Hi, I am Praneeth.
In this blog, you will learn 10 perfect ways you can earn money which are Great Alternatives to affiliate marketing.
If you are in an industry where you cannot do affiliate marketing in that niche on your blog or website, then this is the perfect blog you are looking for.
Without further ado, let’s get started.
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What is Affiliate marketing?
Affiliate marketing is one type of digital marketing strategy where,
Companies will let the marketers help in increasing sales of their products and giving a commission out of each sale that marketers do while using a unique tracking link that tracks the sales called an affiliate link.
Learn more about affiliate links here.
Affiliate marketing in short is about generating sales of other people and companies’ products and earning a commission out of each sale.
There are many pros and cons of affiliate marketing, some of them are,
- It is a low-cost business idea that can make you thousands of dollars without any limit on earnings.
- It is a passive income source which means you do the work today and after a year later also you can enjoy the fruit of your work.
- You don’t need expertise or much technical knowledge.
With every positive side, there is a negative side as well.
The cons of affiliate marketing include,
- Income is not guaranteed, as long as your sales are there you get that income and commission.
- It is a highly competitive industry.
Learn more about the pros and cons here.
With that said,
Here are 10 great awesome and perfect alternatives to affiliate marketing you can do on your website or blog if you are in a niche where you don’t have the product or service to do Affiliate. marketing.
10 Perfect Alternatives to Affiliate marketing.
Here are 10 ways you can monetize your website or blog which are the perfect alternatives to affiliate marketing.
- Place ads.
- Sell products both physical and digital.
- Do consult.
- Work as a freelancer for others.
- Flip your website and start a new one.
- Create a membership website.
- Write sponsored posts and paid reviews.
- Attend events and conferences for some charge.
- Create and sell your own themes and plugins.
- Host a virtual summit or a webinar.
Let’s learn each alternative In detail.
1. Place ads.
The number 1 alternative to affiliate marketing you would get is ADS.
And when you think about it for a second,
Ads are not a bad deal actually
In terms of making money if you consider AdSense or other ad networks you would not make huge money but,
If you join premium ad networks like Media vine or Ad thrive which have their own terms and conditions and requirements to get accepted.
If once you get accepted by these premium ad networks you know.
It is going to be awesome.
You can seriously make a good amount of money out of it.
The problem with ads can be like,
- If you choose a working ad network, it can cause some bad redirections on your website.
- Choosing the wrong ad network can also cause wrong ads with viruses to enter on your website.
- Bad ads can and will increase the load time of the website.
- Ads can be irritating and disturb the user experience of the blog.
- Ads can potentially get you a penalty, click here to learn more.
When you want to monetize your website through ads you need to have to join the right ad network if not your whole website can tank down.
There are 2 ways you earn money placing ads on your website which are CPC and CPM.
For your kind information CPC is called COST PER CLICK which means how much an advertiser is willing to spend if someone clicks on their ads.
CPM means how much an advertiser is willing to spend if the ad has got over 1000 impressions or views.
Talking about factors which influence the earning in ads are the following.
- Traffic sources.
- Content niche and type.
- Audience age and demographics.
- Audience engagement on the website.
- Adnetwork you joined.
Let’s see the second method or way to earn money other than affiliate marketing.
2. Sell products both physical and digital.
This is another big thing when we are talking about monetizing a blog or a website.
Selling digital products like ebooks and courses is a huge part.
Mainly with ebooks,
People are more interested in purchasing ebooks because,
- They are portable anywhere.
- You don’t have any physicality of these online things so no weight of these things like you can carry multiple of these books in your phone.
People can buy ebooks if presented well.
Ebooks are not complicated to make rather you can do it by yourself in a pdf file with a bunch of videos and few audio files and done.
It hardly takes a week time to write an Ebook for your audience and get started with designing the cover on free tools like Canva.
Talking about ebooks,
It’s a great start for you and your audience can have a glimpse or idea of what kind of value you can add to your audience through ebooks at a low cost so that,
You can convince your audience to buy your expensive products like courses by letting them know the value you can add with an example of your Ebook.
You can get to hire freelancers to design and write the Ebook for you for a couple of bucks on sites like Upwork and Fiverr.
Click here to learn how to sell ebooks on wordpress.
Another interesting thing is the online courses.
With online courses,
You can sell courses higher than the price of ebooks.
The good thing about online courses and classes is that it offers the location freedom and the flexibility for the audience.
With online courses, you can also make a good amount of money.
Other than selling digital things you can also sell your own merchandise,
Well, I am are talking about things like,
- Tshirts.
- Hoodies.
- All those products depending on and relevant to your niche can be a great idea.
This idea works great for especially for fashion bloggers.
This is another big deal and thing when you think about it for monetizing your website or blog.
3. Do consult.
This is another huge thing when you are talking about monetizing a website.
Especially without affiliate marketing.
You when being successful in your business or in the niche.
You can offer people to get to you for some time.
You can offer people to take consultations from you.
This can be starting from an hourly to a daily basis.
If you don’t want to start your own ebook or online course you can start your own consulting business.
People mostly prefer taking advice from you being an expert on the topic because,
They see your success, your work and they have the belief that you know what you are talking about and they see you as the expert and the authority of the niche and you know our human psychology is like,
We humans want and take advice from someone happily who is an expert on the niche than from an unknown even if the advice is both same.
This is called social proof.
Many bloggers are earning money very well with this business model of giving paid consultations for other people.
4. Work as a freelancer for others.
This is another big opportunity to monetize your blog if you can’t do affiliate marketing in your niche or on your blog.
For your kind information,
Freelancing is working for others on a temporary basis.
Often people do freelance when they have any skills like,
- Blog or content writing.
- Web development.
- Graphic design.
- Copywriting.
- Coding and programming.
There are many cons for working on freelance websites like Upwork and freelancer,
One of the reasons freelance can be a good idea is,
If you have a blog or a website instead is that,
The chances of you getting hired by someone when people come to your website,
- Read your content writing.
- See your graphic design skills.
- See your website development skills.
When people see your work life, the chances of you getting hired are more.
This is another big thing you can do to monetize your blog and increase your revenue sources.
You can create a separate page such as hire me where you can list down all your skills and conditions to hire you as a freelancer and along with the pricing point.
It makes it easy for people to know, what it costs to get you to do their work.
5. Flip your website and start a new one.
If you are tired of working on your blog for the time and want to start a new project or want to increase your revenue.
You can flip the website on sites like Flippa.
For your kind information, flipping websites means, selling your website.
This is another big business model pretty similar to domain flipping,
The problem with this approach is that you got to start a new website every time and it is never easy to start a new website, there are high chances of falling down and losing hope and making mistakes.
Click here to learn the truth about starting a blog no one tells you.
But the overall business model is like,
You start a website on a particular niche from scratch, work on the website until you get some traffic and income, sell the website on online platforms like Flippa, and make a profit and start again.
6. Create a membership website.
You can also create your own membership website.
Like a private Facebook group or a private telegram channel,
You can give some of the exclusive access to your audience to join your group like,
- Better in-depth content and resources.
- Meetings and interviews with other people help your audience more.
- More informative content.
- More personalized chats and meetings.
- Access to audio content and video content and personalized support with one on one interaction.
You know you can include anything you want to include with a monthly subscription plan,
Other than creating your own private or membership website, you can ask for donations or crowdfunding for people to help you contribute so that you can continue doing your work.
You can create a membership website using The Member press plugin.
7. Write sponsored posts and paid reviews.
This approach is another big deal that most people are doing.
This one is pretty similar to ads.
But the problem with ads is that,
Most people don’t place ads on their website because it makes the website load slow, impacts the User Experience.
Other than that over 25% of people are using adblockers on the internet today.
So, accepting sponsored posts and writing paid reviews for the companies is a big opportunity which companies have found to increase their awareness and reach.
This works great if you have an awesome reputation in the industry you are in and you have a good amount of traffic to your blog or website.
Brands want and will actively reach for such blogs relevant to the industry which has some established authority and credibility.
And people tend to prefer knowing more about brands and products through online reviews and blog posts rather than ads,
As a matter of fact,
- Blog posts are the 5th most trusted source of information online.
- 57% of marketers said that blogging has increased their customer’s number.
- Marketers who prioritize blogging get 13x more results from their efforts.
Source: Optimonster.
You can reach to companies or brands to letting them know that you want to write a product review and mentioning your price and your requirements.
So you know sponsored posts and paid reviews can work for you as a blogger and for the company’s marketing and sales.
8. Attend events, conferences for some charge.
This is another big thing you can do for your blog not just about monetizing it.
You can attend events, conferences, and other meetups of people.
You can inspire people about your work and increase your personal brand,
You can increase your website and blog awareness among the people.
This is another big thing you can do along with earning money from attending those events,
More people will know about you which can increase your website visibility and more people will trust you as the expert and increase your sales.
Because you are speaking at the conference as the expert and authority and remember that social proof thing.
9. Create and sell your own themes and plugins.
The most important thing about wordpress which differentiates from other cms and blogging platforms is its plugins and themes.
The themes and plugins are incredible features of wordpress.
If you are good at coding and web development works, you can start building your own plugins and themes which you can later register into the wordpress.org section officially.
You know anyone can submit their plugins in the wordpress plugin directory and the same goes with themes.
The basic formula to make some money through selling the plugins and themes on wordpress is through limiting the features and customization in a pro plan for people.
You can make a good amount of money with this business model of creating helpful themes and plugins bringing something unique to the table along with solving issues that other plugins lack.
This is a great idea for those who are interested in programming and web development work and have some technical skills.
10. Host a virtual summit or a webinar.
This is also another big thing you can do to monetize your website or blog.
You can host a virtual summit or a webinar where you can invite a bunch of experts and start a discussion on a particular topic.
This is pretty similar to creating a membership website and you can earn money by making access to the webinar or the discussion of the experts in a pro plan on your website.
So that you can get people who are really interested in learning more on the niche can join you with targeted traffic and you can use this model to drive sales to some of the products.
Like an ebook or an online course, you got my point.
This is another big thing you can do to monetize your blog if you have the authority in the niche and reputation in the niche.
There are many pros for doing this including,
- Establish yourself as an expert among many experts and build your authority.
- Help create new connections with other influencers and experts of the industry.
- Increase your brand awareness and reach.
The downside or the con is that it is tough to get started as it takes some time to build a level of trust and authority in the niche and establish some reputation online.
For more information on the best webinar software, you can use to get started on wordpress click here.
Ending remarks.
There you go, I have answered all the alternatives to affiliate marketing you should consider in 2020 and beyond in your niche.
Do comment down what do you think about the listed alternatives to affiliate marketing which you can use to monetize on your website or blog to make some additional money.
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I will catch you next time, till then.
Keep learning and keep growing.