
Advice: how to monetize a website with – 30,000 page views per month? - plg
I have a technical website with ~ 30,000 page views per month --- how to monetize this?<p>(the site is a how-to-do-various-useful-things-in-programming-language-X sort of site)<p>I tried putting a &quot;donate using bitcoin&quot; badge on there but guess what: total BTC donations so far are 0.000<p>I don&#x27;t want to put ads up (unless someone tells me I can make considerable $$ doing so and even then it rubs me the wrong way)<p>any other suggestions?
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davismwfl
Other than ads. Find a couple of the most common questions/issues and those
that get the most action and turn that into an ebook where you can offer
advice, and show the various opinions and details around each different
methodology etc.

If you are getting newbie's coming to the site that are either new to the
language or new to the industry or just having common issues, ebooks,
subscriptions and training are a fairly easy way to monetize.

You could also collect say 50 best useful tips and sell that as an ebook. Go
through all the content on the site and collect these into an organized
training manual basically. Its a FAQ in ebook form. Or maybe do a architecture
practices, design practices and intro ebooks etc, all based on the content you
have.

Also, you could give a small ebook away to increase conversions on getting
people's email addresses. Then get a newsletter setup that you can offer
services to the list, or use it again to sell ebooks, training etc. You may
already have setup the email list, but just in case you haven't yet gone that
way. You can work with partners then to monetize the list where you will not
rent or sell your list but if someone presents you with a good solid topic or
service you will market it to your list and you will get paid to do that. You
just have to be picky about what you send to the email subscribers and not
abuse that responsibility or your opt-outs will destroy the list real fast.

Last idea, going back to the newbies, you could offer a 3-6 month initial
training service where they pay monthly for weekly tips, training and
assistance while they are getting started. Of course I am making a ton of
assumptions with this idea.

I am just shooting ideas out of my head, so they may be totally off base for
your situation, as your question is pretty broad without a link to the site to
understand what you already do.

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plg
awesome thanks for the kind suggestions!

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dpweb
I wouldn't waste time with donations.

With ads you would be targeting about $150/mo or $5/cpm with US visitors,
maybe 25-50% of that internationally. So, you could try to sell something on
the site, and if you don't make that much - go for the ads.

I would do adsense and not waste time with the other ad networks unless you
had time to try different ones out and find one that yields better than that..

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LukeFitzpatrick
You could possibly offer referrals to other Bitcoin sites and charge a fee.
Some sites offer Bitcoin wallets, others can predict the market market. I know
of one Bitcoin site which has a 90% accuracy on prediction.

I'd say, safety of Bitcoin will become a big thing later on with quantum
computing on the rise.

Checkout Meetup.com in you local area. I live in Seoul, it has regular meet
ups about Bitcoin. If you attend this, you should be able to get some ideas.

Best of luck! I think I saw your post on Quora.

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galfarragem
I have also a 30-35K monthly pageviews niche blog and my experience says that
is very difficult to monetize a website like this. I never made more than
90€/month (including all sources of income) with an average of 60€/month.
Anyway my two cents are:

\- donations: forget about it. Before put ads up I tried paypal donations.
That only got me $5 despite remembering readers about it every couple of weeks
for 5 months.

\- ads (adsense): ugly and annoying but is the most important and stable
source of income my blog has. 80% of all income.

\- amazon affiliates: margins are low but with some work (and luck) you can
get a decent source of monetization. Probably depends also on your niche
market. 20% of my blog income.

\- email marketing: since recently I have been collecting emails but didn't
use it yet. Anyway my market target is mostly students so the potencial income
will be low.

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chatmasta
Developers are a notoriously hard-to-monetize crowd, and more developers have
adblockers installed than any other demographic. So I would avoid normal
advertisements.

Here's what you need to do:

1) Collect email addresses

2) Sell things to the email addresses. Books come to mind.

e.g. "Want to hear my recommendations for programming books? Leave your
email."

Or, as another commenter suggested, write a book yourself.

Also put some amazon affiliate links to books somewhere on the site.

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taprun
Without knowing more about your site, it's hard to say. My first suggestion
would be to start collecting email addresses and sound out interesting jobs
from sponsoring recruiters.

I created a free book of revenue models that might help you think about the
possibilities - [http://TapRun.com/revenue](http://TapRun.com/revenue)

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northernmonkey
[http://skimlinks.com](http://skimlinks.com)

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mapster
Have you considered trying affiliate guest posts? Either that or develop a
service that your users could use - especially if your brand is strong,
basically license a white label widget and market that.

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M-S-B
Perhaps a CTA to up-sell an e-book with useful pro information?

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bobsadinook
first, what is your site address? make donate with Paypal available

Your visitor should coming from US,Russia,German or western

consider to use flattr.com and Google adsense(many developer use it)

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davismwfl
I agree, bitcoin is still not as easy as paypal for a lot of people, so adding
paypal itself may help.

