If you’re wondering how free websites make money, the answer is with a lot of hard work!
Creating a completely free website to make money from is much harder than spending some money on building your own website. Free blogging platforms allow online marketers to create content and then link their content with various products and services.
For example, Hubpages.com is a free blogging platform. It lets you create an account, post content and link to various affiliate products. You’ll need to join affiliate programs in order to do this. Hubpages connects directly with these programs and lets you use drag and drop ‘blocks’ to put into your content.
Blogging Platform Or Free Website
A blogging platform like Hubpages does offer a means to get online and earn income completely for free. However, there are some limitations. You can’t rank your content like you would your own website. Google doesn’t rank Hubpages content on its free search algorithms (search results). There are also some limitations to the affiliate products you can link to.
To create your own website, you’ll need to spend a modest amount of money to purchase a domain name and host your site. Hosting is less than $10 a month and a domain name can be bought for $10 or less. See create free website and earn money.
How Free Websites Make Money – Affiliate Marketing?
Most free websites earn an income from either one or two strategies, or both. Affiliate marketing is one of the most popular methods of monetising a blog or website. Affiliate marketers promote other people’s products and services from their websites.
For example, I offer training and education for affiliate marketers through my blogs. I recommend products and services I have found useful to other would-be affiliate marketers. If I make a sale, I earn a commission based on the sale.
Google’s Adsense Program
Another income generating strategy for bloggers is Google’s Adsense program. With Adsense, bloggers and website owners can place adverts within their content. When someone clicks on their advert, they earn a small commission.
If you own the content, you receive a percentage of the advertising revenue paid to run the advert. How much you get paid will depend on your content and the appropriate adverts places on your content, which is done automatically by Google. All you need to do is place some code within your blog posts.
Adsense is a great way to generate income if you have lots of traffic. For new bloggers, traffic is the main concern. Without a steady stream of visitors to your content, you don’t earn any money with either adverts placed on your content or affiliate marketing products.
How Free Websites Make Money – Digital Products
So, how free websites make money is through selling other people’s products and/or using advertising placed on content which generates clicks of pay per click advertising. You can of course also sell your own products too, if you have any to sell. Usually though, website owners use other people’s products because then they don’t have to fulfil on the delivery and products can be downloaded from the internet if they are digital products.
Digital products therefore are useful for website owners because they don’t need posting. They can also be bought from anywhere globally, which makes them perfect for an internet business. Product owners don’t have postage, handling or even much manufacturing costs, once they are made. This means their cost is advertising. Affiliate marketers get up to 40%-50% of the cost of a digital product in commissions because they do the advertising for the product owners.
The owners make a sale and the affiliate gets a large commission. It’s a win win because the affiliate doesn’t need to create their own products and the product owner doesn’t have to pay for advertising. They just pay the affiliate marketers to do the selling.
Marketing Your Website
Since this article is about how free websites make money, I’ll discuss the methods of marketing which are completely free to do. Some website owners use paid strategies too, once they start generating income from their blog. For a completely free marketing strategy to work well, you’ll need to create a lot of content for your website. You can do this through a number of different strategies:
- Blogging
- Video creation – Uploading to YouTube
- Creating Podcasts or webinars
- Building content on social media
- List building
Most free websites start out with a blog. Blogging is a free strategy of creating content to build a steady stream of visitors to a website. Bloggers write content based around their products, or an interest. They can then attempt to sell affiliate products through their website, or the can build an email list.
How Free Websites Make Money – List Building
Some website owners build an email list so that they can promote their products and services (affiliate marketing) to their subscribers. There’s huge value in building a list of email subscribers for website owners. When someone visits a website, they only have an opportunity ‘window’ of a few minutes to decide whether to purchase something from that website.
If you can get a visitor to opt-in to a subscribers list, you can extend this time period to weeks, months and even years. Years later, someone can purchase something from a list. See autopilot marketing.
Websites get people to subscriber to their email list by offering a free giveaway product, like an ebook, for example. I offer a few ebooks to my website visitors to offer value and encourage them to sign up to my email marketing list.
Build Your Own Free Website
You can either start a blog on a free website hosting, or build your own website for a little more. With your own hosting you get to choose which products you can link to and you stand more chance of getting free traffic from search engines like Google.
See free automated money making software for details on building a free blog.
If you want to build your own website with a domain name and hosting, checkout create free website and earn money.
For a more dedicated training and education community, and a range of digital products and services which you can promote, sign up to my email list on this website.