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How to Make Money on Your Website - Using Donations

Small Online Business Idea: Making money with your high traffic and/or high reputation website using Donations.

(The rest of this post assumes you’ve already got one or many high traffic/high quality websites. If you haven’t finished step 1 yet, go here for information on how to build a high traffic website.)

Getting Money from Donations on your Website - Basics:

Rather than trying to offer a direct trade for people’s money in a traditional two-way transaction, some websites can get away with simply asking visitors to make a donation. Whether this donation seems worthwhile or not (whether you’re a legitimate charity, community organization, or just some kid hoping for a quick buck off your blog) anyone can ask their online community for a donation and see what happens.

Most websites that try this technique will get virtually or literally no money via donations. However, the sites that do get money can get big amounts of money. It all depends on what kind of website you’re running.

How it Works:

Setting yourself up to receive donations is remarkably easy. The hard part is getting people to actually donate.

From a technical standpoint, set-up is as easy as 1-2-3

  1. install the code on your website (see below for details)
  2. instruct visitors how they can donate, why they should do so
  3. collect the money in your account and do whatever you want with it.

If you’re interested in actually getting people to donate, the following tips may be helpful:

  • People only want to donate to a legitimate cause. This can include charity, entertainment, voluntary payment, support for a website the visitor found helpful, etc. If your website offers nothing that would lead a person to donate, consider whether you can offer a donation-friendly motive or if you should simply forget about donations.
  • Fraud is illegal. If you say donations will be used for one thing, then turn around and do something else, you’d better have a good lawyer or an international hide-out. If you’re simply looking for a few extra bucks to help keep your website afloat or increase your income, be sure to say so on your website.
  • Use a trusted, secure donation service (see below.) This reduces visitors’ fear of getting scammed. Don’t build your own unless you’ve got a big-time major brand at your disposal.
  • Let potential donors know what their money will go toward. Be as specific as you can without getting pedantic or dishonest.

Dangers:

Aside from potentially diluting the focus of your website (too many options makes a website confusing), calling for donations may hinder the overall messaging of your website. If you think your visitors will be turned off by seeing a donation option, maybe you shouldn’t include one.

Important Partners:

  • My favourite option is offered through Paypal. Paypal is trusted, secure, and easy to install on your site.
  • Another fair option is offered through Amazon. Similar concept, similar process.

How to Make Money on Your Website - Using Affiliate Programs

Small Online Business Idea: Making money with your high traffic and/or high reputation website using Affiliate Programs.

(The rest of this post assumes you’ve already got one or many high traffic/high quality websites. If you haven’t finished step 1 yet, go here for information on how to build a high traffic website.)

Getting Money from Affiliate Programs & Your Website - Basics:

Affiliate programs are basically the same concept as lead-generation, a sales person, or a “middleman”. In short, you neither close the sale nor create the product. The only value you need to provide is to connect a prospective buyer to someone else’s store. With the right kind of website, this can be an easy addition to your content that pays dividends for little extra work.

How it Works:

Large numbers of suppliers and internet retailers (who are trying to sell more stuff) realize that, even if they pay you a percentage of the cost of an item they’ve got stocked, its still in their best interest to make the sale and pay you a sales commission. So, even if they pay you $10 on a $100 camera sale, they still get $90, which is still a good deal for them.

In order to organize this demand, large “affiliate programs” have been set up to accommodate the sale of just about any item imaginable. As a result, its quite easy to offer products for sale on your website that your visitors may be interested in buying. Once you’ve hooked up with one or several affiliate programs, which is pretty easy to get going, you simply sit back and hope that some of your website’s visitors feel like buying.

Dangers:

Any time you send a visitor away from your website, you may never see them again. So, only get involved in an affiliate program if the overall impact on your site and revenue is positive.

Also, by promoting other companies’ products, you are endorsing items which may or may not match your own quality standards. If you promote crappy content and your visitors have a bad experience with them (or if they simply see you endorsing them), their opinion of your site may weaken and that may be that last that you see of them.

Important Partners:

In your search for an affiliate program that offers ease of use, products that fit your website, and a payment model that maximizes profits, consider some of the partners below. For quickly introducing yourself to the principles and common issues surrounding affiliate programs, play around with the Amazon Associates program first and then consider moving on to the other programs.

How to Make Money on Your Website - Using Merchandising

Small Online Business Idea: Making money with your high traffic and/or high reputation website using Merchandising.

(The rest of this post assumes you’ve already got one or many high traffic/high quality websites. If you haven’t finished step 1 yet, go here for information on how to build a high traffic website.)

Merchandising & Your Website - Basics:

Every time you see some kid wearing a sports jersey or musician’s album cover, you’re seeing evidence of someone else’s merchandising. Or, someone else’s $3 profit. Learning how to do merchandising for your own brand is surprisingly easy, especially when leveraging partners like CafePress to help you on your way.

How it Works:

Businesses with custom production and delivery capabilities combine with your custom merchandise needs (logo’d tshirts, pens, mugs, mousepads, books, etc.) to create a virtual store in almost no time. Setup is as easy as 1-2-3:

1) You create a suite of customized products and place them in your “store”

2) You send mobs of eager traffic to the store (possibly on your site, possibly a “store” on another site)

3) You collect cheques after someone else does all the hard work

Dangers:

The main dangers involved are:

  • Wasting your time setting up a store that no-one will buy from:
    • If your online community does not want to buy things with your logos or ideas on them, all your creativity and set-up time could be wasted.
  • Wasting your money setting up a store that no-one will buy from:
    • Choosing a free system (see below) to start with is the best way to avoid this risk. If you start selling material like crazy, you can then do the math on how much %’s you’ll save by moving to a more complex, independent, custom-built system.
  • Setting up a store that people do want to buy from:
    • What will you do with all that extra money?? J

Important Partners:

The following websites are great places to start (and likely finish) your search for an easy-to-operate and inexpensive merchandising system:

How to Make Money on Your Website - Using Ads

Small Online Business Idea: Making money with your high traffic and/or high reputation website using Ads.

(The rest of this post assumes you’ve already got one or many high traffic/high quality websites. If you haven’t finished step 1 yet, go here for information on how to build a high traffic website.)

Getting Money from Putting Ads on your Website - Basics:

One of the easiest ways to make money online is by selling advertising on your website. There are many major services on the market, so the process is extremely simple. In other words, they’re easy to install, easy to run, and its easy to collect payment.

How it Works:

Businesses all over the world are trying to get consumers’ attention and get their message in front of an audience. In the offline world, this includes magazines, TV, radio spots, etc. In the online world, it means any website with an audience, which means you and your website.

In order for ease of administration, these businesses go to a major broker in order to sell a bunch of ads across a network of good websites. The biggest brokers are listed below. These brokers then need websites to place their ads on, which is where you come in.

By adding a small piece of code to your website, major brokers gain the ability to display ads on your website for as long as the code is left untouched. Once the ads are there, there are 3 main methods by which you can get paid for having these ads:

1) CPM (cost per mil / cost per thousand / cost per impression) – Every time an ad gets displayed 1000 times, you get paid the agreed amount. This can be good for very high traffic websites.

2) CPC (cost per click) – Every time a visitor clicks on an ad, you get paid the agreed amount. This can be good for a high traffic website or a site within a niche where visitors are likely to click on ads for more information.

3) CPA (cost per acquisition) – Every time a visitor buys an item on another site after getting there directly from your website, you get paid the agreed amount or % of revenue. This can be really lucrative or result in little revenue, depending on your niche and the likelihood of people buying something.

The best thing to do is try different models, let each system run for an appropriate amount of time, and then see which model produces the best results.

Dangers:

The biggest danger is the loss of a hot prospect in the event that you have a higher-value potential conversion on your website. If a visitor might be worth $500 dollars to you, but they leave on an ad that gives you $0.15, putting ads on your site might be the worst strategy you can implement.

For information-based sites, some website visitors do not like seeing ads. As a result, your readership may be offended and culled if you introduce ads to your website.

Also, putting ads on a high-profile website can look petty or unprofessional, which is not worth the damage to your brand if you’re only going to get a few bucks out of it.

Some of these sites sell ads primarily to get inbound links to their website to trick Google into giving them higher search rankings. Sites that try to sell links based on their value for “increasing your link value” are highly disfavoured by Google. So, if your website relies heavily on Google traffic and you don’t want to get penalized by Google, consider staying clear of these companies (see list below). The details surrounding this last danger are contentious and numerous; a fodder for a future post…

Important Partners:

By far the easiest and best system to get started with is Google’s Adsense program. Sign-up should take less than 5 minutes, and you can have ads on your site in as little as 10 minutes. Plus, its free, trustworthy, user-friendly, and has a large number of people buying ads through it (so the ads on your site will likely be relevant to your content.)

For those of you convinced to try something beyond Adsense, the following vendors are places to start your search (although I think this list is a complete waste of time):

User beware if you rely on Google traffic: