I only joined the DP community at the beginning of February and thus far have managed to make $650 by writing articles. Being only 17, this is great money for me, and along with my part time job I am saving up to buy a car. I see that there is a huge potential in online businesses as you are limitless in what you can offer. But what I want to know is if its profitable to have a website? I don't know much about these sorts of things, but it seems that the only source of income if you aren't offering a product on your website, is Adsense (please correct me if I'm wrong). To me it seems like a lot of work, money, and time to set up a website, provide content for it, market it, and get traffic, with only little amounts of Adsense revenue available. For those of you that own/operate a website that doesn't sell any products or services, what is your monthly website revenue and expenses, and how do you create this revenue.
There are many more ad programs to choose from than just Adsense. Its actually not that much work at all if you just want a semi-successful website. I suppose there is some creativity involved with coming up with a good enough idea to thrive on its own though. My average revenue is around 26 dollars a day. Expenses total around 1 dollar a day. give or take. Pretty much all of my websites are automatic in some way or another. It can take quite a bit of work to build, but once its done, you have an automated stream or revenue. It may not be much, but from then on, its just a numbers game.
Does your revenue only come from ads? And how much did you need to pay when you first set up your website (registering domain, etc..)?
You can use blogger to set up a free website if you wish: like i have used with http://ismooch.blogspot.com but if you are serious about a website, then you better of hosting. which can cost you $6.50 a month. a Domain name is $10 a year. if you get a good host, you can set up a few domains without any additional monthly cost. i pay $7.95 a month and i host 3 domains ($10 each a year). So costs arent that high and u can easily recoup them with adsense each month. Setting up a website can be pretty simple, just use wordpress like i have done with this one: http://iliketorant.com hope this helps
But keep in mind that dp is community driven where there's already lots of traffic.. if you have your own website, its better, but you have to generate traffic yourself.