How to make money from your website in the UK

1. Display advertising

The classic: ad slots on your pages, paid per thousand views. It's genuinely passive — set it up once and it earns while you write. The honest caveat is scale: display revenue is proportional to traffic. A UK site with 10,000 monthly page views might earn £15–£40 a month depending on niche. Finance and legal content earns several times what entertainment does, because those advertisers pay more per reader.

What to check before choosing a network: the revenue share (Google AdSense keeps 32%; we keep 20%), the payout threshold (£60 at Google; £25 here), whether it needs a cookie consent banner (tracking-based networks do; our tag doesn't set cookies at all), and what it does to your page speed. A heavy ad stack can cost you the search rankings that bring the traffic in the first place.

2. Affiliate links

You recommend a product, you earn a cut of the sale. Better than display for small-but-focused audiences, because one committed reader can earn you £20, not £0.002. It works when your content is already about buying decisions — reviews, comparisons, "best X for Y" articles. Amazon Associates pays 1–12%; specialist UK programmes (finance, insurance, hosting) pay far more. The catch: it shapes what you write. Affiliate-first sites drift toward covering whatever pays, and readers can smell it.

3. Direct sponsorship

A local or niche business pays you a flat monthly fee for presence on your site. For UK sites with a strong local or specialist audience this often beats everything else per visitor — a village news site with 3,000 loyal readers can charge a local firm £50–£150 a month, which display ads would never match. The cost is your time: finding sponsors, invoicing, chasing renewals. (This is roughly what we automate — UK advertisers, monthly bank payments, none of the chasing.)

4. Your own products and services

The highest ceiling and the most work: courses, ebooks, consulting, paid newsletters. If people already email you questions, there's probably a product in the answers. Advertising and products aren't either/or — plenty of sites run ads while they build towards a product, then keep the ads on lower-traffic pages.

What we'd actually do, by site type

• Local news or community site: display ads + one or two direct local sponsors. Your audience is exactly what local advertisers want and can't get from Facebook.
• Hobby or niche blog: display ads for baseline income, affiliates on your review content.
• Professional/trade content: your CPMs are the highest going — display advertising works properly here. Add consulting when you're ready.
• Under ~3,000 monthly views: honestly? Focus on content and search traffic first. Ads on a tiny site earn pennies and can put readers off. Come back when the traffic compounds — no network minimum here, but the maths is the maths.