#19: How To Earn Money From Your Website/YouTube/Instagram

S: Hello and welcome back to another episode of the lazy entrepreneur I’m your host Sam recently and as usual i’m joined by my lovely wife Emma. Today I thought it would be a good chance to do a back to basics episode when we talk about something that a lot of people get a bit confused about when it comes to kind of everything online and that is how to make how you actually make money online. I’m not talking about how you build an audience or how you get people looking your stuff I’m more talking about how you turn that into money, in the industry we call that monetization how to monetize your online presence. I think a lot of people get quite confused for that because most content online these days that we consume is free and so how are people making money out of that? And I mean you know we have a few ideas we kind of know about like adverts and I think we’re getting a bit more wise kind of product placement and things like that but actually there’s a whole range of ways different people make money online and there’s kind of ethical considerations about each one as well
E: And I think most people don’t understand them.
S: No most people don’t understand it. I think it is probably yeah my most popular comment on a on a blog post because every month I write like a monthly report in which I say oh this blog made this amount of money and all the time someone will message or write a comment saying well how does it make money yeah yeah exactly yeah I’ve written blog posts on the stuff before yeah I think it’s just good to go back to basics and even if even if you kind of know the answer to this this might give you a bit of inspiration for how for other ways you can perhaps look to make a bit of money out of whatever it is you’re doing. So by online presence I’m trying to be a bit broad and a general on purpose because I’m talking about anything from you know a website like mine you’re doing whether it’s your own URL and you got complete control to a podcast like this to your social media presence your Facebook page or Instagram YouTube channel kind of anything really that’s online and particularly where you’re producing content that people consume so I’m going to briefly give you the title of each each type of way you can make money online and then we’ll go into more detail so the first one is affiliations and we got creating and selling products next up we got online courses then subscription content then voluntary contributions then traditional advertising then coaching slash consultancy and finally a sponsored post
E: sounds good
S: do you know much about all of these you probably have a little bit of a concept of each one
E: yeah some more than others some I know more about the theory rather than the actual practical side so I haven’t actually done them myself
S: yeah
E: but yeah I think I know most of them
S: do you know which one I mainly do that’s a good question
E: um well I just say you do affiliate marketing
S: yeah affiliations is how my blog makes most of its money
E: yeah I know either to promote your products for example table tennis bat you’ll do online ads but I guess that’s not monetizing so that doesn’t really count for this podcast
S: all right well let’s dive in let’s first talk about affiliations I often call affiliate marketing affiliations are normally if you see in my blog I normally write refer a friend because that’s generally how most people understand it yeah like if you have an account with a website or or a credit card or something like that they might have a refer-a-friend offer which means that if you introduce someone to that business you’ll maybe add a little bit money or get reward or something like that and that is generally how I work with my blog I am what I do is I write posts I write a few a month and then I’ll look through the post I’ve written and see if there’s any company on there that I’m recommending or talking about and then I’ll contact that company or have a look on their website to see if they have any kind of refer friend deals so generally Google the name of the company followed by affiliate and see if they have an affiliate deal and often it will work that I would then get a percentage of any money they make from a customer who’s come from my blog to them and it works that I’ll have a special link that will be unique to me and when they click on that that you’ll go to sort of a unique page on that website or it’ll be recorded in the cookies the behind-the-scenes stuff that goes on on the website and that website will then know that that customer was referred by me kind of how affiliates work in detail kind of varies from place to place how long after they’ve clicked on your link is that customer considered a referral of yours that kind of stuff changes from business to business an example of a place that often has affiliates is Amazon you know pretty much any product I talk about will be for sale on Amazon so let’s say I’m writing a blog post about you know what it took to start this podcast I might talk about the microphone I’m using kind of the the amplifier the little whatever this thing is and say for all of them I’ll do a little google and so on Amazon I’ve got on Amazon Associates account which is the name of their affiliate scheme and I can just go search for the thing on Amazon and then click the little button and it will generate a unique link for me and it means if you then go and buy a microphone I recommended I’ll earn something like 3 percent of the value of that order.
E: what about if the product is actually a service and it’s a monthly service
S: yeah so that that depends on the monthly service so some of the ones I have are so for instance one of my biggest earners is a company called odds monkey who provides a match betting subscription service so you don’t know what matched betting is it’s basically when you take advantages of bonuses casinos bookmakers the difficulty with that is finding the bonuses so people will pay a service like odds monkey to do what that research for them and have a service they can just log on it’ll tell you a list of all the bonuses that are on today you can make a bit money out of so it’s worth paying money for and people do I recommend that service because I think it’s you know the best out of the ones out there and there there’ll be a monthly subscription people will pay I think at the moment it’s something like eighteen pounds a month of which I think I get about a third of it so I’ll get like five pounds a month per person that I refer
E: that’s really good
S: that’s how that one works and so it means that it’s quite a long tale so someone uses it for years I’ll still be earning a bit of money every month for years yeah other type which is I’m getting a bit more common is is where what they’ll do is they’ll give you say a hundred percent of the first month referral so another company that I recommend is jungle scout who are a product research tool for Amazon I think again it’s the best product research tool in market and I use it a lot and they will give me, provided the person doesn’t cancel within the first month, they will give me a hundred percent of the first month sign-up fee and then leave it at that doesn’t matter how long the person is signed up after that I’ll just get that initial payment
E: That’s interesting I didn’t know that
S: It’s interesting and it means we got I much prefer the first method because our motivations are more aligned yes so they want long-term customers yes whereas with something like jungle scout I don’t care about long-term customers and in fact what I recommend often because it is the best thing to do with jungle sale is they use it while you’re doing product research and then cancel your subscription or I mean you can use it for less than a month I mean you know it’s not in my best interest but what I do say is that they do have a 30 day money back thing and that if you use it and it’s not that helpful then go ahead and cancel it I won’t earn any money from that but that is the best way for the person to use it yeah but it means that me jungle scale don’t have an entirely aligned motivations yeah so that’s affiliations affiliations like that are quite simple you also get them on places like Instagram where it works slightly differently because you don’t have links in Instagram so it’s harder to track so the way they’ll do it is they’ll create a unique discount code for the influencer yep which were unique to them and then if any person uses that uses that discount code on the website the Instagram celebrity instagram influencer will earn a little Commission
E: yeah that’s really big in women’s fashion isn’t it yeah
S: yeah pretty much whenever you see an instagramer with a discount code that’s what’s going on they’re going to earn a little bit of commission from that if you buy something using that code if you buy using that code affiliates uh let’s quickly talk about ethical considerations because affiliations people have different ideas about it what are they how it compares to other ones I use it because I think generally it is one of them if used correctly is one of the most ethical ways you can make money online in that all the content is free the way I do it is kind of in reverse in that I will write a blog pose and then I’ll find to see if the companies I’m talking about have affiliates and I think that’s the way to do it I prefer that to having just adverts on my website because let’s say always plugged in something like Google adverts which just puts random adverts on your website I wouldn’t have any control over that I don’t know the businesses I don’t know whether I’m comfortable recommending them to people
E: Yeah that’s the crucial thing isn’t it and do you get a lot of companies coming to you saying can you write a blog post about our product or service
S: yeah every day every day yeah yeah so that is ethical way of doing it and the unethical way of doing is to find the company that pays you the most and then write blog posts promoting it but there is a little downside is that it makes it hard it makes it harder for people to give negative criticism for stuff if you’re writing a review post generally you want to say good things because you want to be get that affiliate and you want to earn a bit of money so there is that downside and like all of these have their pros and cons I generally think affiliates are good one thing I think that’s a bit more difficult with them is that people don’t really understand them the best situation would be is if everyone knew that each link had their kind of monetized symbiotic relationship between the person who’s written the content and the company E: yes so they’re aware
S: and I mean places like money-saving expert do that quite well where every post at the bottom they’ll do a list of the same links but without the affiliate stuff attached to it so if people want to they can click through that the problem really though is educational, even though they do that like ninety percent of the people using money saving expert won’t understand how it’s making money
E: well I didn’t even see I’ve used money saving expert many times and I didn’t even see it
S: and I believe they’re very ethical company yeah but um yeah how it’s more an education thing yeah which is a bit of an issue and there’s a bit of a user you gotta think about user experience as well so one thing to do is every link you could put a disclaimer next to it in brackets after every link, like a refer a friend discount if you use this I mean it’d be great from the user experience so people do different things they put a little star next to affiliate links and then have at the bottom or they’ll just write a little disclaimer at the bottom or they won’t say anything it’s up to you um I try different things on different posts sometimes I put a little star sometimes I’ll just put something in the bottom sometimes I’ll put a bracket this is a refer friend deal
E: Do you get many comments from people specifically asking about the ethics around using affiliate links in your blog post
S: I don’t think I ever have I think I wrote a post about the ethics of online marketing yeah and a lot of people talked about that and some people disagreed with me some people thought that affiliates were bad full stop yeah other people were fine about that again it’s one of the things where I think it’s more the application of it that matters rather than the and if you’re aware of the ethical concerns then you can use it in a in a good way yeah that’s affiliations refer a friend deals next up I want to talk about creating and selling a product that’s that’s kind of linked to whatever you’re writing about so a friend of mine has got a table tennis blog and at the time he was affiliated with Amazon so if you clicked on one of his if he recommended a table tennis product like a table tennis bat and people went to Amazon and bought it he would earn 3% or something of it so we said to him well this would be good opportunity for us to build a table tennis brand because we know you’re going to get we’re going to get a few sales anyway people you click through that and you’ll earn a bit more than you would just by being affiliated so we set it up it’s a lot work to do that but then what happened was after we created a product you know he earns a bit more than just he would if he was affiliate but then that business became a business in itself and whereas as an affiliate he was only earning money from people who clicked through his website now anyone who recommends our table-tennis brand at all we’re going to earn money from so it’s gone from maybe we would have got I don’t remember the numbers maybe 10 sales a month so now talking about thousands of sales a month because the business has outgrown the start of it yeah but that could be something that’s quite good if you’ve got a presence already or you’re talking about a specific topic then building a business behind that that then can be its own business can often be a clever move you’ll see people do this a lot with books often if someone’s in a bit of an expert in an area or a someone who’s a bit creative they’ll create a book out of it that can be so it’s quite often with webcomics which you might not think they’re the best medium for a book but they’ll turn their best comics that they’ve done online into a book and they’ll self-published that or if you’re an expert or something if you’re talking about a topic that a lot of people don’t know about you can write now or you can do like an autobiography style thing which a lot of kind of Instagram celebrities are doing another thing you see a lot on on Instagram is people will create a brand product that isn’t particularly different from anything else in the market and sell it t-shirts are an obvious example you know general swag in general they’ll get so you can get stuff that has the branding or the you know the memes from your favorite Instagram app yeah another one you’ll see on beauty style Instagram places are stuff like false eyelashes and people create a company they’ll get them for 50p from China put their little Instagram tag on it yeah and then sell them for ten pounds each yeah and make a bit money that way the next one we’re going to talk about is creating an online course this is the one that gurus talk about a lot they say that if you’re an expert in a particular niche and you’ve got a blog about it your next step should be creating an online course and generally these courses are pretty expensive you’re talking hundreds of pounds maybe thousands of pounds so for instance Amazon FBA is a very popular subject in a moment I’ve quite a few popular blog posts about it and it’s where I earn a fair bit money because have affiliations to deal with Amazon related products but the people who are making the most money from these Amazon sort of information sites are the ones who created an online course to teach people how to do this and generally these online courses what they’re doing is they’re curating information that’s already freely available so there might be kind of other upsell type things like you know coaching like picture pools, one on one or look or group group chat yeah but generally the content that they’re they’re putting isn’t anything unique it’s often curated content that’s already out there
E: but there is some value in that to some people don’t have the time to do that research
S: there is definitely value in that there and often people don’t know where to look yeah they don’t know what and they don’t know who to trust so having someone they trust to curate the content into one place into a nice easily readable step-by-step guide has value to it
E: and by trust I suppose they these customers to understand that by how successful the the coach or the owner of the online course is say how many sales of Amazon products that they got a month how many products is they got
S: yeah the difficulty really is is that how do you verify what I some also need a truth for not
E: Wow
S: and I think that’s a real problem with online gurus in general is that you look at on your life if you are making as much as you were why are you doing this you know people come up that you hear the same rubbish answer all the time which is well I just really want to help people my passion is to teach people how to make money from Amazon really why are you charging five thousand pounds for this course
E: Yeah we’re a little bit skeptical
S: It’s worth being skeptical I think one advantage of these courses is it forces you it commits you to it
E: yes you’ve invested
S: if you’ve paid money to do something you might as well do it yeah make the most of it because if somebody’s free we don’t really value it yeah it’s true and one of the reasons people are so successful online courses is doing value stuff that costs money yeah when you read something for free you instantly think it’s not worth that much so people will read so I’ve got some very good guides on on my website about Amazon FBA that are better than some courses out there that people pay money for but people would rather pay money for the course because it’s kind of behind a locked door and they think that it must be worth something if people are charging for it rather than just getting it for free say on my website I haven’t got any online courses partly because I think that’s real I have a slight ethical issue with them in general and that the amount I’d have to charge for my online course I don’t think the amount of value I could add would really be worth it you know most I’ve got so much good content out there for free but I don’t think what I’d be adding to the course would really be worth it maybe maybe I’ll change my opinion on that at some point I’ve definitely used to think the courses were generally all bad after I’ve changed my opinion on that and I think that some of them are good and it depends on your personality as well towards what’s good for you another slight issue of online courses I want to talk about quickly is that they get a bit cookie cutter often with an online business or which they’re often talking about the benefits are to be unique and have a different angle to something
E: yes which you can’t learn from an online course
S: so having someone layout step by step the work for them that can often that can sometimes do more harm than good because then you’ll follow there step by step and then you’re creating a exact copy of whatever they were doing yeah whereas sometimes being a bit naive and trying stuff that might not work, experimenting is is a better move
E: would you ever do an online course as in create one yourself
S: yeah as I said not at the moment but that might change if I think that I can create something that has value yeah it has enough value for it to be worth because I think I could make an online course that would be really good I think it would take so much time and energy that I am not sure it’s worth it because I would have to charge so much anyway I don’t know one advantage of online courses is that then you could find people to affiliate with it and promote it so it turns into a business that’s not just linked to you and you can do lots of advertising and stuff to push it it’s like basic creating a separate business altogether well that’s today’s it kind of some of the main ones let’s continue quickly and let’s talk about subscription content this is something that a lot of websites are doing and I think it’s quite a good way of doing it where you’ll have a certain amount your content available for free and then you’ll have a premium version of it that people pay monthly for yeah we’ve seen this a lot with a kind of snapchat girls they’ll have like a raunchy snapchat which they’ll say a premium subscription for they’ll have a free version with kind of teasing images and then they’ll have one that you pay like 15 pounds a month for to get their premium snapchat
E: well that’s hilarious because I was just about to say an example which couldn’t be any more opposite this morning on Facebook I was trying to read an article posted by decanter which is a wine magazine and the title of the article was is 2019 a special year for you and here’s a guide to the right vintage to celebrate and this year is both our 30th birthday so it is a special year and I click sorry I clicked on the article to read it and all I could access was the first paragraph and then I had to subscribe to read the rest of the article
S: yeah that is a very good example and slightly different a lot of examples out there you know we spoke a little about odds monkey oh yeah that is a subscription content as well you pay a certain month when you get new content produced for you. Moving on we talk voluntary contributions this is a weight a lot of especially creative stuff is um is is paid for there’s websites like patreon where if you like a service someone is providing you basically give them a certain amount of money a month and it is just a contribution
E: like Wikipedia is doing
S: so Wikipedia is a voluntary completion place where they ask for a donation once a year stuff like that there’s there’s smaller people a lot of artists do this especially if you’re into kind of a niche type of arts whether you’re like all fan fiction or stuff like that where it’s quite hard to make money out of it but people there’s a small group people who really like your content they might be willing to give you say ten pounds a month towards it
E: the one I’ve had a lot mentioned is their on podcasts so there’s a huge science history podcast they’re always pushing for it yeah which I thinks really interesting and the way they promote it is that it’s just two women they spend full time doing the content for this podcast and creating it and they don’t get paid so you the listener if you like the content we think you should contribute and they get benefits so they get like extra content and getting a say in the content
S: So combining like the subscription premium content with a voluntary donation thing yeah yeah a lot of a lot of podcasts moved that route some of the really big ones do that as well there’s traditional advertising so if you put a video on YouTube and you turn on monetization YouTube would have automatically put adverts kind of in the middle before and after it you can get adverts on your own website services like absence which you just whatever your website is using you input the bit of code and keep and Google will just put random adverts in there that they think is linked to your content generally you need a lot of people looking at your stuff for traditional adverts like this to make you much money so if you’re getting millions of views it can pay well but not many people do not many people get that much so for instance on YouTube we have one video that’s got about 10 million views and that has made I think it’s made about a thousand dollars per thousand views something like that so it makes it does make a bit money but you need a lot of views and often if you’ve got that many of you anyway you can make more money by taking a different route yeah also kind of traditional advertising is probably how this podcast will make money eventually so what I’ll do is the plan at a moment is I’m gonna try and reach out to various companies and ask them if they’d like to sponsor the podcast then what they do is they would get a snippet here put a beginning and end of each podcast and they pay for like a month or so for a month and we give end of each podcast you’d hear a short little advert for for that product next up we got coaching and consultancy this is another way that’s very popular especially in the kind of online guru life coaching all that kind of stuff where you say if someone’s an expert it’s a bit of the way I went to slightly with my my own blog for a while yeah where basically I have this concept that if what I’m creating is useful for everybody I’ll produce it for free so if it’s on my blog that anyone can look at it and it’s not just of value to one person but if you want specific information it’s only helpful to you then I’ll charge for that and that’s basically traditional consultancy yeah you get that a lot with that’s another thing you see with Instagram celebrities as well they they do like meet and greets that type of thing where you get a chance to have a chat with your favorite person but you pay for that privilege you’re not kind of getting any information out of it but you’re kind of getting that one-to-one time with someone who you follow and really want to spend some time with next up I’m going to talk about sponsored posts sponsored posts is something that has got a lot more popular of late as it’s a way for companies to basically create an advert but from your voice so if a company gave me a sponsored post for my blog what would probably happen is they would pay me a certain amount of money they will then write the post and it will sound like it’s coming from me it will be something like the best binary trading options or something or how to make money from 4x trading or something like this and they’ll write a post or put a bunch of links in it to their own website somewhere hidden on the page will be a little phrase saying sponsored post or sponsored article but really it’s just an advert and it’s an advert masquerading as an information piece we get them a lot in a in newspapers and magazines nowadays you’ll see often in tiny letters above it that what you’re reading is not actually an impartial article written by the newspaper audio magazine is actually a paid for advert it’s quite a clever way of advertising it’s quite a clever way of making money from the company’s point of view because people don’t really trust traditional adverts yeah but they do trust experts and if you can kind of sneak in your advert then that works well we there’s quite a lot in the news in the last few years about Instagram people or youtubers basically creating sponsored adverts sponsored posts where the photo was set up by the company and they’re doing exactly what they’re told yeah and they’re writing something about a product that they might never have used before where they’re passing it off as their own recommendation
E: yeah and they’re getting paid for it
S: and getting paid for it and kind of originally people didn’t declare it was an ad at all and now they kind of have to put hashtag ad somewhere in the 60 other hashtags they’re using on the right place
E: and some of them do and some of them still don’t
S: same with youtubers, it is very hard to know whether what they’re promoting is an advert or if product they actually care about or if it’s something they’ve been paid to do generally I think that sponsored posts or the least ethical of all the different stuff we’ve talked about today and it’s something I’ve outright turned down every every time I’ve been offered it which is multiple times a week someone will come to me and ask if they can pay to have a post on my blog I think that if you’re doing if you’re on Instagram and you’re doing sponsored posts that’s probably that’s not as unethical but you need to I think it’s important to be quite clear that it’s an advert
E: yeah and it needs to be relevant to you and you need to try to products and yeah I mean yesterday I saw like a food influencer posting about a specific product they were using in a recipe and they actually had to state well they chose to state this wasn’t a sponsored ad they actually really liked the product, and I thought that summed up how distrustful we are of any content promoting a product yeah
S: well it’s hard because she might have really liked the product yeah and then gone and spoken to him and asked him said I really wanna promote your product will you pay me to do it and they might said yes so in that case it is something she believed in it should have the same value but she’s also getting some money for it so how yeah how do you balance that
E: yeah which is right
S: which is the same problem with affiliates really and you can do it ethically and you can do it unethically
E: yeah
S: same really with product placements that’s another thing people do and ninety nine percent of the time they don’t declare so they’ll get a contract from a company particularly with sports brands where they’ll say you need to have pictures of you wearing this product three times a month you’re not allowed to put any pictures wearing these products that our competitors own you do this every month for a year and we’ll pay you seven thousand dollars or something like that and those are the ads or are they not adds? They’re not ads it just so happens that you’re wearing that stuff but you’re wearing it because someone’s paying you for it so where does that fall ethically and I think it’s something you got to make up your own mind about
E: you see a lot in TV shows and films as well like apple and certain drink brands and they do really stand out and you think oh how much have they paid to be in this latest Netflix series you know whatever it is yeah
S: yeah and they don’t declare it do they I don’t know every time that appears they don’t put a little little subtitles or sponsor ads alone whatever yeah it’s interesting so there we go now we have it those are mine different ways to monetize your online presence how to make money from your whatever is your doing online quickly again affiliations those are refer friend deals where you get a commission based on whoever you refer to that company we got creating and selling a product that’s something that you can when you’re already talking about a product or something you can create an item that you know your customers will buy and earn a much bigger margin you can create an online course where people pay a set amount to buy off you you can create subscription content where people pay a monthly fee to access a premium version of what you’re producing you can take in voluntary contributions if people really support what it is you’re doing you can have traditional adverts such as YouTube adverts or kind of snippets at the beginning of a podcast you can take on consultancy clients or coach people you can have sponsored posts or product placement where you’re paid to to put stuff in your in your posts or you can do a bit of all of them which is generally what makes because you know finding an affiliate is much easier because it doesn’t cost the company anyway than finding someone who will pay you up front for an advert on your website so a lot of people will do a little bit of each and then see what works from say yeah
E: so in 2019 are you looking to do more of some of these monetizing tactics or less because I know you do some of them at the moment and why?
S: good question so I’ll be doing more on this podcast ya know I’ll be looking towards additional advertising room and trying to take on because I don’t think affiliations really work that well on a podcast
E: yeah
S: I think traditional advertising will work better but that’s a bit of an experiment we’ll see how that works out and that’d be occasionally finding companies who I think would be a good fit reaching out to them and that might not work out because there’s quite a lot of work and we might not be able to agree on a price yeah I think that the best way that I can monetize my website is by driving is by driving a consultancy business and so I’ve had it in my mind I’ve done a little bit this before
E: you’ve laid the groundwork
S:I’ve laid the groundwork for it and I do you take consulting clients every now and again but it’s a very passive process where if people try and get in touch with me they can do but there is a there is a kind of consultancy option they can take where they can immediately set up a call with me kind of in the next day or two but well you know it’s the thing I do is try and build it out like a separate business to have its own website and have its own price structures and there’ll be something that I could hopefully build as a separate business where I drive traffic from my blog and from this podcast then I can also offer refer a friend deals and affiliate stuff and build it out as a separate business well I do it like that in 2019 I’m not sure yeah it’s something I’ve been thinking about for the last few years and haven’t done yet but I might do 2019 those are really the two that I’d be looking at doing the rest of them I don’t think so subscription content could work for me but
E: that’s what I was thinking about yeah
S: it doesn’t particularly appeal to me I quite like giving away all the stuff for free it is a shame that people don’t value free stuff so the reason I might do a subscription stuff is because of that so to add a bit more kind of perceived value around it um but I probably won’t I think I’ll probably continue what I’m doing but apart from that no I don’t think so I think that’s it sounds good all right well thanks for listening we talked about a lot of topics here and I have written quite a lot blog post on this stuff before so in the show notes I’ll put links to all of those and I’d really appreciate it if you enjoyed this podcast if you could leave me a good review on iTunes or whatever platform you’re using but apart from that I hope that you found this useful and interesting and are able to implement it into your life adios