You might be thinking if you can make money building websites or how much money can you make building websites. One of the longest-running ways to make money online is through your own website.
Building websites can be a good source of income, income ranging from the one that can be used to pay a few bills to the amount that can be used to replace a salary or even to the one that can be used to live an exotic life can be made from websites.
In each ever way you want, there are tons of ways to make money from building websites.
Nowadays, building sites are easier since you don’t need to start building websites from scratch using programming languages like HTML, CSS, PHP, PYTHON, etc.
You can make money building WordPress websites or another website builder like GoDaddy, Wix and other builders.
The best way to build a website is to have an audience.
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Table of Contents
Proven, Reliable Ways to Make Money Building Websites
Below are proven ways to make money from building websites. These methods can help you increase your income with limited upfront investment.
Make Money Building an Awesome Blog
Starting a blog is a fun means of making money online. A lot of people start a blog to share their regular record of thoughts, opinions and experiences.
Not only is that you can earn a living from blogging, but there are also cases of people turning a blog into massive companies.
Not every blogger will reach the height of turning his/her blog to a massive company but if done right it can be a great source of making some great passive income.
When starting a blog, one has to keep in mind that it’s a long-term investment, you might not start making money until month six or a year.
As your writing improves, your skills grow, and your site picks up more traffic, it’s a definite possibility that you make some good money over time.
Tips on Starting a Blog
- Choose an evergreen niche like fitness, health, relationships, finance, etc.
- Learn search engine optimization (SEO) and SEO writing which can help your site rank better in the search engines. SEO can also help in choosing a niche and also topics to write on.
- Always create the best case studies or content
- Network with popular bloggers and influencers in your space.
Want to learn the exact steps I take? Read my post on how to start a niche blog with success.
See Related: Pros and Cons of Blogging
Make Money Building an Affiliate Site
Promoting products and services can be a great way to earn revenue. Affiliate sites are built on product and service recommendations/reviews.
Then commissions are earned when a reader buy product or services from your link.
This does not sound like a good means of making a lot of cash but there are multi-million sites based on affiliate revenue alone.
Revenue from affiliate sites can be based on reviewing or recommending products and services or by integrating affiliate marketing into existing blogs.
For example, let’s say you have a site that’s based on musical studio equipment. You could create posts that review relevant products and, and every time you mention the product, include an affiliate link.
The commission ranges from 30% to 70% of the selling price.
Tips on making money from affiliate sites
- Select a niche that is profitable. Tools like google trend should be used to check the seasonality of the products under this niche throughout the year.
- Sign up for the Amazon Affiliate Program
- Find affiliate programs for the other products you want to review
- Create content in the form of tutorials, review posts, resource pages or emails and use your affiliate link
- Optimize the page and track your rankings in Google
- Rinse and Repeat!
Read these books about affiliate marketing to learn more.
Make Money Building an E-Commerce Store
In recent years, building E-commerce sites is another way to make money online.
If you prefer dealing with physical products and selling something tangible, then opening up an eCommerce store could be a great fit.
There are two different methods of running a successful eCommerce store:
- Creating and selling a niche physical product to a dedicated group of buyers.
- Purchasing cheaper goods from sites like Alibaba, AliExpress, overstock, etc., repackage them, and sell them at a markup.
The first approach requires a passion for the product, a lot of research and product testing.
The first approach seems a little risky if you are just starting out, you might consider the second approach and later evolve to the first after gaining trust from buyers.
Beyond selling, you have to put in mind shipping. You can handle the shipping yourself or employ drop shipping where the manufacturer handles the shipping for you.
Shipping the product yourself is advisable because most time you will need to repackage before shipping.
See Related: 16+ Ways to Get Paid to Code
Make Money Building Websites for Others (Perform as a Service)
You can also make money from creating for people. Depending on the site, a site can cost anywhere from $250 and higher. A web development company would charge not less than $2,500 to $50,000.
Depending on the level of expertise and trust built, a lot can be made from building websites.
Our favorite platform to find jobs right away is FlexJobs. You'll have access to some of the best opportunities to earn as a freelancer by interacting with top companies hiring remote workers right now.
You can also sign up on freelancing sites like the following to earn as a web developer and start making money.
See Related: Upwork vs Fiverr – What is Best?
Build and Sell Websites
Depending on how old your site is, the traffic to your site and how much revenue your site makes, you can make a lot from building and selling websites.
You can sell your site for 12X to 30X OF your monthly income from selling sites.
The following factors will influence the selling multiple:
- The age of your site;
- Your domain authority;
- How much traffic your site receives;
- How much profit you generate;
- Your revenue diversification;
- The steadiness of your revenue;
- Whether your site is growing or stagnating.
On sites like Flippa.com, you can sell new sites with no traffic and profit but for smaller cash compared to selling already existing revenue-making sites.
Buy and Sell Websites
The process of buying and selling a site is like flipping homes. This is a little different than building from scratch and selling.
You buy a site that is untapped, fix it up and sell for profit.
The process is straight-forward but can be risky therefore it’s better to do a lot and lots of research and don’t invest money you can’t lose.
Here’s how you buy and sell sites for a profit:
- Check out marketplaces like EmpireFlippers, Flippa to find an undervalued website that you know you can improve and resell the Site.
- Do your site research to uncover revenue and traffic numbers, link profile, and the real reasons for selling the site.
- If it checks out, purchase the site.
- Make site improvements to maximize its traffic and revenue.
- Sell the site for a profit.
See Related: Guide to Website Investing – Can You Make Passive Income?
Sell Advertising Space on Existing Websites
Making money with your site via advertising is usually when your site is receiving a large volume of traffic. We’ve all seen sites that use advertising throughout their content.
Sometimes the ads are intrusive, but other times they integrate naturally with the content.
Payment will depend upon the network, but usually, you’ll get paid based upon the number of impressions or clicks and at times the number of visits to your website.
One of the ways to do this to incorporate ad networks like Google’s AdSense, Ezoic and Media.net to your site or sell advertising yourself to companies looking to sponsor different blogs, their products or services. These are some of the best ad networks for bloggers.
You can also review the products from a company in an ‘advertorial’ that’s part content, part advertisement.
For example, if your website is all about the latest action PC games, the creator of one of those ads would LOVE to have you review and feature their app to your fans.
See Related: 20+ Best Side Hustle Ideas
Accepting Donations from Strangers
Accepting one-off donations isn’t a fast road to wealth, but it can help cover expenses in the short-term if people like what you have to say and want to support your journey.
Do you have a strong, engaged community? Simply ask your readers to donate!
For example, web.archive.org makes a lot of money from donations (most likely due to their millions of visitors per month).
See Related: How to Become a Content Creator
Generate Online Leads for Other Companies
Businesses thrive on new leads coming in their door to inquire about their products or services.
Let’s say you have a website about teaching forex, options for income and trading in general.
Your reader’s information (like their email address or phone number) would be of great value to different online schools that’re looking to sell their courses to eager, proactive students.
Basically, you’re connecting the dots; playing the matchmaker by introducing two parties who can benefit one another.
While it’s similar to how affiliate marketing works, in this case, it doesn’t actually matter if your reader ends up purchasing their product or not.
They’re just looking for an introduction at this point.
See Related: Remote Jobs – the best way to earn money from home
Build an Email List
Spend any amount of time reading blog growth tips, and you’re sure to come across people saying “the money’s in the list.”
They’re referring to your email list, which comprises your most loyal readers.
The objective is to convert as many strangers who visit your site for the first time into passionate followers who want to stay up-to-date on your latest work or content.
Admittedly you definitely won’t get rich overnight. But it’s one of the best, long-term methods to profitably growing your blog into a full-fledged, money-making enterprise.
Use Leadpages to build an email list. You might not even need a website as their landing pages are an efficient alternative. They are currently offering a free 14-day trial if you use my link.
Try Leadpages now for free.
Create a Subscription Job Board
A job board is another lucrative to earn a living from websites. People looking to hire someone in a specific niche will post a job listing on your site and your visitors will apply for the job.
You can either charge people to post job listings.
Or, you could charge your visitors a monthly membership fee to access the job board. Keep in mind that you do need to have decent traffic in order for this to work.
A company won’t pay to post a job on your site if you aren’t sending any qualified applicants their way.
On some sites, both parties will pay a fee to post a job on the site.
See Related: Best Part-Time Jobs to Earn Money
Accept Sponsored Posts & Articles
One of the common ways to make more money from your website means getting those visitor numbers UP.
Once you’ve done the hard work of building steady traffic to your site with an engaged community, there are a few different ways to monetize your hard work.
For example, many companies go out of their way to look for blogs that will feature their sponsored content.
‘Native advertising ‘like this works well because it lines up with your site’s primary content and it comes across as relevant and transparent.
You can also review the products from a company in an ‘advertorial’ that’s part content, part advertisement.
For example, if your website is all about the latest iOS games for iPhones and iPads, the creator of one of those ads would LOVE to have you review and feature their app to your fans.
When done right, this can create a win/win scenario.
However, when done poorly, with irrelevant or inauthentic site content, it can erode all of the reader’s goodwill you’ve worked so hard to create in the first place.
See Related: Are Blogs Still a Thing?
Manage Other People’s Website
Some people are too busy going through the stress of site maintenance so they hire people to it for them.
Site management activities include:
- Adding and improving web content.
- Increase the site’s search engine optimization.
- Perform monthly site-wide content checks.
- Running maintenance and troubleshooting.
Site managers most times are paid per month. From $500 to $2,500 per month or even more.
If you scale it and teach other employees, you can turn this into a full-fledged business.
See Related: How to Make Money without a Website or Blog
Conclusion on How to Make Money Building Websites
A lot of money can be made by building a website. How much you make depends on what you do and how you approach it.
Have it in mind that making money from building like most investments might not be immediate, but with persistence and dedication, you will get there.
The best part of creating and building websites is that you will learn along the way. Each time you do it will make it easier for the subsequent time.
At the end of the day, you will have substantial resources to have authority in the online community.