go to all blog posts

4 Other Ways Your Online Shop Can Make Money

23
May
2019

As an online store, most of your time, money, and effort should be spent on selling products to earn your profits. However, not all income requires regular work in the same way that traditional sales do. You can earn passive income even when nobody is buying by implementing passive income strategies on your site. While they won’t make you rich, it can help you to increase your income more consistently at little cost to you. Today we are talking about: Affiliate Marketing, Sponsored Products & Posts, Google Ads and Increasing the AOV with 1 Click Upsells.

4 other ways your online shop can make money

Below are 4 strategies to implement that can help you earn more without affecting the rest of your business.

1. Affiliate Marketing

Unless you’re a huge online store, chances are that your inventory is based around a specific niche rather than a wide array of products. For most, it simply doesn’t make sense to over expand yourself into niches & industries you aren’t familiar with. However, in some cases your customers may need a product that you don’t offer – but you can recommend them one!

Affiliate marketing involves directing customers to another store or listing in exchange for a percentage of the sale you make. This is common with marketplaces like Amazon that offer a wide array of products in a single place. By simply creating an affiliate code for a product, you can earn extra income while helping your customers get everything they need without scouring the web.

You can also implement affiliate marketing through your store’s blog, which can be an effective tool not only for SEO but also for referrals. Creating valuable content around your blog with affiliate links is an incredibly popular way to earn extra income online, and between linking to your website & affiliate partners, you’ll be able to add some extra sales & commissions.

If you run a store powered by WooCommerce or Easy Digital Downloads, AffiliateWP is a place to go. We are using it in our projects since 2016 and are completely happy with features and support.

2. Sponsored Products & Posts

In addition to affiliate programs, you can also work with other businesses directly in the form of sponsored products or posts. Both of these offer exposure in exchange for a fee or commissions, allowing you to leverage your traffic for additional income.

Sponsored products can include a specific item that a smaller creator or company develops that allows them to get their brand out to a wider audience – yours. If you have a store that sees a lot of traffic, brands may be willing to offer you a fee or commission in exchange for listing and selling their products in your store. They get to increase brand awareness, and you earn more money.

Sponsored posts are similar to sponsored products, but rather than trying to get a product out there, you’ll often link out to another blog or website on your blog so that you are credited as a backlink to the advertiser. This improves their search engine optimization ranking – an incredibly valuable asset if you have an authority site or blog in their niche – that is worth a good bit of money.

3. Google Ads

Just like you’re always looking to attract new customers, so are other businesses. Advertising – whether it is in the form of banner ads, popups, or smaller blocks on a site – is valuable when you see a ton of traffic. The more traffic you see, the more eyes are likely to see the ad which increases the value of that real estate on your site, so companies will pay more. This means that if you have solid traffic to your store, you can earn a bit of passive income just by adding some code to the pages.

Google Adsense makes this easy by brokering the buying & selling of advertising on websites. By signing up with Google Adsense, you will receive a snippet of code to include on your site that will host another company’s advertisement. The subject of the ad that the user sees is often based on their browsing history, the search they took to reach your site, and other factors, however it is likely that this targeted ad is relevant to the visitor, so they often won’t object to it. This is important because although you get paid based on web traffic, you get paid even more if someone clicks an advertisement.

Cost-per-click (CPC) measures how much advertisers are willing to pay for a click on their advertisement. If you happen to have an advertisement on your page with a larger budget, someone clicking on that ad can earn you a portion of what Google receives from the advertiser – earning you free money for little to no work. If they don’t click, you still get credit for the view!

4. Increasing Your Average Sale Value with 1 Click Upsells

While it’s not necessarily a separate way you can make more money with your shop, with the right tools it can be incredibly easy for you to increase sales with upselling. Upselling involves offering special deals as part of a purchase (for example, offering 50% off a second product when you buy the first one) so that customers can be tempted to buy more.

1 Click Upsells is a simple and effective way to upsell your customers in a non-invasive way. After checkout, this plugin will bring up offers that you have created based on what is in the cart. Once they submit the order, they’ll be prompted to upgrade the order. If they accept, it will be processed using the same information they provided the first time, making it quick & easy. You can choose for it to be a separate transaction or linked with the parent purchase for easy tracking as well.

This plugin helps to increase the amount the average purchase on your site is worth, allowing you to increase margins & spend more on advertising that can help your other money-making methods as well.

Wrap Up

While you’ll make most of your money selling products in your store, that doesn’t mean you can’t earn some passive income in the meantime. Using the methods above, you’ll be able to earn more for your business, increase margins, grow your marketing budget, and overall be more successful at little cost to you.

Add Comment

in Tips and Tricks

Bogdan
In 2009 he started contributing to WordPress and couple years later built his first WooCommerce store. Now he's helping WooCommerce storeowners all over the world make more money with their stores. Wordpress problem solving expert, backend developer, founder of BogdanFix.

Leave a Reply