I am always on the lookout for new ideas for generating revenue on my site and I know others are too. Not surprisingly people are loathe to talk about new money-making ideas but hell, we are all in this together. I´ll show you mine if you show me yours... DCT started an interesting thread about the types of site and the revenue earned from them http://forums.digitalpoint.com/showthread.php?t=21113 but what about your average content site? If we have no product of our own to sell, cannot sell subscriptions and can barely code our way out of a wet paper bag, what options do we have? I don´t want to give specifics in the thread but in broad terms here are the ways I have found to make money from my site and a comment on how effective they are: 1. Adsense: since applying Critter¨s Law, AS earnings have been climbing and given that you can set AS up, tweak it occasionally and let that baby run, it is a painless way to generate a fairly stable income - until such times as Google decides to shut the tap off for whatever reason. 2. Advertising - Listings. Within industry groups, I sell listings on directory type pages. Paid either annually or quarterly this is a small amount of work for a small amount of regular income. 3. Advertising - Sponsored pages. Webpages with advertorial content relevant to the site, seo´d to come up for competitive terms. This was a hard sell at first but having several pages up for a number of companies now, I can demonstrate that this form of internet marketing is very effective. It works well for the client and makes more money for me than the basic listings. With this form of advertising though it is important that you retain the final say on the content of the page. You do not want it to sound like a puff piece for the sponsor. The content must be relevant and generic otherwise visitors simpy click off and that is not good for you or the paying client. The bonus with this form of advertising is that it is also generates quality content. 4. Commissions: Small amount of money, large amount of hassle. At least for me. I don´t like this form of earning money but that is mostly because I am not really set up to handle selling services very well. I do not sell buttons or banners on my site. I don´t like them myself and don´t think they are effective though I will throw in a small button as part of a package if they client is interested. So that is it. Not very creative, eh? If anyone has any interesting revenue earning ideas for content sites that they have found effective and would like to share in a very general way, throw your ideas in the pot.
james, if you read his post he said: He's not talking about selling products. This is an interesting thread, one I would also like to see other people's opinions on.
You can create and sell products, yes. Other ideas: Add "pre-sell" pages to your site that are also valuable content, and include links/images for related products. This could be: how-to info useful articles detailed reviews etc These are great for Adsense, yes - but they are also great for promoting specific products or services, for which the commission is much higher. Add an autoresponder or mailing list to your site, and follow up with your visitors. Your goal can be to encourage them to revisit, or to promote specific products/services within the actual email. I liked your idea of creating "sponsored pages" that rank well for advertisers. Why not create some of your own "sponsored pages" that promote affiliate programs, so you can earn additional revenue. Not only will you earn money, but you can also share the conversion stats with potential advertisers to really seal the deal! Too, you can always just make more sites
1. If you have a lot of good, specialized information, you could have a "members area" for an annual / other periodic fee. General users could see an introductory summary only to whet their appetites, then there could be a link: "Become a member to read more". Wuold work for high-value information. 2. Use site to get subscribers to your ezine and then sell ads in the ezine. This would work for your Tenerife sites as you could throw in ads for the latest properties etc. 3. Use site to generate offline referals, not just online. 4. Build site up and sell it on to another person who has a business that will fit nicely with it.
I too, am interested in this topic. My situation is peculiar, because 90% of my visitors are people who disagree with me, and vehemently so. They are therefore unlikely to buy anything from me, or clikc on Google ads for that matter. I guess I am asking, how can I benefit from this organised dislike?
For websites that are purely content driven there are a couple of options. Basically, I think content driven websites fall into two categories: information or entertainment. You should treat the sites like non-internet entities such as newspapers and magazines. A bulk of your revenue will probably come from advertisements. If the site is more informational most of the times you can find affiliate programs to push, sometimes you can’t though. So you’re stuck with CPC and CPM ads. You can, also, sell banners and text links. Another good source of revenue is classified ads on your site. A non-ad based source of income for content-based sites is memberships. A lot of sites sell memberships for the ability to be able to get early access to the content. Some memberships are for special select content that non-members can’t view such as special reports or stories. Some sites use memberships for all of their archived material. You don’t always have to think what product can I ram down some one’s throat. You can, also, use the site to drive traffic to your other sites, too
Some great responses here: Lynn, your pre-sell pages, you mean to write content specifically round a topic that will sell for Adsense, as an affiliate and/or direct commissions from local business, right? I don´t really use any other ad network except for AS. I used to use CJ but found that many of the attractive offers were limited to US and Canada. Perhaps it is time to look again.
Another idea is to create and sell your own ebooks, repeating some site content and also having some unique content added. You could also offer a news letter and sell adevertising on that.
Yes. If you are making money with Adsense, then you are obviously successful at getting visitors to click through to related sites (most of which are selling a product or service). While the conversions would be lower, the commission is MUCH higher with affiliate programs that pay per lead or per sale. So its definitely worth testing! I would definitely check out both networks & individual programs that relate to your topic/market and see what is available to you.
Great thread! this idea of mine is to attract new listings (which will indirectly increase your revenue in the long run due to PPC, etc). you can do so by displaying a random listing (or several of them) on the front page, for example. so someone would add a listing to, ahem, be listed in the relevant category *and* hoping to get displayed on the front page a number of times as a bonus.