Hi Folks, and thanks in advance for your replies and suggestions. Here it is in a nut shell: We run a free webzine for music. It's a weekly webzine that offers free music downloads and artist interviews. We avg. around 10k hits per month and we're growing (we're less 3 months old). Because it's free, we have no real monetization going on. Adsense is a joke (can't even buy coffee with what it brings), and converting the site to even a low monthly membership (we believe) will not work and will alienate our visitors. The only way we see to viably monetize the site is with CPA surveys, and to that end, we still have concerns. Our biggest concern with CPA surveys is that is still involves a tedious "fill out the form" procedure that we believe will get tiring and old for our visitors on a constant basis. It also re-directs the visitor to an external site - thus leaving ours, even if momentarily. Although it may not render us the same amount of revenue as traditional CPA surveys, we would rather opt for a survey that not only resides within our site (visitors NOT re-directed, but survey remains over our page until completed), but also is less invasive regarding filling out forms. Perhaps a lower-level survey of simply answering questions or opinions, so that our visitors can get to our content faster and with less of a headache. I also found that most surveys run the gamut regarding their content, and little has to do with OUR content of music related topics. I welcome your opinions on our thoughts above, which CPA program you feel may suit our needs the best, and any other suggestions for monetizing our free service would be great. Thanks again!
You could review some quality products that are related to music and get a percentage cut for any sales you generate by joining affiliate programmes. You can for instance sell Amazon products.
Thanks Jon. In truth, music sales are going no where. We actually already experimented with Amazon's affiliate program and placed music related sales widgets across several pages. It generated nothing, and we were offering titles from the "A" list of artists. Within the last few days, we began exploring video ads and we think we like this direction. It's less invasive than CPA programs (and we know - less money too), but we believe it's fits our audience's tolerance of having to delay getting what they want from our site. If you have any opinions in this area of CPV (for video ad affiliates), please comment. Thanks.
When your site gets big enough advertisers will pay you to advertise on your site. In fact they will now, so shop it around. Just for a banner you will get flat fees for them to place it on your site.
How timely your post!! I just got an email last night (unsolicited) asking for our rate sheet from a local cellphone accessory distributor. Do you know of any website or service that allows smaller sites like ours to ask for equally smaller advertisers? That would be interesting!