Make Money With A Free Website

There are multiple ways to make money with a free website. Since it’s possible to get a website for free and since it’s possible to make money with a website, then any money that you make with a free website is actually free. There will be income with no out-of-pocket costs. Building a website to the point where it will make money can take some time. Once it’s at a certain level, then this could potentially be a business with passive cash flow and $0 startup fees. If the site has high traffic and you’re earning advertising from it, then you are not actively having to do anything to earn that income. You could also earn income from it in other ways besides advertising revenues and convert it into a self-sustaining business as described below.

How To Get a Free Website

There are multiple resources for creating a free website including wix, weebly, or wordpress.com. See other resources under Web Freebies: Free Web Builders and Web Freebies: Free Ecommerce Sites (Free eBay Alternatives). With each free platform there are various limitations. Some will leave the site branded with their name. Some are easier to use than others. Some will have better features than others for search engine optimization.

Search Engine Optimization is the process of making your site friendly to search engines so that your site appears in search engine results. It involves both onsite SEO and offsite SEO. Onsite SEO includes making your site user-friendly. Search engines favor sites that are user-friendly because they want to match user-friendly sites with people who are conducting searches. The people conducting searches are the customers for the search engine, and the search engine is doing their best to satisfy their customers. Onsite SEO also involves adding meta data to each page to give the search engine more information to work with. Meta data is information that is not visible to the user, it’s only visible to search engines. Offsite SEO is the process of building quality back links to your site. This is described more below, under “build your following”

You’ll find that the free web builders are limited in the features and that some are not as SEO-friendly as paid resources. When you think about it, it makes sense that search engines would look at various factors to determine if a website is a legitimate source of information, and if anyone can create a free website using free resources, then how do they know if a site is fake or legitimate? There are tons of technical explanations, but the main point is that sometimes paid resources are actually better.

Yet, it is possible to build an audience with a free resource, which is why this page exists. However, the problem you’re going to run into down the line is that you’ll eventually want to grow beyond the capacity of the free resources. So your options are to either start with the free resources and convert later to paid resources, or you can start with the paid resources now and avoid the costly and time-consuming transition later. One of the best ways to build a website is to buy hosting with a provider like Bluehost or GoDaddy. Once you’ve purchased hosting you can install WordPress for free. A third of the internet is built on WordPress (including Actually Free), and it is very SEO-friendly.

A blog is one type of website and creating a blog is a way to make money. Free blogging resources include blogger, tumblr, and WordPress. Much of the information on this page will be similar to Blogging For Free Stuff. Yet, both pages will have unique information so it will be good to compare them and use each for reference.

If you wish to forego building a website, then you can also create a social media page and earn profit from that in a similar way that you’d profit from a website. Almost all social media platforms are free, including Facebook and YouTube. If you create videos on YouTube on a regular basis, you might be called a vlogger or video blogger. In order to make money with social media, you kind of have to become a mini celebrity. You want to build your views and followings to the point where you can either get advertising revenue from it or where companies will pay you for sponsored posts. See also Make Money With Social Media.

How To Monetize a Website

Video has some old resources, but it’s still a good overview.

There are multiple ways to monetize a website. Here are a few of them:

Ecommerce

Ecommerce is when you sell products online. You can sell almost anything whether it be tangible or intangible. Tangible products require that you either stock and deliver them yourself, or you can outsource that to a drop shipper. Drop shipping is when you receive the order but someone else stocks and delivers the product, so they drop ship it for you. Non-tangible products such as ebooks, music or photos are among the best products to sell online because they can be reproduced and delivered automatically when the sale is made. More on that below.

Advertising Revenue

You can create a website that is similar to a magazine, and just like a magazine earns advertising revenue, you can too. Ad networks like Google Adsense will give you a code that you can embed in your site. Once the code is embedded they’ll display the ads on your site. They track all advertising stats and pay you when you’ve reached a payout limit.

Affiliate Marketing

Affiliate marketing is very similar to advertising, but it’s more of a manual process. With affiliate marketing you select the product or service that you want to promote. You join the affiliate program for that product or service and they’ll give you a unique affiliate link. Whenever someone clicks on that link and purchases a product, you get a split of the sale.

Paid Membership

You can offer free content on your site to lure a following and then offer paid or premium content. This model is common among news sites, but you can also do it on a smaller scale. Perhaps you make your site about creating an eBay business. You give your users a lot of good content so they can benefit from your site even if they’re not paid members. But then you can sell access to a directory of wholesale resources. In order to gain access to that piece of valuable information, they’d have to pay for membership to your site to receive a login.

Self-Publishing, Electronic Media

Again, some of the best products you can sell online are digital products such as ebooks, tutorial videos, virtual classes, photographs, music or anything that is delivered as a computer file. These products can be reproduced and delivered for download automatically once they are purchased for instant, immediate completion of sale. You can also get a free sales force for these products by promoting them through affiliate programs. Instead of becoming the affiliate as described above, you are now the publisher and other affiliates will sell your product for you on a commission basis.

Sponsored Posts

Once your following is built up enough, companies will be willing to pay for your influence. On a blog you could get paid to write an article, on YouTube you could get paid to create a video review. You must disclose whenever you receive compensation for sponsored posts.

Build Your Following To Increase The Value

Like any business or marketing platform, the value of your website will increase as your following or influence increases. This is a numbers game. Obviously a  business won’t be interested in advertising on your site or paying for a sponsored post if you’re only reaching 100 people a month. But if you’re reaching 30,000, then they might be interested.

The most common ways to promote your website and grow your following is through search engine optimization, social media and email marketing. An introduction to search engine optimization was given above. You can build quality backlinks to your site by doing internet public relations. This means you will do guest posts on other blogs or be interviewed on podcasts and internet radio. Social media is the process of posting and engaging with friends and followers on social media. Email marketing is the process of building a list and sending emails to the list strategically.

Whether you’re promoting your site with search engines, social media or email, one of the most important things you can do is provide good content. The content has to be so good that people read it and think, “wow, thank you for sharing that”. They have to appreciate it so much that they’ll comment, share, “like” it and engage with it.

Automating Your Website Business

It is possible to build traffic up to a point and then disregard it so that all remaining income is passive. However, most websites perform better when good content is added frequently and consistently. So it’s better to automate the addition of content instead of letting it go. Yes, you have to pay for this automation, but at this point you’re not paying out-of-pocket. You’re paying out of the revenue that the site is earning and you keep the difference, which is free money. You can automate the technical maintenance of the website by hiring a webmaster (Mirex Marketing is recommended). You can automate the addition of new content by hiring writers and contributors (Mirex Marketing can also provide this or you could hire freelancers or virtual assistants).