This is what you should do if you are a developer or designer.

Being a developer or a designer must be the perfect job in a world conquered by computers. But technical people are not necessarily marketing masters.

As a developer, you can build awesome stuff that eases our lives on a daily basis, but how can you bring your creation to people’s attention?

I mean, okay, you’ve developed a plugin. But now what? How do you promote it? How do you make money with it?

All you need is marketing. I know it sounds scary, but what I am going to cover in this article will help you get the most out of your products and monetize them accordingly.

How to Make Money With Your Personal Website

There are many methods to start monetizing your website. You can use them all or just a few, it’s up to you. But trying as many solutions as possible will definitely get you closer to your goal, which is sustaining your efforts alone.

Affiliate marketing

Affiliate marketing is one of the main monetization solutions for most of the publishers and sellers.

It’s actually very simple to join the affiliate zone. Most online companies have affiliate programs, so just look for it on their website, sign up, get custom links, and use them on your blog.

Another good thing to do is to create your own affiliate program so others can link to you back. This will increase your chances to get promoted by various brands as well.

What’s the advantage of the affiliate marketing? You can promote third-party products that you like while getting a commission for doing it. If someone buys something from your website (via the affiliate link), you are getting paid for making the recommendation. The commissions vary from owner to owner, but usually they revolve around 30% or 40%.

The affiliate marketing is very easy and quick. After you sign up to a company’s program, all the money transfers are made automatically via your account, with no extra emails or steps. You just need to provide an available online payment method (e.g. a PayPal) and everything is set to work by itself.

Blog posts

Blogs should never miss from one’s website, no matter if you are a designer or a developer. Maybe you’re not much of a writing fan, but you still need a blog.

Why? Well, for having the chance to use the aforementioned affiliate links, for introducing your products, for growing a community around your site, for SEO reasons, for building trust and getting people’s attention. A blog is very important, never underestimate its power when it comes to business.

Blogs are the golden section of a website because they are an open door to content marketing. And content marketing is the door towards selling online.

Apart from the regular posts that generate traffic and bring people to your site, you can also write premium content. Through premium content, you can restrict your visitors from getting the entire piece of advice by asking them to pay for the rest of it. Of course, you can try this method only if you’re producing awesome and insightful articles, long guides, or huge tutorials that are valuable enough for those who are willing to pay in order to get them.

The premium content solution can be of help, but I won’t recommend it until you create a solid bond between you and your audience. People usually pay only when they trust you. So first build trust by writing great content for free and only then you can think of asking your readers to give you money for it.

Now, for every blog post, you will need photos. So, unless you’re a photographer and have your own collection, you will need copyright-free images. For example, Burst is one of those sites that provide great galleries of free pictures for commercial use, so you’re entitled to use any of them without violating the digital goods law.

Google AdSense

It’s nothing complicated to put ads on your site if you choose Google’s program. And, for starters, it should be enough. To display ads on your site, you need to simply sign up to Google AdSense and add the received code to your site.

And that’s all. Google will do the rest of the work, as it will generate ads that are relevant to your content and would be of interest to your visitors. From now on, you will be paid every time a visitor clicks or just sees an ad (it depends on the settings and your preferences).

Create an online shop

As a developer, you probably have a few digital products you are proud of. And you’re probably planning to launch some more. Since your goal is to grow your site and get your portfolio exposed, you can as well try to create an online shop. If your tools are good enough and your site is eCommerce-friendly, people will eventually buy your stuff.

Of course, you won’t get rich overnight by building a store on your site. Selling online requires promotion, too. Let people know about your work first, and only then you can start having expectations.

But all this selling online adventure will be worth it at the end of the day when you’ll start scoring your first sales.

Create a paid course

You’re a developer, right? You don’t need to stick only with selling products when you know so many coding secrets. Take advantage of your developing skills and teach others.

You can create paid courses for those who want to learn the art of coding. Come with nice and popular ideas, something people will love. You can either deliver them as eBooksor as videos.

Create an Advertising page

This page can contain any type of advertising you want to add to your site, be it sponsored posts, ad banners, brand mentions, reviews… you name it.

If you write on your blog constantly, people will ask to get featured there. Create an advertising page, talk about your offers, and let people know your prices.

Through sponsored posts, you can charge anyone who wants to promote their product via your blog. You can write a set of guidelines that your clients must follow because you are the one who makes the rules on what the content should look like.

The ad banners help you get nice partnerships by placing on your site custom ads made by your clients. These are different from those provided by Google AdSense. This time, you’re the one who adds the banners, which are custom made by the people who order them, so it won’t be a random method of selection. Another difference is that you’re the one who decides the costs: cost per click, cost per conversion, or simply a fixed price for displaying the ad (this would be to your benefit because you get the assurance of getting paid no matter how many clicks or impressions are registered).

Another type of paid content is the review. You could set a price for people who want you to talk about their product in a dedicated blog post.

Mentioning others in your older posts is another monetization method. Everyone who wants to get featured on your site or blog can be asked to pay a price that you decide upon yourself.

But these are just a few examples of what your advertising page can contain. You are always free to come up with new interesting ideas that can be to your own benefit, depending on the services you want to provide.

Email marketing

Why should you use email marketing?

• According to Statista, the number of global email users is said to rise to 2.9 billion by 2019.
• HubSpot says that 86% of professionals prefer to use email when communicating for business purposes.
• Econsultancy found that three-quarters of companies agree that email offers “excellent” to “good” ROI.

Create your own user base and let everybody know when you’re publishing or launching something new. Newsletters are still the thing, and a good part of your converters will come from there.

SendinBlue, MailChimp, or AWeber are just a few solutions that will help you with collecting emails, creating call-to-action buttons, and sending automatic or custom messages to your subscribers.

Build a good-looking portfolio

Showcasing the nice things you’ve created throughout your career will expose your expertise to more people, so the chances of getting hired for new projects will increase gradually.

So you should make a separate section on your website where you can list all your past works in a beautiful, catchy fashion. The way you present your work contributes a lot to the general impression of the client about you.

A great portfolio denotes professionalism, so every developer and designer should take it into consideration. Let your work speak for yourself.

Write for others

You’re a developer/designer, you know and discover nice things daily, things that most people have no idea about. Use your knowledge and write paid tutorials or advice posts for various publishing platforms. There are a lot of websites out there that look for contributor writers to share technical hacks with their audience.

So, write about what you know and get paid for that. You can start contacting the blogs you are already following so you can become an author there.

Create a podcast

Podcasts are taking over in the last couple of years, they are another reliable source of good traffic. So, if you’re not much into writing, you could switch to recording podcasts. Or you can do both if time allows you to.

The thing is, through podcasts you can also earn money by advertising either your own products or others’. You can think of podcasts as another source of advertising besides blogging. Bonus: you can consolidate your already existing audience and bring a new one aboard.

Add a Hire Me page

This is optional, it can actually help only if you’re looking for freelancing opportunities. And, trust me, after optimizing your site with at least half of the tips I talked about above, traffic and (hence) clients will come. So, the chances that you are contacted for professional partnerships are higher now.

A Hire Me page that contains specifically the kind of work you’re delivering, your style, a schedule, price ranges, and whatever else you think is worth the mention will attract people interested in your services and, at the same time, will spare you of repetitive conversations or misunderstandings.

This is my list of tips worth trying right after building a developer or designer website. By applying them, your personal business will start to grow slowly but certainly, so you will need to have patience. Do not expect big results right away, you need to put brick over brick to finally get visitors, converters, and clients. But it is worth the journey.

What else would you do to monetize your website? Is there something I missed?