They are really good exposure because the content is never salesy, but always useful.

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