Are Advertisements The Only Way A Website Makes Money?

To most people, making money online is mostly about advertising on your blog or website. Advertisements can be of various form, including direct ads, affiliate ads, sponsored ads, and so on. While advertising remains one of the most popular and lucrative forms of online earning, it is not the only one. If you don't want to clutter up your website with all those ads, and prefer to keep things minimalistic, then you can consider other ways of making money with your website.

1. Sponsored Reviews

Paid reviews are a very common method of making money. Authoritative websites, or websites focused on a particular niche get paid to review certain website, app or web service. If you have a website with a decent traffic, you can contact a review network too and get paid for writing reviews on your website. Some of these networks include PayPerPost, ReviewMe, and BlogVertise etc.

2. Affiliate marketing

Affiliate marketing is a form of advertisement, but not if you do it properly. Instead of just stamping an affiliate ad in your website's sidebar, it's far more important to actually create content about the product you're advocating. People write reviews, comparisons, rounds ups, and so on about the affiliate products they want to sell on their blog.

3. Consultancy and Special services

Offering your expert services in the form of consultation to clients who pay you is another form of making money online. MBT has its own services page, where you can get in touch and hire us for our professional services.

4. Software and Tools

If you're a developer, you can showcase the software and tools you've created on your website to make money. Some people offer free tools on their sites . You can offer trials, with option for users to buy the full versions of your software. These tools can be anything from Blogger widgets to WordPress plugins.

5. Themes and templates

There's another source of income you might have overlooked. If you're good at tweaking templates and themes, you can create your own and sell them. Bloggers are always looking for new themes or templates for their blogs, which is why some people, such as Brian Gardner from StudioPress, have made a fortune developing and selling templates.

6. Paid surveys and polls

There are services that will pay you money to run a small survey or poll on your website. The most popular one is called Vizu Answers. Basically you need to sign up with them, and select the kind of polls that you want to run your site. Most of these services operate under a CPM model.

7. eBook marketing

If you have sound knowledge of a particular subject, why not use it? You can build an eBook on it, and then sell it for a profit! Check out our post on building an eBook delivery system, complete with an auto-responder. Almost every pro-blogger has used this technique to make some money.

8. Donations

I hope things don't come to this, but if you're really doing some community work, or developing an open-source software, you can ask people for donations to fund your project. I wouldn't put it down as a profitable endeavour though. There are certain moral obligations associated with taking donations from the public - learn and understand them.

9. Selling websites and domains

Another very profitable business model is making and selling websites. Good domain names themselves go for 6+ figures. And developing websites can further add value. And if you have a well established blog or website, you can sell it for much more.

These are only some of the many ways you can earn money online without having o advertise on your website. Stay tuned for more ways to earn money online. If you have any questions, feel free to ask us in the comments section below. Peace :)