5 Ways To Generate Revenue For Your Website

29 responses..

Subscriptions - This is what I feel is my stable income and so I try to keep focused on providing a service people want and need I have many sites which offer subscriptions and almost all of them are donationware or contributionware. I never offer a specific product, service, or support. Instead its completely 100% donation based. For a long long long time subscription income didn’t come close to passing my contextual advertising or affiliate income. Now its almost 2x them and continues to snowballs. I have played with various price points throughout the years. I first started off with a one time fee of 29.95. Then after a few months and doing a lot of research I switched to a recurring annual fee of 29.95. I stuck it out at this price point for about 1 year until we had around 33345 members or the equivalent of a million dollars annual reoccurring income. At that point I changed it up to 19.95 for a 6 month reoccurring annual membership. yes its 10$ cheaper initially but for the same time period it actually makes me 10$ more. I find that people really like the 6 month deal for 19.95. This site now is at over 50k paying annual members and I see no reason to ever play with the subscription price point ever again.

Donations- After several people told me to put up a donation button I thought I would try it. I was totally stunned at the response that it has gotten over the years. In donations alone I have been able to cover all of my server costs and then some.

Physical Goods : Depending on what market you are in there can be a huge markup for physical goods. Being that I am pretty heavy in the mobile market I will use that for examples. Most cellular data cables can be bought for under 1$ and if you buy bulk you can literally get them for pennies (quantities of 1,000 or more). I sell these data cables for 20-30$ depending on what model. Yes, I charge a lot more then what people can pay for them on eBay or other places but still people buy. I figure out what its worth to me to sell them and that is how I come to my price point.

Contextual Advertising - AdSense/YPN/MSN : This is the cowboy market. Its fun and profitable but TONS of volatility. Sure you can make 5480$/day and be on the road to 2 million a year for the month of January but then what happens in Feb when you dip down to 1200$ a day. It makes you want to change your entire website… but then is it your website that needs changing or did the market flux… or was it that change you made 2 weeks ago in the global header that is drawing less paying ads. THIS WILL DRIVE YOU INSANE

Affiliates - I have had good success with affiliates like Azoogleads and CJ . I have also heard 5staraffiliateprograms is good also but I do not have experience with them. SE traffic seems to drastically effect the affiliates for me. When I am ranking super well then my affiliate money has gone HUGE through the roof but my subscriptions, donations, and contextual revenue doesn’t seem to be so effective. The same is true for when I fall off search engines. I see a drastic reduction for affiliate revenue but the rest stays the same.

So lets recap:

ShortTerm - Contextual Advertising - Hot or not.
MidTerm - Donations, Affiliates, and Physical goods - Decent sustainable revenue
Longterm - Subscriptions - This is your rock. Will continue to snowball until people cancel.

Ok so now you are running your short, mid and longterm revenue streams? Now go see the experts on how to optimize these:

For Blog specific check out problogger.net
For Contextual Advertising check out Jensense
For Affiliate programs check out dp forums

This is actually a repost/recap




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  • posted on May 14th, 2005:
    Written By: ShoeMoney

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    29 Comments

    @December 4, 2005 11:08 pm
    a389951l Says:

    Great article. Subscriptions - I never thought about the potential here. But I really don’t get what you mean by 100% donation based. Can you elaborate if you don’t mind? Thanks…

     
    @December 4, 2005 11:12 pm
    ShoeMoney Says:

    the best way to explain donationware subscriptions is to checkout what webmasterworld is doing http://www.webmasterworld.com/donate.htm

     
    @December 5, 2005 6:03 am

    Shoemoney shows how to make money

    If you don’t read Jeremy Schoemaker’s blog Skills to pay the bills: Shoemoney, you’re missing out on save great advice. Jeremy just posted his advice on five ways to generate revenue for your website. Contextual advertising — which includes AdSense…

     
    @December 5, 2005 8:10 am
    jawinn Says:

    What types of content are people willing to subscribe to these days?

     
    @December 5, 2005 9:26 am

    Yes, great article. Thanks for the 5 Star Affiliate Programs mention in your blog. I hang out at the Digital Point forums as well as my own 5 Star forums, if anyone has questions about how to increase their affiliate revenue I would be happy to help.

     
    @December 5, 2005 10:57 am
    will Says:

    Shoe, do you sell on eBay at all? What are your thoughts on making money there?

     
    @December 5, 2005 12:59 pm
    smindsrt Says:

    Nice post ShoeBaby! You can add… if someone has a site that gets lots of traffic there is a bit of money to be made with advertising… i.e. adbrite or similar forms of advertising

     
    @December 5, 2005 1:02 pm
    HU Says:

    Great read. I’ve seen several subscription based models. What do you do on yours? Do you offer extra downloads, access to content earlier, more content, etc?

     
    @December 5, 2005 2:50 pm
    ShoeMoney Says:

    I offer nothing except usually like a special badge on messageboards that lets others know your a subscriber or “supporter”. For me with what I do its important not to claim ownership to a particular item for resale.

     

    [...] Email Me « 5 ways to generate revenue for your website [...]

     
    @December 7, 2005 10:11 pm
    ShoeMoney Says:

    Right…. all at one site.

     
    @December 11, 2005 4:38 pm
    Radu Says:

    I’d like to ask if you think that subscriptions might perform better than ads on an astrology articles website. At the moment, Adsense rulez, but I really like your subscriptions idea, as it implies a level of trust or collaboration with my readers. At this moment, if a user clicks on an ad, that’s good, it earns me money, but on the other hand that visitor leaves my website and won’t get to read my other articles… And that’s not really stimulating me to write better articles, only better “keyword rich articles”.

    So, basicly, this seems to be a great opportunity to write better articles, but the question is: is it also a better financial option?!

     
    @December 13, 2005 9:16 am
    Jason Winn Says:

    Master Shoemoney,

    Will you share with us what forum software you use?

    Can you give any guidance on how exactly you place the donation/contribution buttons on your site? Are there any custom donation hacks for forums you recommend?

    Do you use paypal subscriptions?

     
    @January 4, 2006 6:35 am

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    @May 8, 2006 12:31 pm
    Julie H Says:

    For those with a particular geographical niche traditional advertising works too. Don’t think you only have the networks - go out and find advertising prospects in your own neighbourhood and sell the concept to them - the old fashioned way. Many business websites are pretty enough but poorly seo’d so the biz owner is pulling his hair out to drive traffic to his expensive on-line brochure. Prove that you can do that and you’ll have another regular source of income.

     
    @May 31, 2006 3:37 am
    diyadin Says:

     
    @June 6, 2006 4:40 pm

    Great ideas Jeremy!

     

    [...] Shoemoney’s Blog has some really useful information about PPC and contextual advertising. For forum owners, I think he wrote a good piece about subscriptions here. [...]

     
    @August 31, 2006 2:57 am
    Buch Says:

    Hi! Good work. By the way, look my site too

     
    @September 8, 2006 3:12 am
    Hanny Says:

    hi all:) Its a nice site. And i looking for a friends. Visit my site
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    Love and music is my life ;) Good luck

     

    [...] Third, you can learn from his successes. Beginners need to pay attention to those who are able to earn money from the Net fulltime. As a part-timer, I don’t have the time to test ad placements or new ad programs. However, people like Shoe have and will share their opinions with you. Take advantage of their knowledge. For starters, read his “5 Ways to Generate Revenue for Your Website“. His top recommendation may surprise you. [...]

     
    @May 11, 2007 8:11 am

    Good post, it reminded me a lot of what you said at the last Elite Retreat. Good stuff.

     
    @May 12, 2007 7:55 pm
    Olltwit Says:

    For contextual ads, Adsense is tops in my book and I’ve tried many. Webmasters among you, may still copy and paste large chunks of code, like I do, when adding adsense or other bits across multiple pages of your site. As a software author I made a simple little program to copy & paste large chunks of text, across my whole site. If that sounds useful you’re welcome to download a free copy. The address is on my blog.

     
    @May 29, 2007 1:31 pm
    duman6 Says:

    Great ideas. Thanks a lot

     
    @June 11, 2007 1:06 pm
    turan tuna Says:

    Shoe, do you sell on eBay at all? What are your thoughts on making money there?

     
    @August 3, 2007 5:58 pm
    iva Says:

    where can i make money really.

     
    @September 15, 2007 9:06 am

    thank you very good

     
    @September 21, 2007 7:15 am
    netdelisi Says:

     
    @November 5, 2007 10:13 pm
    CqsiUggg Says:

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