3 Ways To Monetize Your Website

If you are a small business struggling to stay afloat, you need as much extra money as possible to keep from permanently closing. Here are some ways to make additional cash from your website, aside from an online store.

Donations

This is the most straightforward way for your customers to give you money. You can place a "Donate Here" button anywhere on your website, but the best place to put it would be either in your about section or the home page. Customers will click on the button, enter the amount they wish to donate (you may have pre-set amounts instead), and send you the money.

Incentivizing Visitors To Donate

If you want, you can motivate people to donate by offering rewards such as shoutouts or the ability to pre-order a new product. Make sure to offer an appropriate reward for the amount donated, as you do not want the reward to cost you more than the amount you received in the donation.

Advertisements

While many people may say that advertisements diminish the user's experience of a website and the disadvantages outweigh the advantages, integrating advertisements into your website is another useful way to make extra money.

Google Sites

Google Sites makes incorporating advertisements into your website extremely easy. All you have to do is link your Google AdSense account to your website, or create a new account and link that one instead. After doing this, a new option in the toolbar should appear, letting you add advertisements in two possible ways.

The first way is to use auto ads. Auto ads are a fast and easy way to display ads on your site. With auto ads, Google chooses which ads to show on your site and where to show them. This is very convenient because auto ads are displayed the same on all devices, and all ads, by default, meet Google AdSense's program policies.

Instead of auto ads, you can choose to have ad units on your website. Ad units are for creators who want full control over the ads being shown on their website. Creators have the ability to select the ads they wish to be displayed from a list of different types and sizes. Ad units are manually placed on a website by the creator. However, the places that the creator chooses to put the ad units must comply with Google AdSense's program policies, and the ad units are not guaranteed to be displayed the same way across all devices.

Squarespace

Unlike Google Sites, it is difficult to put advertisements on a Squarespace website. Squarespace does not have any plug-in features that will let your website host ads. Instead, you must use a third-party service such as Google AdSense. In short, to display ads on your site, you have to copy and paste the code provided to you by the ad service into Code Blocks. Also, since adding custom code is involved in the process, it would be much harder for a person with little coding experience to control their advertisements. If you wish to learn more about incorporating advertisements into your Squarespace website, visit this article on the official Squarespace website: https://support.squarespace.com/hc/en-us/articles/206545597-Can-I-place-advertisements-on-my-site-.

Memberships

If your business already has a significant amount of returning customers, creating a membership program is a great idea. You can reward customers who have paid for memberships with perks such as free shipping, the ability to pre-order items, and no ads (if you have any). If you want, you can also add different membership levels so that customers can have the ability to choose which one they want.