More and more people are wanting to start a side hustle, or manage a full time business while working from home. These ideas generally need a website to be able to flourish. There are so many different ways that you can earn money from a website, and many of these don’t actually require you to sell anything.
So in this article we will discuss how to make money with a website without selling anything.
Make Money with a Website Without Selling Anything
- Can I Earn Money With My Website?
- How to Create a Website: A Beginners Guide
- How Make Money With a Website Without Selling Anything
Affiliate disclaimer: This post contains affiliate links (disclosure). If you use these links to buy something we and possibly you may earn a commission. Thanks.
Can I Earn Money With My Website?
Before we get into details, the first question that we need to address, is to understand whether it’s possible to make money from a website.
The answer is of course, yes it is! There are so many ways to generate income from your website, including (to name a few):
- Running Advertisements: Getting paid to run advertisements on your website
- Affiliate marketing: Earning a referral bonus if people sign up to a product you recommend
- eCommerce (Drop shipping or Own Products): Selling items that you have either made, or are produced by someone else
- Business Websites: Promoting a service to clients
- Freelancing & Offering an Online Service: Generating income from doing various online tasks such as content writing, digital design, social media management and virtual assistant, etc.
How to Create a Website: A Beginners Guide
For a website to work, you need to have 2 main things:
- A domain name: something to recognise your website by. The part that follows the www.
- A hosting company: the place where all of your files are stored and the part that.
Sometimes these come together in a bundle, and other times it makes more sense to keep these separate.
Additionally people will add various layers on top of that, and various programs to help optimize their websites. This is important for things like page speed and other performance measures (used to rank your page higher on Google).
Here on thewahman we use about 5 separate services and join them all through various DNS settings.
Domains are a standard product. It doesn’t really matter if you buy one from this company or that company. Your still buying the same underlying assed (even though some companies will include various addon services). Therefore we use one of the more cheaper options, specifically NameCheap (aptly named)
What is the Easiest Solution for A Beginner
Sometimes people just want something that works out of the box. Something that they know the cost upfront, and everything works straight away.
For this we recommend that you start with BlueHost. There are a lot of recommendations for it, but really because its perfect for beginners and people wanting to set up a website without any hassles.
Bluehost are one of the cheapest and most beginner friendly hosting companies that you can go through.
Their basic plan costs $2.95 per month (for 12 months) which includes:
- 1 website with 50GB of SSD Storage
- Drag and drop website builder
- Free Domain (for 1 year) with SSL
- Free CDN
It would be very hard to find anything that matches that price for the above services that you get. Overall your paying only $35.40 for a full year and you have everything you need to create your very first website.
Kind of like a try it, see how it goes and then go from there.
If after the first year, your site is generating income (and you choose to keep it running), you can think about opting for a faster cloud hosting service (like Cloudways, instead).
But lets break down some other options for those that want to do a bit of a mix and match, and ultimately get the best deal.
Finding Your Perfect Domain Name
Coming up with a website name (also known as a domain name), can be a sticking point for many people. The name is important as it promotes your brand and needs to be simple and stick in peoples mind.
So you know what your website is going to be about?
There are many services out there that help you decide on a name for your website. There are so many domain name generators out there that can help you choose the perfect example.
Just remember that there are millions and millions of websites out there (well, 644 million as of March 2012 per the Web Server Survey by Netcraft, or, now potentially over 1.1 billion according to internetlivestats). Your job is to direct that traffic (i.e. people looking at the internet) to your website! You want something that is descriptive of what you are trying to show on your website, but something that can be easy to understand and search for as well!
For my website here, thewahman.com is just an abbreviated version of The Working at Home Man (which was already taken when I registered my first site. From my website’s name, you can tell that the information here is about working at home. Make sense?
You can use this free tool to check if the name is available or not:
You are now off to a great start. Often picking the domain name can be one of the most important decisions when you create a website, as it provides the context for the information that will appear. A name is a brand.
If you are looking for the cheapest domain name, you have a look at NameCheap. They always have a promotional campaign running, allowing you to pick up a domain at less than $5 USD for the first year.
Choosing an Appropriate Web Extension
If you are just starting out, it may be best (and easiest) to obtain a “.com” extension. This is the most widely known and used extension and you really can’t go wrong using it.
But as time goes on, there are more and more extensions that are becoming available (for example .io, .net, .dance, etc.).
However, not all names are available for everyone. For example, if you wanted a .com.au extension (Australia), then you would need to have registered a business in Australia.
Website Hosting: Where You Want All Of Your Files To Be Stored
Website hosting is hands down the most important aspect of your website (even more important than a domain name 😮). It’s the place where all of your website content is stored, and then distributed to people viewing your website.
Choosing a good host is extremely important, as no two hosts are the same.
Here we describe a few of the different types of hosting:
Shared Hosting
This is the most basic of hosting, that will see lots of websites sharing the same server. All of the websites on that server will share the same infrastructure and resources of the server (like RAM(memory) and CPU’s).
The upside is that this type of hosting is so cheap (aka. Bluehost @ 2.95 per month), but the downside is that you may have slower speed, or processing power. This type of hosting makes it perfect for entry level websites that don’t need much resources.
Cloud Hosting
Cloud hosting is a few rungs higher than your shared hosting platforms. Cloud hosting allows you to utilize a network of servers, which makes it super easy to keep up with the requirements of a website or application.
The real power in cloud hosting is that a website owner is able to scale up (or down) their hosting requirements at a click of a button.
Pricing for cloud hosting can also be fairly cheap, when you are after a “bare bones” setup. A company like Digital Ocean offers “droplets” starting at $5 a month.
However, if you are not so technical with setting up your own server, then one of the biggest downsides using something like this is that you may have a lot of trouble getting everything set up, including dealing with API’s, data loss, and sever hijacking (among many other things).
Managed Cloud Hosting
If you are not so savvy with setting up servers under regular cloud hosting, then you may be interested in Managed Cloud Hosting. What is this you ask? Well its simple. It’s just your regular cloud hosting, but its managed for you so that you don’t have to worry about any of that technical stuff.
Managed cloud hosting provides various advantages like 24/7 support (so that you can get immediate help when your website is down), performance improvements (like caching applications etc), automated backups, security improvements, and so much more!
An example of a good managed cloud hosting company (and one that we use for this site) is CloudWays. They offer extremely quick websites, and plans that start from $10 a month.
🎉 Special deal 🎉
You can save 10% off your first 3 months of CloudWays with promo code: THEWAHMAN
There are also other types of hosting, such as managed, dedicated and VPS, but we won’t go into them here.
How Make Money With a Website Without Selling Anything
So now we have our website, we can get on to understanding ways of making money online without selling anything.
Some of these ways include running advertisements and affiliate marketing. I have excluded things such as eCommerce, business websites and freelancing as these are selling a service (i.e. your items or your time).
Running Advertisements
Running advertisements on your website has to be one of the most well known, and also quickest ways that your able to monetize your site. Depending on the amount of site visits you have, you can sign up with an ad network.
Generally if you are a new blog, you will likely find a home with Google AdSense as there are no pageview minimums that you have to meet to sign up.
However, if you wanted to increase your AdSense revenue by up to 250%, then I suggest that you have a look at Ezoic. Ezoic provide a much higher return than AdSense, and they also offer a suite of other SEO optimization tools that you can utilize as a member of the platform (no cost).
I currently use Ezoic on my blog, and I have written a review about how the platform can help your website grow!
Affiliate Marketing
Affiliate marketing has to be one of the best ways that you are able to make money online without having to sell anything. It’s as simple as putting a link to a program that you recommend, and then get a kickback or referral bonus if someone signs up through the link (similar to how cashback rewards programs work) .
Affiliate Programs You Can Join Today
There are so many different affiliate programs in so many niches that you are able to join. A lot of your favourite companies may already be utilizing a rewards program that you just need to sign up to!
Beware though, a lot of companies will require you to have a certain amount of website views before you’re able to join.
Below I have selected just a few really good programs that:
- don’t have strict joining requirements
- provide a good overall return
- can used by anyone, meaning that they should be easy to market.
Fiverr is a global marketplace of freelancing services. All you have to do is promote one of the vast arrays of products, is to create an account, find your link, and then start promoting that link.
What is great about Fiverr, is that there are so many things that you can promote through Fiverr, including:
- The platform itself. Fiverr is a leading marketplace for freelancing services. They offer so many different things including Twitch Emotes, Social Media Management, Photo Editing, Voice Over, Content Writer, and NFT (to name a few)
- Fiver Business. This is a platform for setting up a team with the freelancers that will drive business to the next level.
- Logo Maker. You style a logo and Fiverr designers will develop a brand and logo that is customized to your needs.
- Fiverr Learn. A platform to help other learn everything there is to know about marketing, graphic design, websites, writing, business, video & photography and programs.
- And.Co. Tools that are used to handle everyday business items (proposals, invoicing, payments, contracts, tracking time, expenses, tasks and reporting).
Additionally, Fiverr have all a lot of media assets for you to use, and some cool widgets that your able to include straight onto your page.
Ezoic
The company used to help users generate more revenue from their website by running ads. Ezoic have no minimum website visits (like companies like Media.net and AdThrive), and they also offer a revenue guarantee – a website hosted with them will outperform other ad companies or Ezoic will pay 25% more in ad revenue.
Really, these subscriptions should be selling themselves.
Some of the best affiliate programs are those that will pay you continually, and therefore provide a passive income each month.
Running Advertisements vs Affiliate Marketing
This is a question that a lot of people may be asking when they first decide to generate some income from their website. Is it better to show ads on your website, or wait until you have more website visits?
This is a personal decision and there isn’t really a right or wrong answer. A lot of people suggest that its better to wait with the affiliate links and advertisements, at least until you have a steady source of traffic coming to your site.
Other people suggest that if you plan on having ads later on your site, you might as well show them now and get people used to them. Either way, you’re not likely to make a lot of money when you’re just beginning.
If you start getting the people coming to your site, then affiliate marketing may be a better option for you to earn income. You could so some basic math like:
- How much did I earn in advertisements from the last 1,000 visitors to my site?
- How many sales did I get through my affiliate link during that same time?
I signed up to Ezoic in 2021, and as you can see, I’m roughly about to get $10 per every 1000 views to my website. Please note, this isn’t the same as you will get if you use Ezoic. You may receive a lot more, or possibly less than that. If you wanted to find out more about showing ads on yoru website, I have written up a review of the platform I use here.
To Sum Up
We have briefly discussed a few ways that your able to generate money on your website. There are a lot more methods than the ones discussed here, and everyone has different requirements and possibilities based on the types of website they make.
What we also haven’t discussed is the importance of getting your website in front of people. You are not going to make any money if no one is visiting your website. It’s that simple.
Overall making money online without selling anything is really quite fun. You don’t have to deal with customers, clients, orders, shipping, inventory or returns. What’s there not to love?