now that I am finally old enough in posts and days to post in this section I would love to get your opinions on my site www.chaindlk.com it is an online music magazine for electronica,industrial,ambient,experimental music with reviews, interviews, news etc... Except for the use of SMF it's all custom written code. I have over 30'000 visitors per month but I am struggling making some money from it. It is a non-profit site but with 30k visitors and over 100k page views per month I would love to make at least enough money to pay for the server and to pay my contributors for their content.
It's an excellent site and has alot of great content though it is a little cluttered as you scorll further down. Have you thought about selling text adds on your site as well as adsense? Also have you thought about selling mp3's? Not just main stream but creating an area where your members can upload and sell their music and you get a small portion of the profits or they pay a monthly fee to list an unlimited number of their own music on your site to sell.
Hey inets, thanks for being the first to review my site... I've been struggling with how to monetize this. I want to keep it non-profit but I want to distribute the love the ones that do a lot of the work, the contributors... I experimented with adsense, chitika and adengage and made zero, zip, nada, so now I am experimenting with amazon ads, since I figured out how to make them more targeted to what's on the page. I would LOVE to sell ads on my site but I don't have time to find labels/artists interested in advertising... I would need a person to do that. The mp3 idea is very good, I never thought of it in those terms... I am a little afraid of the infrastructure required to create something like that and of the bandwidth required for uploads and downloads... Do you know of any scripts that do that if I wanted to give it a try?
Unfortunately not sorry. I've seen sites where people can upload music to to sell but not to sure if this can incorp'd into your site in a frame like amazon. If it could be then you could be able to take the hassle out of setting it up yourself and still making money. Unfortuneately there is no such thing as non profit as any business needs a profit to be viable. How commercial you want to make it is what becomes the deciding factor.
by non profit I just mean that I intend not to keep any of the potential monies but to simply redistribute it to the contributors and pay for expenses
The content looks a bit cluttered on the page and it's difficult to read some of the text. The page layout and the typography needs some work.
I don't think you need this this text "once fully loaded, you may use the above navigation menu links or the SiteMap (see above, right..." I would add a short tagline below the site name which describes your site so you visitors know what your site is about.
Thanks for ideas. The tagline is a good idea, I'd have to graphically make room for it. The "once fully loaded" line is there because that menu doesn't work until the page is fully loaded and I didn't want people to be looking for something that is in the menus and not be able to find it because they are hovering over the menu while the page is still loading, you know?