Are you interested in making money from something that is important to you, while staying at home?
Of course, it does, who wouldn’t like that? Everyone needs to make a little extra money at the end of the month!
Instead of waiting for your next raise, I suggest 4 ways to make $1000 more in income per month. All on the Internet from the comfort of your own home!
What I’m about to tell you is not a fraud, it’s not a stupid pyramid scheme. It is not a get-rich-quick scheme either! Earning money on the Internet takes time and effort.
This article covers the 4 main ways to monetize your website and explains what it takes to be able to generate $1000 per month.
I’m talking to people who have a website or who want to create a side income while staying at home by starting a website.
It’s up to you to decide what strategy to adopt to monetize your project!
How to make $1000 a month with advertising on your website.
You can make money via ad placement services such as Google Adsense.
The goal is to develop a website with lots of traffic in a niche where the competition for paid ads is strong.
You can use the AdWords Keyword Planner to find out which keywords have the most competition.
Here are some examples of paid niches: travel, insurance, finance, technology, sports, and nutrition.
In short, any topic that gives this when you type it into Google:
To be able to calculate how to make 1k per month, we must take into account the most important metric: the RPM.
What is the RPM?
No, it’s not Turnover Per Minute. It is Revenue Per Mile.
That is, for every 1000 page views on your site, how much money do you make?
Ads make you money every time someone clicks. If 1% of people click and you make 15 cents per click, then you have an RPM of $1.50.
In other words, you will make $1.50 for every 1000 page views on your website.
Your goal is to increase this value as much as possible, while not compromising the popularity of your site (no one likes a site with more ads than content!).
What is a good RPM and how to increase it?
A good RPM is about $4-5, but there are sites that have much higher RPMs. Some sites go up to $15! It all depends on the quality of the placements and the competitiveness of the topic.
To maximize your AdSense revenue, you should first make sure you are using the most popular ad formats.
Then the goal is to find the optimal position on your website. Horizontal 728*90 ads placed between two paragraphs usually work well. A popular practice is to place 3: one after the first paragraph of text, one before the last paragraph, and one in the middle.
Alternatives: Taboola and Outbrain.
If you don’t like the look of the ads, you can try Taboola and Outbrain. However, it takes a pretty huge site to be able to get accepted by their program (at least a few million page views per month).
Here’s what it looks like:
Their RPM is similar to AdWords.
Alternative: Sell directly to companies.
You don’t have to go through a distribution network! You can try to contact companies directly to sell them visibility.
If you do this, you can charge by CPC (cost per click) or CPM (cost per thousand).
The most popular is to put a fixed CPM since it’s not your fault if the person buying the ad does a bad job of advertising.
You can charge between $10 and $20 per CPM, depending on the exposure you give them (wallpaper, banners, pop-ups, etc…)
Finally, how much traffic do you need to be profitable?
To make a long story short, if you have a very well monetized website and you have an RPM of $5, you will need 200,000 page views per month to raise $1000.
If you’ve managed to find a sponsor for your blog, you’ll be able to make between 50,000 and 100,000 page views per month.
How to make $1000 a month with affiliate marketing.
Affiliate marketing is another very popular way to monetize your website.
Most websites offer a commission to people who generate sales by sending traffic. Just look in their footer, there is usually an affiliate section.
When you sign up for an affiliate program, you are given a link. When a person clicks on that link, they are identified by the website with a cookie (usually lasting 30 days). If the person buys within this period, you will receive a commission.
The good thing about affiliate marketing is that you control the products you put forward.
With AdSense, anyone can appear on your website. It’s YOU who decides what to suggest to your audience.
Here are some of the services I use:
- Mailchimp
- Lead Pages
- Fat Cow
- Dollar Photo Club
- Tweet Adder
- Elegant Theme
Since I use each of these services and I KNOW they are the best in their respective niches, I have no qualms about promoting them.
In addition to providing a better visitor experience, affiliate marketing is usually more cost-effective than AdSense advertising.
There are several ways to promote affiliate links. You can put them in a newsletter, in a blog post, do paid ad campaigns, or put banners on your site (as if they were ads).
A popular technique is to write a review of the product and try to optimize it to appear on the first page.
A popular site that does just that is TopTenReviews.
Amazon is also a very popular option for affiliate links. However, since the commissions are very low, I recommend recommending high-end products like camera lenses for example.
In short, any product that sells for over $500.
The problem with calculating affiliate income is that if the person visits a page where you don’t have affiliate links, you have no chance of generating income.
The best way to generate revenue is through content articles.
If you promote a $400 lens (example), 0.5% of visitors decide to buy the product and you make a 6.5% commission ($26), you will need to sell 39 products per month.
Considering these numbers, you will need 7692 visits on promotional items.
Depending on the authority of your website and the keywords you are targeting, you should calculate about 50 to 150 different product recommendation pages to get similar traffic.
All in all, that’s an RPM of $130. Quite a bit higher than AdSense!
Of course, the challenges are not the same! And if you decide to promote cheaper products, you will make a lot less money!
Personally, since the affiliate services I offer are under $100, my affiliate pages generate around $25 per 1000 page views.
How to make $1000 a month selling a product (physical or digital)
An increasingly popular way to make money is to sell digital products like training, e-books, templates, songs, etc.
Of course, you can also sell physical products.
If you go for the first option, I highly recommend you to use Gumroad, it’s a web service that takes care of securing the sale of your products and delivering them.
This is what I use for my online store. Of course, if you want to integrate it directly on your website, you will have to secure your website with SSL encryption.
There is a fee of 5% + 25¢ per transaction.
If you want to sell physical products, go to Alibaba to find your products at reasonable prices.
You can also do business with drop shipping companies, that is to say, a company that lets you sell its inventory on your site and that takes care of customer service and inventory management. Doba is the most popular of them.
Then you need to open an online store, I recommend Shopify because it’s the easiest and fastest option.
I also recommend anyone with online stores open a store on Amazon and eBay.
The numbers for a digital product
If you decide to make a product for yourself, I highly recommend selling it at a premium.
Why?
Because it’s no more effort to promote something for $1000 than something for $10.
Let’s say you decide to sell your first product for $100 and you don’t have much traffic. You’ll need to promote it to drive traffic to your sales page.
You will need to buy Facebook and Adwords advertising to be able to show your product to the right people. So you need to calculate the advertising cost in the price of your product.
Of course, there are free ways to promote your product. Doing guest posts on popular sites and opening an affiliate program are two good examples.
The math: Your product sells for $100. You collect leads at an average of $1 each. 2.5% of people end up buying, so they cost you $40 per sale. Gumroad takes $5.25, leaving $54.75 in your pocket.
To make $1000, you need to sell 19 products per month, which is an investment of $760 (the cost of advertising to gather your 760 leads).
The numbers for a physical product
When you want to make money with a physical product, you need to find a niche where you can sell your product for more than 5 times the cost.
Examples: lingerie, jewelry, nutritional supplements, sex toys, perfume…
Let’s say you sell something for $100 and you make an $80 profit, you will need to calculate the cost of acquisition. If we keep the same numbers as in our last calculation, lower the selling costs by 2%, and include $15 for shipping and handling, you are left with a profit of $41.50.
To be able to make $1000 in profit, you need to sell 24 of them, which represents an investment of $960.
How to make $1000 by selling services
There are two main ways to sell services over the Internet. There are services in their proper sense, where you perform an action for someone and products as services (called SAAS – Software As A Service).
Selling a regular service
The easiest way to sell your services is to find a popular problem in a niche, write a detailed article that covers exactly how to solve that problem, and then offer to sell your services to entrepreneurs.
For example, I could write an article that highlights the importance of conversion optimization on a website (A/B testing) and what are the 5 biggest levers to optimize a website.
I would then look for transactional websites with a lot of traffic and use LinkedIn and Whois to find their owner.
I would contact them directly by showing them the article in question and try to have a phone interview with them.
Keep in mind that having references helps this process a lot. So you can offer to do the first one for free, as Neil Patel did with Tech Crunch.
Selling a Saas service
The goal is to interview entrepreneurs and find repetitive tasks they can automate.
You then get a developer to give you a quote to build the project. You then offer the contractor to take care of building the tool if they agree to pay the development costs in exchange for never paying for the product.
Once this is done, you go to all the other companies that could benefit from the service and offer them the service.
A good example is Stéphane Guérin with his DashThis business. It allows you to give the argument of time saved to be able to make your price structure.
For example, 10 hours saved per week at $20 per hour is $200 in value to the customer. So you can charge him between $25-50 per month to use your service.
If you put that at $50 a month, you would need 20 clients to be able to make $1000 a month.
Of course, you’ll probably pay a little bit of advertising to be able to get your 20 sales, so you should expect to make no money for the first 2-3 months.
Conclusion
That’s it! You’ve got all the information you need to start your adventure and start generating a small passive income using the internet. None of the above is simple or easy, but it is the best way to increase your income and make ends meet!
So, does making an extra $1000 on the internet seem impossible? Or within reach?
Did this article help you, or scare you?
I’m curious to know what you think in the comment section! And if you are already monetizing your site, share your tips with other readers!