Monetizing Your Coaching Website to Create Passive Income

What does it mean to monetize a website?

Simply put, monetizing is the process of earning money from your website or blog by using it as an advertising platform through your content and with offers relevant to your site.

What’s the Reality?

Before we get started with how to monetize your website, it is important to know what you should expect.

Monetizing your website is not a lottery win, money will not just start rolling in right away. It is more like a slow crawl to start, which builds over time. But this should not dissuade you from doing it!

To earn profit from monetizing your website, you will need to have:

A website
Content – blog posts are the best way to get traffic to your website
Proper SEO (Search Engine Optimization) set up on the site
A social media following
An email list

All of the above may seem daunting, but it is ok to start small and work your way up.

What this all comes down to is traffic, or how many people come to your website. You need traffic on your website to make a profit from it. I will talk more about how to get traffic to your website in next month’s article. If you have traffic coming to your website then the marketing will be seen and clicked and you will start making money.

Now that we have talked about the reality of how you will benefit from monetizing your site, I want to share how to do it.

OK, I’m Ready. What do I do?

There are a few options that I would suggest that are fairly easy to set up and maintain.

Create and Sell Digital Products

For coaches, this one is pretty simple. Write that eBook, create those helpful worksheets for your ideal client, make audio files of your meditation lessons… the list can go on and on. Many of you have already created these for your one-to-one clients. You can easily add these files to your website and sell them using a plugin like Easy Digital Downloads. This is an excellent way of creating passive income for YEARS! I have a client that makes over $2000 a month on eBooks and worksheets she put on her website over 5 years ago!

Affiliate Marketing

Affiliate marketing is simple. You sign up to be an affiliate for businesses, products, classes, etc. that fit with what your website is about and that you feel are worth sharing. This is a really helpful article that goes into great detail on how to get started in affiliate marketing.

Basically, when you get approved for an affiliate program, you get a special affiliate link from them and you then put those links on your website. You can have actual affiliate ads, share the links in your blog posts, or use the links on your social media pages. You can see this in action on The Coach Guardian. (>> look in the sidebar over there >>).

When people visit your website and click on the links and purchase through your affiliate link, you get a portion of the sale. A great way of using affiliate links is to review the product/business/course on your website with those links and ads scattered throughout. Side note: make sure to have a disclaimer that they are affiliate links, either at the beginning of your blog post, or in the ad.

Depending on the affiliate program, you can make from pennies up to a lot of money from a single sale. One of my affiliate links gives me $50 each purchase, I have made around $600 from that one affiliate link alone on my website!

You can sign up for the Amazon affiliate program (they have strict standards for their affiliates, so do some research on what they need first) to make a little bit off whatever someone purchases off of amazon within 24 hours – regardless if it was the product you were marketing. Their affiliate percentage is much lower, but with that 24 hour window and if you have great traffic on your website, you can get a lot of passive income over time.

Affiliate marketing can take a little time to set up (i.e. signing up for programs, adding the links/ads to your website) but you could definitely figure out how to do it yourself, even if you are a novice in website editing. Affiliate marketing is a great way to make passive income over time through your website.

Donations

Maybe you don’t want to pepper your website with ads and affiliate links. But you have an avid following that wants to support you. This is where giving your readers an option to donate could work. You can see how The Coach Guardian offers to let their readers donate in the sidebar (over there >>) but another fantastic example is on Brain Pickings.

Create Your Own Membership Site

If you already have content that you think people will pay to read, watch or listen to, another option is to create a membership site. What this means is that you have an area of your website that is locked away unless people want to pay a one-time fee or monthly subscription to see it.

For someone with little website building experience, this may be more difficult to make happen. You need to install a membership plugin. I like LifterLMS, but there are soooo many good ones, and different ones will fit your needs. Set up your website using the plugin for paid areas of your website. If you are interested in going this route here is an article that goes through everything you will need to do and have.

Unless you have some experience creating and/or editing your website this one may be too difficult to implement yourself, so you may want to contact your website designer. And if you don’t have a website designer, you can read my last article on how to choose a website designer/developer here.

These are some of the ways that you can use your coaching website to make passive income. There are more, and doing some research on your own to see what best fits your needs is key.

Here are some articles about monetizing your website that may help you:

11 smart ways to monetize a website in 2020 (with examples)

2020 Guide to Monetizing Your Website or Blog

33 Ways to Monetize a Website/Blog

How To Monetize A Website: 14 Ways To Make Money Online

If you would like help, or have questions about monetizing your website, feel free to leave a comment and I will assist you!

Jenny Mitchell

Jenny Mitchell has been a WordPress website designer and developer for coaches for the past 7 years. She is also co-founder and technical and logistics manager for The Coach Guardian. Jenny loves to share her knowledge in all aspects of building an online presence with coaches.

https://jenny-designs.com/

Jenny Mitchell

https://jenny-designs.com/