

Ask HN: How are you monetizing your site? - vaksel

What are all the different ways you found to make money off your site?
======
knightinblue
I wrote this last week for another 'Ask HN' thread regarding starting a
successful blog. Thought it would also apply here -

"Generating revenue - whole books can be written on this subject (and they
have been). But it can broadly be broken down into five categories -

1\. Advertisements - the magic word here is CPM (read up on that). The higher
the CPM, higher the payout for you. A word of advice in this matter - adsense
is complete horseshit when it comes to CPM. Don't buy into the hype, it's
absolutely pathetic. Same goes for Adbrite, Chitika etc. The real money is in
PRIVATE ads. Take a look at the prominent blogs - like techcrunch.com for
example - do you see any adsense or other types of nonsense on their blogs?
It's mainly used as a placeholder in case any private ad spots weren't bought
by advertisers. NEVER rely on adsense for your primary ad revenue. Having said
that, you won't have private advertisers till you have good traffic, so it's
ok to start with adsense. But as soon as traffic spikes up, dump adsense like
it's the plague.

2\. Affiliate - this is a bit trickier than ads being that it's not completely
straightforward. The basic idea is that you link to products on your site and
if you readers follow your links to buy those products, you get a cut of the
sale. Amazon is a good start, but they're not the best. The key is finding a
good affiliate that fits YOUR blog audience the best. The next step would be
to beef up on your affiliate marketing skills. Start reading affiliate
marketing blogs like shoemoney.com for this.

3\. Merchandising - you can sell stuff on your blog. This can be as
complicated as actually creating your own product or as simple as setting up a
cafe press store and selling related merchandise (INSANELY easy! Just go to
cafepress.com and set up a store for your blog, and they will handle the rest,
by taking a commission of your sales.)

4\. Job Board - a specific section on your blog where ppl can post or look for
jobs. Charge based on traffic. You can either set up your own job board from
scratch (check out the problogger job boards on the bottom right of
problogger.com) or do some research on alternatives -
[http://www.blogtrepreneur.com/2008/04/29/make-money-with-
you...](http://www.blogtrepreneur.com/2008/04/29/make-money-with-your-own-job-
board/) (Job-A-Matic has a good premise). Read up on this.

5\. Donations - Bloggers like Steve Pavlina and Leo Babauta use this method
and it works out great for them. But it's not for everyone. Your audience has
to LOVE you, or at least really appreciate you, for this."

There's actually two more methods as well -

6\. Newsletter -
[http://www.businessweek.com/technology/content/feb2009/tc200...](http://www.businessweek.com/technology/content/feb2009/tc20090224_035701.htm)
\- this guy makes a $40 CPM, which is absolutely incredible. Sign up for
successful newsletters like dailycandy to get an idea of how they monetize
them.

7\. Sell a Service - from freelance writing to consulting etc.

What's your site about? That could help narrow down your options.

~~~
fudmonkey
Job Boards are great for monetization if you have a community around a
specific niche. Even in these times, there's money in recruitment.

You could try Easy Job Boards for a simple hosted solution where you get to
keep 100% of revenue - <http://www.easyjobboards.com/>

------
scumola
Sell stuff. Get people to sell their stuff on your site and take a small bite
of the sale price. Don't rely on ads and seo - too competitive. Then, go out
and pound the pavement and get people to sign up to sell stuff. Would be good
if you get a sales guy in your startup team.

------
udfalkso
I run this site: <http://isitnormal.com>

It gets quite a bit of traffic, mostly from search, but it has proven very
hard to monetize. Tried adsense, but my content was too risque for them. Was
using an ad network called clicksor for a while, but their ads are very
intrusive and didn't perform well enough to justify the bad user experience. I
even tried the adult friend finder affiliate program for my "unsafe" content,
but it performed absolutely horribly.

Would love to hear more ideas from the HN crowd. How does one go about finding
private advertisers without a salesforce?

~~~
tannerk
Dude your problem is not ad networks, rather the monetizing strategy. Traffic
is huge, but comes from 600 some search terms / phrases (very, very
defragmented). I’d group all search term based on similarity. Find yourself
some kick ass affiliate offers to go along with each visitor group. Serve the
ads accordingly, instead of relying on Google welfare. Based on what I’ve
tried and seen, you should be able to get $20/25 CPM at minimum.

~~~
tannerk
...just think of it as PPC marketing in reverse. Instead of figuring out
keywords, figure out an offer for a phrase. Hope this helps.

~~~
udfalkso
Thanks!

------
skolor
The only way I've made money on any site is by selling something. Ads are
great, but I can never get them to cover anything but basic operating costs,
and even then they will barely cover the costs to keep a server running.

Depending on how the site is set up, you can either sell a product or a
service. The problem with that is largely that you have to have something
people are willing to pay for. I know quite a few blog-type sites have had
success with a model along the lines of Current month free, Archives require
payment.

------
noodle
sell a product. sell a service. sell ad space. referral programs.

~~~
noodle
forgot one -- ask for tips/donations.

i kind of think that most monetization solutions will fall under one or more
of these overarching concepts. i might've missed one or two though.

------
EvilTrout
There are also intangiable (non-physical) products you can sell.

For example, my product is a web based RPG. We use a points system, where
users can purchase Brownie Points in various increments. Then they can redeem
those points for various products (all of which web-site only features.)

It's an alternative to subscriptions (like Lighthouse). Where your users pay a
monthly or yearly fee.

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lucumo
We're running a freemium model. Users get to view ads or they can pay to
remove them and get some other features. The free part gets a lot of people
into the game (as a figure of speech, but also literally) and some buy a VIP
account.

------
mahmud
My "website" is a digital brochure for my business. Ask me how I make money
from brochures if you want.

------
monkeybusiness
Making money is so last year.

~~~
tdoggette
I understand downvoting the useless and malicious, but this was a /joke,/
people. 0 is fine if you don't want it in the discussion; Negative numbers are
just gratuitous.

