As the digital world evolves, more ways open up for us to make money using a website. The types of websites from which we can make money are also sometimes called digital assets, and this world has been gaining a lot of exposure in recent years. Today, there are so many ways to monetize a website that it’s simply crazy, whether it’s affiliate marketing, renting leads/inquiries, ads/banners, dropshipping, an online store, or online courses—all you need to do is choose a field and get started.
Warning for lazy people – To anyone who thinks this is easy money, think again. For anyone looking for a passive income of thousands of shekels a month after 3 months of work without doing anything, it is advisable to look for another profession where you can earn a bit more easily (like a bank robber). Another important point to note is that the ability to make money from a website is usually reserved for veteran digital pros. Although it is possible to make money from a website without experience, it will be really hard if you don’t have knowledge in marketing, organic SEO, and paid advertising. In addition to knowledge, in many cases, you also need an existing infrastructure to promote yourself professionally.
Later in the article, you can see a breakdown of several ways you can make money using a website or a digital asset.
Online Courses / Selling Knowledge
One of the most interesting fields through which you can make money using a website is the world of selling courses or digital workshops. Because of sites like Udemy with low-standard, bargain-basement courses, the ability to sell a course at high prices has become much more challenging than it used to be. Nevertheless, if you build a name for yourself and aren’t looking to sell a course for $10, this is probably the income stream with the greatest potential among all the options listed in the article. Unlike fields like affiliate marketing where you market someone else’s product and receive a commission for it, here you are marketing your own products. In addition, you retain the customer’s details, which gives you the opportunity to continue selling them additional products in the future.
For example: If I launch a website building course and sell it for around 1,000 – 2,000 NIS, then once I crack the formula for selling the course in large quantities (and it’s not a simple challenge, there’s no easy money), I can reach a respectable income just from the course alone. If the first course succeeds, you can also create additional courses and try to upsell. For example: You can create a web design course for beginners, an advanced web design course, an e-commerce building course, an Elementor course, a speed optimization course, etc. The sky is the limit, and if you succeed in building a supportive client base that knows your products are high quality and worth it, they will continue buying from you, opening up the ability to create a real business out of it.
Website Rental / Lead Rental (Customer Inquiries)
Another profit model that may be interesting is the rental of websites or selling leads from the website. The idea here is that you build a website and take care of ranking it on Google and getting it to the top positions for the most competitive keywords in the field. It is important to understand that this is not easy work, and it is an income that arrives after a long time. On average, standard SEO for a website on Google can take around a year or two until seeing real results and reaching the top positions on Google. The more competitive the niche, the longer it will take to rank the site and the greater the investment will be. It is important to understand that we are not the only ones in the market, and once we enter a certain niche, there may be an external response from our competitors, making the arena even more competitive.
Once we manage to bring traffic to the site and maximize the number of leads we receive (at least 10 inquiries per month), we can start looking for a business owner who will buy the leads we get. With a really low volume of leads, the right model will usually be purchasing leads per a specific cost-per-lead. This can range between 10 NIS per lead to around 50-70 NIS, and it varies depending on the niche and the potential profit from each sale.
Once the volume of leads we get is large enough, a better and more stable option is renting out the website on a fixed monthly payment basis (purchasing on a per-lead basis causes a big headache). Here too, it is important to understand that this is very hard work. The first step is to rank the website on Google, the second step is to generate enough leads to make it attractive to a business owner, and the third step is to find a business owner willing to pay for the leads. Each of these steps is very complex, and in certain fields, it is very hard to find a business owner willing to pay for renting the website.
Affiliate Marketing
Another interesting world worth knowing is the world of affiliate marketing. The idea here is very simple, and all we do is sell other people’s products in exchange for a commission for a successfully completed sale. For example: one of the leading niches in affiliate marketing is the world of web hosting. Most hosting companies will allow you to receive a commission of $50 for every customer you bring. In practice, it works as follows: I can publish an article on my website featuring recommendations for hosting companies.
If a visitor who enters the page takes my recommendation, clicks on one of the hosting companies I presented, and purchases the hosting, I will receive a commission for that purchase. In the hosting link (URL) that I publish on the site, there are special parameters that allow tracking to determine which affiliate the visitor came from, and with the link, they know I referred the visitor—which is why I receive a commission on the purchase. Link-based tracking can sometimes create issues for visitors since some users have software that blocks tracking and cookies, which may prevent us from receiving the commission for the referral, but this is the tracking method of most companies that offer affiliate programs. The world of affiliate marketing has gained a lot of popularity over the years, but it’s important to understand that here, too, it is not easy money and there are many disadvantages.
The first disadvantage is that I am selling someone else’s product. I bring a client to the business owner, and in most cases, I receive a one-time commission. If it’s a one-time commission, it’s preferable that the commission be high enough. For example, $50 is a relatively high commission, while low commissions like $5 won’t be worth the investment. Today, once I think about marketing a business and bringing them clients, a one-time commission is something that interests me less, and I start focusing more on businesses that offer ongoing recurring commissions for the entire customer lifecycle.
Usually, when it comes to a recurring commission, the commissions received range from 5% to 30% of the monthly profit that the referred client pays the business owner. This percentage will accumulate in our account every month from the amount paid by the customer to the business owner we are marketing. Another disadvantage of affiliate marketing is the fact that I am marketing someone else and all the power is in their hands. This means that if tomorrow the business I am marketing decides to stop affiliate marketing or reduce the commission, this creates a very big problem for me. That is also one of the reasons why usually, when I try to market a certain niche, I will try to present several alternatives, and I will have the option to remove an alternative and replace it with another business if they try to flex their muscles at me. There are also certain fields where you can earn a higher one-time commission, but this will usually be for premium products that are a bit harder to sell than standard web hosting.
For example: Not long ago, I launched a website building course that costs in the range of several thousand shekels, and soon I plan to open an affiliate program for it that will allow you to earn 25% from every sale. This is a slightly more complex sale than hosting for a few shekels, but the profit per sale as an affiliate marketer can reach amounts exceeding 400 NIS per sale. And if I plan to offer commissions in such amounts, I am sure there are other players in the market offering them for informational products, and you just need to find them.
Ads / Advertisements on the Website
Another option to make money from a website is by displaying ads/advertisements on the site. The main provider that allows you to get money from ads on a website is Google AdSense, but there are other providers and companies. The idea is this: if you build a website and manage to bring a large enough amount of traffic to it, you have the option of showing ads to people who visit the site. If someone clicks on one of the ads, you share the profit with Google and earn a certain amount of money for the visitor’s click on the ad. It sounds like a great opportunity, but in practice, it is very difficult to make money from ads on a website.
In one of my attempts to test the subject, I took a website that receives around 8,000-10,000 visits per month. At first, I inserted ads into the site minimally and earned around 80 NIS per month. The second attempt was to place ads more aggressively, and there I managed to increase the revenue for the same amount of traffic to the range of 150 NIS per month. This example allows us to understand the profit potential of a website based on traffic volume. Of course, this can vary from one type of website to another, but these figures will give you a sense of how much you can earn from ads. As you can see, these are very low amounts; to reach serious profit figures rather than just a few hundred shekels, you need to bring traffic of several hundred thousand visits each month.
Due to the small population size in Israel, the ability to reach a large enough volume of traffic in Israel is almost zero. This means that to profit from ads, it must be a website built for an international target audience and not for Israel. The problem with international websites is that ranking a site organically there is tough; in Israel, you can still tackle competitive niches if you do a good job.
Abroad, the competition is much bigger, and it will take a lot of time and resources to produce results. The profit potential we have from ads in most fields is very low, so this is a revenue stream I would prefer to avoid. By the way, for anyone who wants another revenue stream from ads, there is YouTube, and there too the income is relatively low, but the profit potential is a bit higher than a standard website. You can see a video below where I present data from my account including how much I earn from the YouTube channel and how YouTube’s mechanism for calculating revenue works.
Online Store / Dropshipping
Another option worth knowing, but probably the one I like the least, is the option of opening an online store or the subject of dropshipping. You probably know what an online store is; it’s a store you open and sell products in. An online store requires purchasing inventory/merchandise to sell, you need to provide customer service, handle returns, and lots of other headaches. And there is the other option, which I also don’t like, and that is the world of dropshipping. In dropshipping, it is a store that you open, but you don’t stock the product. Instead of selling your product directly, you refer the visitor to another store like Amazon, eBay, AliExpress, or any other website.
Here too, similar to affiliate marketing, you receive a commission on a product sold through your referral. In most cases, these are relatively low commissions, but this is also a revenue stream that can work similarly to affiliate marketing. If you choose the field of dropshipping, it is recommended to try marketing high-ticket products and avoid products worth a dollar or two because you can’t make a viable income from those. In addition, for most products where dropshipping is possible, there will be high competition, and in order to have the ability to sell the product, it will usually be necessary to present it uniquely and better than all the other competitors.
Here too, I would recommend finding a way to market multiple stores for the same product rather than just one store, to reduce the chance of working with only one store where all the power is in their hands. In addition, it is recommended to connect your stores to social networks and open a Facebook Shop and/or Instagram Shop with the catalog of products available in your store.
In Conclusion - How to Make Money from a Website?
As you may have gathered, there are many ways to make money from a website, and contrary to what they say on YouTube, in none of the ways I mentioned will you reach tens of thousands of shekels in just a few months. Each of these fields is especially difficult and requires a lot of work; the more you come from digital backgrounds and have knowledge in the field, the easier it will be for you to market the website. If you are new and just starting out in these fields, the learning curve and knowledge you’ll need to acquire will be especially long, and it will take much more time to produce results. From here, all you need to do is start building a website, choose one of the profit options I mentioned, and simply get started and try to make money from the new website you built.
About the Author
Yochai Yirmiyahu, has been working in web development and graphic design for overr a decade.r 15 years and is the owner of YYDevelopment. Expert WordPress ninja, custom plugin and theme developer, and lecturer in the WordPress Expert course, the most comprehensive website building course in Israel for learning WordPress web development.
