Making Money

29.12.2016 |

Episode #12 of the course Build a website and online brand quickly and cheaply by Rob Cubbon

 

Profit is a great metric to measure success, but it’s not why we do what we do. We do what we do to help people. If we’re not making any money, we’re not helping anyone, so here’s how you can make money with a website.

 

Community

The best and most futureproof way of making money is by creating a community. A community is a collection of visitors, evangelists, and customers who follow the site and its contents.

This is your tribe. They provide a great source of market research. They will tell you what they are interested in and give you ideas for content and products. One of the best methods of staying in touch with this community is via an email subscription list, and fortunately enough, this is easy to set up in your WordPress website.

 

Creating an email subscription list

You’ll need the help of a proper email marketing company (like Mailchimp, Aweber, etc.) to collect email addresses and send out emails in bulk. This is a small investment, and you will see a return on it.

Your email list can guarantee you sales. These people have signed up to receive emails from you, and they expect to get sold to. This is huge. Your email list is the best source of online sales.

 

Consultancy (hours for dollars)

You can start making money straight away from a website by offering services. You can provide design, illustration, photography, development, legal, writing, or any other business services.

 

Affiliate commissions

You can earn affiliate commissions for your website when a visitor purchases a product you recommend through a special link.

 

Advertising

Another way you can bring in revenue from a website is through advertising. However, I have found this isn’t a good business model, as you need huge traffic to make anything like a decent return on the ads.

 

E-books and e-courses

The most useful advice I can give about making info products is this: create as many products as you can. Don’t spend ages perfecting the first one. Your first one will never be your best. You will make better products over time, and you’ll become quicker at creating them. So start now!

An e-book can be nothing more than a collection of your blog posts presented in a logical order in a well-designed PDF. But with a following and an email list, it is quite easy to sell them.

If you are creating videos on YouTube (and I would advise you to do so), then I recommend you create premium video training, because it shows authority. I have also sold courses on a variety of platforms.

You can sell video courses from your site using WordPress membership plug-ins or Teachable.

 

Software as a service (SaaS)

Another model for earning passive income from a website is software as a service. Examples of SaaS applications would be cloud-based solutions for email marketing, accounting, collaboration, and customer relations.

This income model would be the most expensive to set up, but it is potentially the most profitable.

 

Putting it all together

I hope the readers of this series will be inspired to create brands and businesses with WordPress websites, just as I have.

You don’t have to be too technical to do this, you don’t have to have a mind-blowingly original business idea, and you don’t have to be rich. Anyone can create a successful business online. You can do it.

If there’s one word that is more important than all others in online business, it’s this one: consistency.

You should be consistently working on your website, consistently creating quality content on it, consistently collecting email addresses, consistently emailing them, and consistently providing quality services and/or products.

You’ll be helping people in the way you have been helped by the great information we have at our fingertips online. It’s good for you and good for the world.

Finally, after reading all the advice I’ve given you, there’s only one thing left to do: take action!

 


I have free videos on WordPress, passive income, design, email marketing and business. You can find these at robcubbon.com

In particular there is Set Up WordPress And Blog: A Crash Course In Web Publishing and An Introduction To WordPress and Website Creation For Clients. Both are about an hour long of step-by-step WordPress tuition.

Learn more


 

Recommended book by Highbrow

“Business Model Generation: A Handbook for Visionaries, Game Changers, and Challengers” by Alexander Osterwalder, Yves Pigneur

 

Share with friends