Recently I was asked how to generate income from a shoe website that does not include ads or affiliate model. This answer suggests that you are using an e-commerce website. I won’t go over link building as an SEO offering to increase revenue though it is an option as well.
Monetize the Data
This will depend on how you have your terms and privacy policy set up. Your website is a big data collection source. This type of list would be considered “buyers” in that they made a purchase with a credit card.
You could get into more descriptive with the data based on the types of purchases the users made. Shoes specific to CrossFit or running tells a bit of a story.
A complete digital marketing campaign should always include data monetization and multi-attribution analytics. Facebook and Google use this strategy to create demographic data that marketers can use to promote their product or services.
This data is important to other companies offering complementary or supplementary products. The way to monetize this data is to reach out to companies and see if they are interested.
You could offer to piggyback on your current marketing efforts by either sending their offer along with yours in emails, mail, on your website as upsells, as stand-alone products or even as a rented page within your website.
Sell Ad Space
An easy way to monetize your website is from the current traffic you currently have. Taboola, Google Adsense, allow you earn income every time a website visitor clicks on one of the ads on your website.
The only complication with this process is you cannot control who advertises on your website. You could essentially provide ads to your competitor’s products.
In this case, it’s often best to reach out directly to companies that offer complementary or supplementary products.
Add a Blog and Accept Sponsored Posts
There is an interesting article that describes how to make money from blogging. The key is having enough website traffic where people would want to pay you to post their articles.
The biggest advantage of hosting sponsored content is it’s an easy way to monetize your site.
The only consideration with sponsored posts is disclosing that it is a sponsored post.
Here what Google has to say about it:
“Paid links: A site’s ranking in Google search results is partly based on analysis of those sites that link to it. In order to prevent paid links from influencing search results and negatively impacting users, we urge webmasters use nofollow on such links. Search engine guidelines require machine-readable disclosure of paid links in the same way that consumers online and offline appreciate disclosure of paid relationships (for example, a full-page newspaper ad may be headed by the word “Advertisement”).”
Email Marketing
You should already be sending emails for the following
- Welcome Sequence
- Abandonment Checkout
- New Subscriber
- Post Sale Sequence
- Win Back Campaigns
- Cross Sell
- Browse Abandonment
If you are not then you should start now. The areas where you can offer complementary products, supplementary products, is during the cross-sell and post sale sequences.
You can offer other companies products or services for a flat fee per send or from a percentage of traffic sent to their website, or a percentage of the sale.
Offering Complementary and/or Supplementary Products
This is often the most overlooked option to monetize your current traffic. What you have is a location where people come to shop. A digital store, and just like a grocery store people are impulse buyers.
The fact that they are on your website shows they are in some part of the sales cycle. Considering you are selling shoes, you could offer socks, polish and such.
Or you could take it a bit further and offer discounted enrollment into Mudder events, races and such where you make a commission on.
You can get very creative here. The same can be said for the email marketing
Use Your Website as a Case Study for Consulting Gig
You finally reached a level of great success. Congratulations! All of your successes and even more so, your failures have a value.
Each hurdle becomes a lesson turning your business more profitable. Now you can use your current venture as a case study and teach others how to do the same. For a fee of course. A great way to do this is through webinars.
No matter which venture you chose I wish you the ultimate success and that is happiness. Good Luck!
