7 Ways to Make MONEY From Your WEBSITE! - #7Ways

If you have a website and you're trying to make money or make more money with it, then this video is for you. What's up, Believe Nation? It's Evan. My one word is believe, and I believe in you. I believe in your potential, your ideas, that amazing thing you've got inside here, and I want to see it explode out into the world for you to have ultimate success and impact around the globe. One of the things that I get asked a lot is, how do I make money from my website? I want to start a website. I want to make money online. What are some of the ways that I can make money from my passion and my idea? So today I'm going to share with you my 7 ways to make money from a website. [MUSIC] Way number 1 is access to you. And so this is really powerful when you're building up a personal brand or you're building up a trusted entity. People are coming to your website, they're looking for information, they're looking for guidance, looking for expert opinions and advice, and the more they come, the more they get to know you, like you, trust you, and see you as somebody who can really help them solve some problems. And that's what you want. And then you're going to get people reaching out to say, hey, can you help me with XYZ? And it's not the most sexy place to start because it's not scalable. You're effectively selling your time, but looking at What does a half-hour consultation with you look like? Or what does an hour-long consultation look like with you? Whether you're coaching, whether you're helping them with a specific problem, whatever you're talking about on your website, even if you have really low traffic numbers, the people who are coming to your site are looking for an answer to a problem, right? They have a problem, they're looking for an answer, they're coming to your site. You could potentially fill that void, not just with the information that you have, it's a nice taste, it's a nice tease, But then people will want to hire you. People want to connect with you. People will say, hey, I don't know how to solve this problem. I don't want to solve it myself. How can I work with you to do it? And so if I look at my website or look at my videos, I'm making a video like this about how to make money from a website. People will watch it and some people will use it and leverage it, take the information, apply it to their business. Other people will come and watch it and they say, I don't want to do all that work. I just want somebody to come in and solve that problem for me, or I need more information. I need, I need more coaching. I need one-on-one help. Evan, can I hire you to help me do it? Now, I don't do that as a service. I don't work one-on-one with, with coaching clients, but I could if I wanted to, right? And you can too with the content that you're creating on your website. The easiest and fastest way to be able to start making some money is to sell your service, sell your knowledge, sell your expertise to help the people who are coming to your site solve a problem. And so having something on your website that says, do you want a consultation with me? Do you need help or feedback? Do you want to have a call with me? Uh, having that as a call to action so that people who want to take the next step with you can, and whether that leads to a PayPal form or a contact form or a tell me your problem form or whatever that is, put that up there and you can start making some cash on your site. Way number 2 is affiliate products. And this is where you basically recommend other products that you use, that you like, that you trust, that have had an impact in your life and your business. And you take a commission every time that it's sold. This is not a path that, that I go down. It's not how I monetize my content, but I could. So as an example, you know, anytime I recommend the book, it could be an Amazon link, and I would make a percentage of any sale that was made through that link. I think I actually do that for my own books. I think I do that. But if I'm recommending another book, I just say, this is a great book, go check it out. You could be making money from that. Think about the other products and services that you use. I use Sage accounting software, I use AWeber email marketing, I use a whole bunch of different products and services that if I recommend, I could potentially have an affiliate code link out there. The most important part, at least for me, this is, you know, the industry can get a little shady, a little slimy because people are recommending scam products that they've never used before. And so for me, anytime I recommend something, I use it, I love it, you know, I use it in my life or my business. And I found tremendous value from it. I don't recommend anything to the people on my audience, on my website, on my YouTube channel that I haven't actually gone through and used myself. And I think it's a really important thing to keep in mind because you want to have a client for life. You want them to buy one thing from you and find so much value from it that they say, wow, this person is really helping me out. What's the next thing, right? The next thing you recommend, they're going to want to buy again, and the next thing they're going to want to buy again. And so that one customer that you get you turn into a repeat customer over and over and over again because you're making their life easier. You're saying this thing works, trust me, go out and buy it. And if it actually works for them, they're going to buy it, right? They're going to come back and tell their friends, they're going to keep buying more every time you make a recommendation. And so that's why it's so, so, so, so important that if you get into affiliate marketing that you actually love the products that you're using, something that you would feel comfortable recommending to your mom, your sister or your wife or your husband or your kids to use because you got that much value from it. Way number 3 is your own products. This is great when, again, you're building up your website, you have some content, you have some traffic, and you're thinking, okay, I want to help people more, I want to be able to provide more value to them, and I'm going to create my own product. Whether it's an actual physical product like you're selling coffee cups or you're making a book or you have an e-product, an info product, you're teaching people how to do things. One of the best ways to start this though, I would highly recommend going first for the coaching. Go back to number 1, sell a service, get to know people one-on-one, people who are paying you and you understand what their problems are. Because what happens a lot is entrepreneurs have websites, they say, okay, I'm getting some traffic, now I want to have a product and the product flops. And the product flops, and then you go back and you think, well, the landing page sucked. I got to fix my landing page. I got to change the title. I got to change the optimization. I got to work on my landing page. You launch it again and it flops. And the problem wasn't necessarily with the landing page and doing the optimization. The problem was the product just sucked. Like the product wasn't what people wanted. And so what you want to do to build a really great product, you want to start with the coaching, start with the service. Meet people, understand their problems, and when you start hearing the same thing over and over and over again, I need help with this, I need help with this, I need help with this, right? If I was doing coaching and every third call was about how to write a business plan, what should my next product be? How to write a business plan for the people who can't afford the coaching or for the people who just want that answer. Here's a great product for you. And I think people jump into products too soon before they even have a really good stage of their audience, but it's definitely a great way to do it. The reason why I'm hesitant in recommending it so early is because it takes so much work to create a good product. For me to write this book, it's a lot of work. If it flops, that sucks. How much work did I just put into this thing that didn't work out? I don't want that for you. It happens so often is that you spend so much time working on this amazing product that then nobody wants. Because you didn't do enough research into what your audience actually cares about. You have to combine what you love doing with what the audience wants. Just doing what you love doing is not enough. That's just a hobby. What your audience craves, wants, needs, desires is super, super important. And so you have to have those conversations with them to figure that out so you can build the best product. Way number 4 is through donations. This is super common, whether it's through PayPal or if you look at Wikipedia, they often have those donations at the top. Whether it's a buy me a beer fund, buy me a cup of coffee fund, whether it's something like Patreon that you're using where people are donating to you every month for thanking you and you're providing some extra service for them. To make that work, what's really helpful is to show the amount of work that's involved in doing the thing that you're doing. To show how much time you're spending on making the content for your website, to show the plans for what you want to do, because you're appealing to somebody's goodwill. If you're selling a service or selling a product or affiliate marketing, you are selling a benefit, right? Like they're going to get something out of it. What's the benefit of helping you just donating money? You want them to feel good about themselves. You want them to feel good about the cause that they're donating to. And so that story, the backstory is important. Why you started this thing, where you want to go, the resources that you're going to need to get there, the heartfelt personal message like, "Thank you so much for joining me on my mission." It's a great way to start and you can start making money with people who are the repeat, they keep coming back. Even again, a small audience. If you have 100 people a month coming to your website, but they really love the content and they can't live without it, you could get some donations coming in. Again, put a tip jar on your website, put a Buy Me a Coffee, Put a Patreon where you're giving more benefit and value, but it's so important that you tell your story alongside of it, otherwise people won't give you the money. Way number 5 is brand deals. So now as you start building up an audience and as you start getting known in your industry, you'll get corporations who want to work with you. I am known in the entrepreneur space, so I get a lot of companies who are trying to target entrepreneurs. To come work with me, and they say, Evan, we want to work with you on a campaign, we want to try to promote this product, or this is what we believe, can you help us get exposure? Most of them I say no to because if it's just a product pitch, I'm not interested, especially if I don't use their product. I'm not going to come on and just pitch you guys products because you would lose interest. I always want to create value in everything that I'm doing. So as an example, with the Stephen Kelly videos, he's the CEO of Sage, I use their software You know, we have a 3-year deal working together, and every month we do a Google Hangout, YouTube Hangout, where we answer questions. And it helps give Sage exposure, but it's not a hard push where you need to go buy Sage accounting software, it's the best thing ever. If an accounting question comes up, that's great, we attack it. But most of the questions are just about trying to help entrepreneurs, and Stephen gets that. He wants to be a resource for entrepreneurs, and so it's really great. Partnership. When you're thinking about brand deals, you want to make sure— because it's tempting, it's tempting to take the cash. You're going to pay me cash for this, this is great. It's tempting to want to take that cash. Just make sure it aligns with your values, your fit, you know, you think your audience is going to like it as well. And the key to making that happen is not necessarily a huge website with tons and tons and tons of traffic. It's more about the specialization. If you are one of the go-to places for X, for Smurfs, for Tim Hortons coffee, for, you know, lentils, whatever the thing is. If you are the go-to place for a specific niche, then you become really attractive to the brands that care about that niche. If you are the place to go to for lentils, and I'm saying that because I have— let me show you, I got my breakfast that my wife made me, lentils and eggs. So you're the website they go to for lentils, and you rate all the different lentils and you share your lentil experience and you're sharing recipes and you're sharing, you know, how to get healthier by eating lentils and diet and tips and all that, you know, that's a pretty limited audience. Who cares that much about lentils that they would subscribe and coming back to that website? But there would be some people who would do that, and then you become really attractive to the lentil companies, right? They're going to want to work with you. Like, you are the place to go to for lentils. And so you don't need to build up this giant website with millions of views. It's more about a targeted audience that you can really pay attention to. Number 6 is advertising. This now becomes a mix of do you want to go niche or do you want to go broad? Advertising is what most people think of when they're making money from a website. The challenging part is at the beginning you don't have a lot of views and advertisers are typically looking at how much volume am I getting am I going to earn from this? If you're getting 1,000 views a day, it's not really enough to be able to make really good money off of advertising. You need to think, how am I going to scale this thing up? Unless you're focused on brand deals and they care so much about that audience that they want to run an ad campaign on your website. It's just typically ads are calculated by how many thousand impressions that they're going to get. That's much more growth strategy. It's for most content. You look at YouTube, if you want to have success on YouTube, advertising is an okay way to make money at the beginning, but it's one of the hardest because you just don't have enough views to really make it count. And so it's much more of a later growth strategy than early stage. If you're just getting started out, I'd be looking at the other strategies that we talked about already. And the number 7 way is to build your platform, to be a recognized authority. This goes back to why brands would be interested in you. What I found is as I built myself up as a go-to resource in the entrepreneur space, I get a whole ton of opportunities that I never would have thought of happening for me. So one was the book deal. Like I got a book deal with Penguin Random House. I never thought I would get a book deal. I never thought I would write a book. It wasn't part of my initial plan. I get asked to join boards of directors for different companies. Like, you want me to be on your board of directors? Again, something I never really thought that would happen to me. I get asked to do speaking gigs and speaking deals, and I thought going into this, what corporation would hire me to speak? Because what am I gonna say? My message is so entrepreneurial. I'm gonna go up on stage and say, hey, you should quit your job and go start a business. What company is gonna want me to talk to their employees? Employees. I never thought speaking would be a part of it. And as it turns out, there's a big market for it. I don't aggressively pursue it because Nina, my wife, misses me too much. There she is. She misses me too much when I go away. So I try to keep it to a few engagements a year. But all these things will start to happen that were never probably part of your plan, just because you get known in your industry. And so the more you can figure out the niche that you want to go after and say, I'm going to be one of the top 3 websites for this one little tiny thing and do that, and then you can expand. Look at Facebook strategy. They started off only being for university and colleges, and then they eventually expanded to be for everyone. Start off with a niche, figure out what you can be 1, 2, 3 best in the world at, and then start attracting attention to the people who care about that industry, and you don't need to have tons of views. And then so you can expand beyond. You may have some big vision for what you want to do, and I love that. Like, dream big, think big, I love it. But start small, in small steps every day. Like, okay, phase 1 is I need to get this thing done. I need to be known in this niche. That's where I'm going to dominate. And then from there, I'm going to expand my empire and build it up, right? So building up a platform and building up your authority, your expertise has been a really surprising way that I've been able to generate money from my website and I'd love for you to experience that as well. So thank you guys so much for watching. I made this video because Keon Witherspoon asked me to. If there's a topic you'd like to suggest for a future 7 Ways video, check out the link in the description below and you can go and cast your vote. I'd love to know from this video what was your favorite way out of the 7 that you're going to immediately apply somehow to build in your website? And did I miss an 8, 9, 10 that you want to add to the list? Leave it in the comments below. Really excited to see what you have to say. Thank you guys so much for watching. I believe in you. I hope you continue to believe in yourself and whatever your one word is. Much love. See you soon. Raise your standard. Apple at the core, its core value is that we believe That people with passion can change the world for the better. Not one drop of my self-worth depends on your acceptance of me. I don't ever give up. I'd have to be dead or completely incapacitated. Hey Believe Nation, if you want to see my all-time favorite top 10 rules of success, I have a very special secret video for you. These are the individual clips that I have personally learned the most from and applied apply to my life and my business. Check the link in the description for details.