This chapter covers
- Understanding e-commerce options
- Avoiding annoying your customers
- Choosing the best e-commerce plugin
- Installing Secure Sockets Layer to avoid the Not Secure message
- Creating a strong call to action
- Converting visitors to customers
- Marketing effectively
You can monetize—make money with—your website in a variety of ways. It’s your job to ensure that the approach you choose aligns well with your audience, the site’s content, and your personal goals and resources.
In this chapter, we’ll look at the most popular and effective ways to monetize a site. You can make money with most types of sites, one way or another. However, it’s important to understand that even when making money, your primary goal for most sites should remain ensuring that your site satisfies your audience’s expectations with excellent, polished content. And any advertising, sales, or requests for donations should be at least secondary, if not tertiary.
For many kinds of e-commerce, you’ll want to use a plugin. In this chapter, we’ll explore the most popular one, WooCommerce (https://mng.bz/9Yw8).
The topic of e-commerce is vast and varies greatly based on the kind of site you run and the type of sales you intend to pursue. E-commerce could easily fill a book on its own, with each chapter devoted to a different subtopic. Here, we’ll present an overview, with suggestions and guidelines to point you to resources for further detail about your specific use case.