How to make money with a website in South Africa

This is a guide to how to make money with a website in South Africa. A lot of South Africans are looking for ways to make money online, some are going with YouTube, some choose to be social influencers and some choose websites. This is a personal favourite topic of mine; most people know that you can make money with a website but also don’t have an idea on how to go about it.

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1) Selling products/ services through website

That’s how the vast majority of websites make money across the world. Most of the time these are businesses selling their services or eCommerce stores. You can setup an online store without having an inventory to sell, this is something called dropshipping. With dropshipping you display products you don’t have in stock on your website and when people buy them you also buy from the suppliers.

The cost of setting up an online store in South Africa is anywhere between R4K and R20k, your online store can sell clothing items, jewellery, beauty products, etc. The main problem with operating a website is that you have to drive traffic to it, driving traffic to a website is a special skill. This will cost you some money, especially if you have never ran any sort of website before. A great source for getting traffic is Facebook, you can promote your website and get thousands of visitors, the prices are super cheap. In order to sell anything on your website you have to get traffic.

Website conversion rate

The conversion rate for most websites is around 2 to 3 percent. This means only 2 – 3 percent of your website visitors will be converted to customers. Those are extremely low numbers; this means that in order to get 10 people to buy your products or services you will need around 500 visitors. This is just to put things in perspective, you can run a Facebook ad campaign to get those 500 visitors which will likely cost you anywhere between R500 and R700. This means that those 10 customers should cover those costs.

2) Blogging

If you are not making a website selling products and services then you can opt for a blog. The main purpose of a blog is to distribute information and attract a huge traffic to your website. To put it in perspective a traffic of around 3k visitors is a lot to a website selling services or products because that’s around 60 – 90 new customers in a month. But that’s not the case with a blog, you have to generate around 10x that traffic to start making substantial income from a blog.

This is because a blog makes money from advertising and affiliate marketing most of the time. This is a great way to make money with a website in South Africa, you don’t really sell anything but just make adverts for other people. You get paid each time someone clicks on the ad or for every successful affiliate conversion. Affiliate marketing is basically marketing products for a brand and then earn commission for every one that buys as a result of your marketing efforts. Commission income can be great, for example, Promta Web Services pays anything between R180 and R900 for every successful conversion for an affiliate.

Now let’s say only about 10% of your website visitors click on your affiliate links, that would be around 3k people per month for a website receiving 30k visitors a month. Out of those 3k people only about 3% will actually become customers as discussed above. That’s around 90 people, now supposed you get R900 in commission for all these people, that amounts to R81k. You didn’t have to do anything; all you did was advertise PWS and got paid for that.

How to get traffic for a blog

There is a long way to traffic and a short way to traffic for most blogs, this blog (MySouthAfrica) has never been advertised, ever, yet it gets thousands of people per month. But that’s because we took the long way. The short way to getting traffic for a blog would be paying for it like our neighbours who run websites that sell products or services. This includes setting up your Facebook page and promoting it through paid ads, then promoting your articles, this will appear as “sponsored” in other people’s feed.

The long way would be to write quality content, quality content attracts visitors but not immediately. You will have to wait for about 6 – 8 months before you actually get those visitors. That’s because of a little something called SEO; when you write quality content, Google loves it, it takes it and displays it on search results, there are over 5 billion searches per day on Google. You will get thousands of visitors for free from Google.

Conclusion

We covered how to make money with a website in South Africa, it is not easy, it requires hard work and perseverance. Do you have any thoughts or questions? Comment below.

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