You Need to Spend Money to Make Money from Your Website

No matter how many times you multiply a zero, the grand total of all multiplications will always be zero.

Similarly, you cannot make money with zero investment. If success came at no cost, everybody would be a millionaire, right? So, you must spend money to make money from any business and it’s the same with “making money online.”

It’s true that setting up an online business or website costs a fraction of what a brick-and-mortar business will cost, but still–it’s not free. It’s also true that you can make up for the lack of money by spending a lot of time and effort, but you cannot do everything on your own.

That’s why, as the title here suggests, if you want to make money and earn a real living from your website, you’re going to need to invest at least some money into it to see its full potential.

Stand Out of The Crowd With Custom Design

WordPress is free and there are thousands of free themes available.

However, a free theme cannot be a substitute for a premium or a custom made website that was designed with your requirements, brand, and target audience in mind.

Almost all free themes (and a lot of premium ones, if we’re being honest) have a similar look and features. A professionally designed and custom made theme can instantly help you stand out of the crowd. So, you must consider hiring a WordPress developer to create your website, unless you are really short of money.

Sometimes you need to spend money to make money with your website. Click to Tweet

In that case, you should go for a premium theme. Be careful with free themes because they seldom include support and they are more likely to be vulnerable to security breaches.

On average, a premium WordPress theme costs just $40, which is nothing when you consider the benefits.

Spend on the Right Technology Stack

Your web hosting provider can play a massive role in ensuring good performance and site speed. So many businesses and bloggers make the mistake of going for the cheapest option. There’s a very small difference in the expense but the repercussions can be quite costly. Slow site speed has been proven time and time again to reduce site conversions.

A good web host will be the difference between a fast, easily accessible website and one that takes forever to load or has a lot of downtime. You need to make sure that your website is up and running at all times if you want it to make money for you, right?

No matter how many plugins or on-site changes you make, you need the latest technologies like PHP 7, Nginx, or MariDB to have a state-of-the-art, high-speed website.

Investing in managed WordPress hosting will save you from loads of trouble and downtime is just one such issue. Plus, you won’t have to worry about other problems like security breaches, DDOS or XML-RPC attacks, having to backup your site, or even performing updates. Why waste hours on troubleshooting site performance problems when you can outsource all of that and more at a relatively low cost?

In addition to good web hosting, you also need to invest in services like a CDN (content delivery network) or cloud storage. But keep in mind that free or unbelievably cheap services are more often than not cheap for a reason. Don’t be afraid to pay for quality here.

Why waste hours on troubleshooting site performance problems when you can outsource all of that and more? Click to Tweet

Are You Spending on Marketing?

Once you have a professionally designed and managed website, it’s time to get your potential customers on the website so you can start making money.

But there’s one small catch: there are hundreds and thousands of competitors trying to do exactly the same thing. In the world of web, “build it and they will come” doesn’t apply. You will have to fight for each and every visitor and this battle will take place on various fronts, including but not limited to SEO, social media, and content marketing.

SEO and social media marketing are full-time jobs in and of themselves. While it’s certainly possible to learn how to do the required tasks, it’s not entirely feasible that you’d have enough hours in the day to manage SEO and social media on top of all the other tasks you must complete to run your business.

If you’re looking for quick results, there’s nothing better than PPC advertisement. However, each and every click will cost you some money. Strict budgeting and thorough research are required here. Again, seeking out professionals in these fields is likely your best bet toward driving more visitors to your site and seeing an increase in conversions.

However, if you are looking to try and tackle social media advertising yourself, we recommend checking out this beginners guide on how to generate leads with Facebook.

We’ve already discussed the importance of premium themes or services. It’s the same with the tools and plugins that you can use to complete other business-related tasks like marketing, lead capturing, conversion rate optimization, and so forth.

There’s no point in wasting countless hours on finding and testing (and second-guessing) a free plugin that does the job when you can spend a small amount and be done with it in minutes.

Digital marketing tools can save a lot of time. Competition is getting more and more intense and using the right tools can give you an instant edge over competitors. These tools can range from social media management (Hootsuite or Buffer) to email marketing (MailChimp or AWeber);  keyword research (Moz) to pop-ups (Ninja Popups or SumoMe).

Summary

If you spend money to make money in the right places it will speed up the time it takes to see results and provide you with quicker (and bigger) returns in the end.

But now we want to hear from you. How have you spent on your website to earn more money? What tools or services have been worth their weight in gold? We’d love to hear all about it in the comments below.