Having your own website is a great way to generate leads, connect with your customers and find potential teammates for your direct sales business, but did you know there are other ways you can monetize (a.k.a make money) from your own website?

In this post I’ll share my 5 favorite ways to make money with your website.

1. Sell more of your direct sales product

There is only so much selling you can do in person and in your VIP group.  Everyone is busy so the time that can be spent being hands on with customers is limited.

With a website you can write blog posts about your products and then link to your company’s ecommerce site so people can make a purchase.

These extra sales referred from your website can come without much effort on your part.  New customers can find your website and blog posts through Google searching, existing customers sharing links to your website or through an automated email sequence you send to all the leads you collect from in-person events and forms on your website.

2. Sell a recurring subscription for your direct sales product

I love recurring revenue!  The repetitive sales and predictability in cash flow from recurring sales makes my extremely linear engineering brain happy!

Is there a way to offer your customers a recurring subscription where they pay you monthly or quarterly in exchange for a special deal or discount on your product?

If you have your own website you can set this up easily using PayPal recurring subscriptions to accept payments.

3. Affiliate marketing

In a nutshell, affiliate marketing is recommending another company’s product then making a commission when someone purchases that product you recommended.  Companies will give you special links that are unique to you so they can track when someone makes a purchase using your link.

In my opinion this is the easiest way to add some side income from your website because there are always related products you can mention in your blog posts.

One of the most popular affiliate programs is the Amazon Associates program.  You can refer people to any product that’s for sale on Amazon and make anywhere from about 2%-8% commission on sales made using your referral links.  It’s not a huge amount of money unless you are referring people to expensive items, but it is essentially passive income after you write the blog post and link to the product.

Besides the fact that you can pretty much buy anything on Amazon, another perk is that you make commission not just on the product you linked to but everything a customer adds to their cart and purchases up to 24 hours after they used one of your links to get to Amazon.

Many companies offer affiliate programs for referring customers and commissions generally vary anywhere from 5%-30%.  Check out some of your favorite stores and see if they have one!

4. Sell your own digital product

Digital products include things like a printable PDF document or worksheet, eBook, course or basically anything that can be downloaded or accessed on the internet.

One perk of selling your own digital products compared to affiliate marketing is that you keep 100% of the revenue instead of making a lower commission for recommending someone else’s product.

Is there anything you can make or create that would be a great companion to your direct sales product that you could offer to your customers?  Coloring sheets?  Worksheets?  Supplemental information or research you could make into an eBook?

If so, you can create these digital products and mention them on your website pages and blog posts when you are writing about your direct sales product.

You can also have dedicated sales pages or a portion of your website devoted to your own products.

There are many plugins available that make it easy to add the capability to accept payments and deliver your digital products to your customers with your website.

5. Advertising

Placing advertisements on your website is another way to make additional income.  You can essentially rent space on your website to companies to place advertisements.

There are programs like Google AdSense that will place ads on your website for you and pay you based on the number of clicks or number of views ads get on your site.  You can also reach out directly to companies that offer products your website visitors would like and see if those companies would like to place an ad on your site.

That sums up my five favorite ways to make money from your website.  Let us know in the comments below which one you plan to use on your site!

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