4 Ways To Make A Profitable Website Without Selling Anything

First things first, when it comes to making money online, you need a website and it needs to be profitable. What do we mean by a profitable website? Well, it’s a website that is designed and operating in a way that makes money.

Profitable websites allow you to utilize the behavior of your audience to convert clicks into cash. So what makes a profitable website?

Good user experience

Every website should have a great user experience at its core. Users should be able to easily navigate through your website, engage with your content, and have quick access to the information they’re looking for.

Mobile optimization

Ensuring that your website performs just as well on a mobile device as it does on a desktop is crucial if you want to use it to make money.

More people than ever before are using mobile devices to browse the web, so you need to ensure you make your website mobile-friendly in order to support them.

Quality design

Modern website builders make it easy to create clean, fresh, and professional website designs. Having a high-quality design is important if you want to use your website to make money.

Users should be able to land on your website and enjoy the visual elements, not be over or underwhelmed by the features on the page.

Page speed

The fact is that faster websites have greater potential for generating higher profits. Users don’t want to wait around for your content to load, which means website load times are crucial for success; webpages should be up and visible instantly.

Easy navigation

How you structure your website is important if you want to use it to make money. Users should be able to find what they’re looking for quickly and in no more than three clicks.

For more insights, read our guide to the best ways to promote your website.

Content

So, you have a nice website hosted on your own domain, what’s next? Perhaps the most difficult part of the whole process of making a profitable website is to have the right type of content.

You need to have content that:

• Search engines will love (not like but love – you will read below why).
• Users will trust – gaining user trust will make you more money in different ways. Even if you are not actually selling anything on your website, the core inbound marketing techniques still apply.
• It can potentially attract advertisers (very important, keep reading for the details).

To achieve this, you need to continuously work on your SEO, make use of other techniques to get traffic to your website, and of course publish content that has the following characteristics.

High-quality content

• It’s relevant regardless of when someone reads it (this is called evergreen content)
• It’s long enough to get the attention of search engines and readers
• It’s fresh with up-to-date information
• And, of course, it is useful for the user.

This will not only help your SEO and social media efforts but will also keep users longer on your website (reducing the bounce rate), which increases the likelihood of clicking your ads.

You need to understand that regardless of the method you choose to monetize your content, one of your objectives is to create a loyal audience that will regularly visit your website to get your content.

This means more views, more ad clicks, more email subscribers, and more conversions (whatever conversion is for you).

What type of content attracts more advertisers?

When it comes to content monetization, not all content is the same. Different types of content will generate different earnings.

If you are familiar with the Google keywords tool (a tool that is also used by Adwords advertisers), you know that each keyword has a different CPC (cost per click).

In other words, advertisers will pay a different amount for each click on their ads, and this also depends on the keyword cost (many other factors play a role in calculating the cost per click).

Since advertisers pay a different amount for each click, this means that you as a publisher will get paid differently for ad clicks, depending on the content of the page the ad is running.

In case this gets confusing, let’s demonstrate this with a real example:

If you are an advertiser and want to show your ads when people search for weight loss related topics you can expect to pay Google from $0.20 – $1.00 every time someone clicks on your ads.

Traffic and Monetization

For any monetization method to work (including selling goods or services from your website), you need to have traffic and in the case of Adsense or affiliate marketing, you need to have a lot of traffic.

How much traffic do you need to make money from a website?

It depends on how much money you want to make from your website or to say it otherwise, your traffic levels will determine the amount of money you can make.

Assume that you have an informational website that is running Adsense and that you have followed all guidelines required by Adsense and especially the part that talks about the number, type, and position of your ads.

In a best-case scenario, you can expect to have a 2% CTR (click-through rate), this means that 2% of the people that will view your ads, they will click on one of them.

Let’s also assume that you get paid on average $0.40 per click. This means that if your ads are shown 1000 times (views per day), you will earn approximately – 1000 x 2% x $0.40 = $8 per day.

Now, if you want to make $100 from your website per day and according to the simplified example above, you need to have at least 13,000 views (instead of 1000).

The expenses of running a website

They are some obvious running expenses like hosting, ongoing SEO, social media advertising, and promotion but the real cost comes down to the content.

Good content that can give you good organic rankings and traffic from search engines and at the same time is likable from users (or the other way around) costs either money (if you outsource the content) or time (if you produce the content yourself).

For the sake of continuing the example above, and to demonstrate how you can make a profitable website, let’s say that you outsource the content to professional writers who are experts about the topics you are publishing.

The least you can expect to pay for a 1500 word article is $200 (I know that this may sound a lot, but we are talking about really good content, which depending on the niche, may cost much more).

So, let’s do some calculations:

Publishing 3 times per week (this is the average publishing schedule for information websites or blogs) X $200 = $600 per week + hours needed to publish it (optimize it, add internal links, etc).

In a month you will publish 12 posts i.e. $2400 and earn $3000 ($100 x 30)from advertising so you have a profit of $600 (without accounting for the running expenses and the time that you have to spend doing various tasks to keep the website running).

So it’s possible to make a profile without selling anything right?

1st – Making a profitable website is hard work, whatever you may read about ‘easy ways to make money’ or other ‘too good to be true’ promises is simply a way for them to make money by selling you a product and not the way for you to use the Internet to make money.

2nd – You really need a lot of traffic to make a profit from your content even in the cases that you produce the content.

In order to write a good article or create a nice infographic, you may have to spend a number of hours that are taken away from your overall productive time.

It’s all well and good knowing what makes a profitable website, but you’re probably thinking that you still don’t know how to make money with a website without selling anything.

Well, look no further. Below we’ve listed top ways that you can make money online without selling a single thing.

Affiliate marketing can be a great way of making money online without selling physical products or services. Affiliate marketing is basically where you convince a user to purchase a specific item, and you earn a commission on the sale.

For example, if you’ve created a blog about horse riding, you might link to specific riding accessories within blog posts that you recommend your readers buy.

If you’ve set up affiliate links on your website then you’ll earn a small commission from the sale if a user follows that link and makes a purchase.

In order to implement affiliate marketing successfully, you’ll need an audience. After all, you can’t receive any commission if there’s no one clicking on your links and making a purchase.

The great thing about affiliate marketing is that it’s super scalable. As your audience grows, so too does the potential for making money through affiliate links.

If you’re driving a good amount of traffic to your website, and you’ve built up a good relationship with your readers who trust your advice, you can be making a lot of money without having to put in a great deal of effort.

Affiliate marketing is an excellent example of a passive income stream and allows you to reap the benefits of selling items online without having the headache of sorting delivery, refunds, and customer service.

Many well-known brands have signed up to affiliate schemes, while ecommerce giant Amazon even has its own program in place, Amazon Affiliates.

For further guidance, read about the different types of affiliate partners in our complete guide.

Placing ads on your website is a great example of how to make money online without selling products.

There are two main ways that you can place ads on your website – you can either sign up to a third-party ad network, or arrange the ads directly with the advertisers yourself.

Once you’ve launched your website and have started generating traffic, you can sign up to an ad network.

Some of the most popular ad networks are Google AdSense, Adthrive, and Ezoic. It’s worth noting that some networks require a minimum traffic number, so if you’re just starting out, we recommend going with Google AdSense.

Ad networks are super simple to get your head around, and are yet another example of passively making money from your website. Once you’ve been approved to join the network, you’ll be given a small piece of code to insert into the backend of your website.

Then you’re done. Seriously, that’s all you have to do. The network will then run ads through your website. As your website grows, you’ll be able to have more control over the size and placement of ads as well as the theme of the ads you place.

The amount of money you make through an ad network will depend on an array of factors, including your monthly traffic, and the type of content you host on your website.

Advertisers will bid for the ad spots available, and you’ll get paid for hosting the ad on your website. Remember the ad network will take a % of the overall payment too.

You don’t have to use an ad network if you think placing ads on your website is the best way to make money online without selling anything.

You can instead promote ad places on your website yourself, or go directly to the businesses you would be interested in featuring to see if they would be up for placing an ad on your site.

Placing ads in this way allows you to set the price for your ad space as high or low as you want.

It can prove trickier to convince people to pay for an advertisement on your website than using an ad network though, and you’ll need to manage the admin such as sorting payment and approving the ad visuals and messaging.