Building your personal brand is important for some different reasons. Even if you have products on major vendor websites and platforms such as Amazon or others, your goal should be to make money with your website.
Advantages to Making Money on your Website
There are many advantages to making money on your website as opposed to on other platforms.
- You keep all of the profits.– You have no middle man or platform to worry about when you sell on your website. You control all the money as it comes in, and you can put your choice of shopping cart or payment system on your site.
- You make all of the rules.– When you are on your website with your goods and services, you control how you place the items on your website and which ones you make prominent on your page. Also, unlike on a major platform, you the only items that customers will see will be yours.
- You help promote your own brand.- When you sell or promote your goods on your website, the focus is on your brand rather than the additional goods and services of so many others.
- You can use affiliate marketing and other methods to bring in additional revenue.– Affiliate marketing allows you to bring in more revenue by promoting the services of others.
Ways to Bring in Additional Revenue on Your Website or Blog
There are at least seven different ways that you can make money with your personal brand. We discuss these below. Then you can decide which ones might work with your website and web properties.
#1: Sell Products
One of the most popular ways to make money with your brand and on your website is to sell products. There are two major types of products: physical products and digital products. Physical products are products that exist in the “real world.” These include products for the home, clothing, office supplies, toys, computer technology items, and a host of other physical items that you can sell online.
Once you sell them, you have to ship them. You also have to decide on how you will keep your inventory. Many startups have a small facility in which to keep their physical product inventory but as their business grows, this need will rise, and you will have to make other arrangements. Until your business is going well and making you positive cash flow, it’s not a good idea to overstock your inventory. Because, with any physical product, anything you don’t sell is lost money.
#2: Sell Digital Products
We put digital products in a category of its own because it is so different from physical products. Digital products, unlike physical products, don’t need a space for inventory. You never have to worry about overstocking or keeping too much inventory. That’s because they are digital files, and you can make as many copies as you want.
Also, when digital products are housed online in any storage system, the system will automatically make copies so that you are not limited in the number of downloads you can sell. This is the big benefit in selling digital media such as eBooks, mp3 files or mp4 video.
#3: Offer coaching or consultation
Another great way to help get your brand out there and make a splash in the online world is to offer coaching or consultation services for your area of expertise. Entrepreneur Magazine has some good tips along these lines to help you promote your brand by making yourself an expert in your field or industry. Writing an eBook, offering coaching sessions, and holding seminars are all great ways to make yourself known as an expert in your field.
Credibility is important and “social proof” is the new way that visitors and prospects get a sense of whether they trust you enough to do business with you. So, even if you don’t make sales using these coaching or consultation methods, you will certainly win friends and influence people. Once you become “an influencer,” you will be able to take your brand even further.
#4: Google Adsense Ads
If you’ve never tried Google Adsense ads, you may want to consider adding this to your site or your blog. Google used to make people choose what kind of ad they wanted to run. But people often would put ads that were not relevant to their niche or ads that didn’t produce the results that advertisers and Google wanted. So, recently, they have taken over that part of the Google Adsense system, and Google now chooses through a unique computerized and automated system, which ads will run with your content.
The way to control the general type of ads you’ll get is to use key words or phrases that Google’s search engine will consider relevant to certain products or services. Then those types of ads will run automatically alongside your articles and posts.
With Google Adsense, you must have a Google Adsense account, and you get paid when people click on the ads on your page. In some cases, you may also get a percentage of the impressions as well. You need to sign up for Google Analytics if you do Google Adsense so that you will always know how your ads are doing. Size matters also and you can try different placements and sizes until you find what works.
#5: Affiliate Marketing
As we mentioned in the list of ways to make money on your site, affiliate marketing is a great way to pull in more revenue as well. You join affiliate marketing to promote the products and services of others. Choose which products you want to use carefully as they should be somewhat related to your products or services to avoid getting penalized for spam in Google. You can join one of the affiliate marketing networks to get started. Some of the most popular ones are listed below.
- Rakeuten Marketing
- eBay
- ShareaSale
- Avangate
- Clickbank
All of these affiliate marketing networks are considered among the best out there. But there are thousands of them available! Affiliate marketing is the single best way to go from “rags to riches” within your business while you are building your brand. But it takes hard work and a trial and error approach that you have to be willing to give some time to.
#6: Native Ads
Another way to start building your brand while making cool cash is to invest in native ads. Native ads, unlike other types of ads, do not appear to be ads. Instead, they are just good content that is related to the content that is already on your site. So if you are a publisher of content that is newsworthy, this might be an idea for you.
#7: Customized Ads
Additionally, you can create customized ads for Facebook and other social media to focus in on the target audience you want to attract.
If you want to focus on building your cash flow and your brand, consider creating on the original infographic. Infographics use dynamic images, graphs, and visual content with important facts and information that people need.
We can help!
InfographicDesignTeam.com can make this easy for you. Ask us how we can help you get your brand noticed and increased your revenue and ROI with the skillful use of infographics.
