The purpose of a freelancing website is clear: to attract customers, provide contact information and raise the online profile of the freelancer. So what if your site could be doing more than this? What if your website could be adding to your bottom line by simply existing online?
The good news is, it can. With the right tools, your site could be earning you a passive income while you focus on running your business, and with very little effort. Here are four key ways to make money from your freelancing website.
- Affiliate advertising
Clearly, you don’t want to advertise competing freelancers on your page, but what about collaborators? If you offer IT services, you might have customers enquiring about the latest tech products, for example. In this case, you could earn money by including affiliate links in your content that refers users to Amazon products.
By becoming an Amazon affiliate, you’ll make money each time a user clicks through and buys products from Amazon.com. For more information about becoming an Amazon affiliate, as well as traffic generation tutorials and branding strategies, click here.
- Pay-per-click (PPC) advertising
Pay-per-click is another method of online advertising. In the same way that affiliate links earn you money when a customer buys an affiliate’s product, PPC means you get paid whenever a user clicks on an ad displayed on your website.
If you decide to run PPC ads on your website, you need to be selective about the brands you partner with. You also need to be careful not to stuff your site with ads, as this will annoy users and cause your site to run slowly. Instead, advertise products and services that complement your offering and are of genuine interest to your target customer.
- Selling products
You may already work from an office or shop, but you might be missing a trick by not taking your business online. Building an e-commerce system into your site could increase your sales, reduce operating costs and boost profit margins for your business, so it is definitely worth the upfront investment.
There are millions of people searching the Internet every day looking for products and services, so you could be missing out on potential custom by not selling online. Plus, an online store is effectively open 24/7, which means customers could be buying your products while you sleep!
- Accepting donations
If you have an active and engaged following, setting up a PayPal button or linking your website to your crowd-funding account gives people the opportunity to support your freelancing journey.
For example, PayPal offers donation buttons that only take about ten minutes to add to your website. These buttons provide a way for you to recoup what you might be spending on a good web hosting, product creation, research, and all of the other costs to maintain your freelancing website.
Your freelancing website doesn’t have to be static. With the right tools, advertising opportunities and regular content creation, you can turn your website into a passive income-making machine.
