How to Make Money with Your Website
This will be the beginning of a series of posts about monetizing content websites. A content website is a website that provides mainly, well, content – meaning that this is not about online stores and not about web applications.
During my years as a software developer, many people have approached me with this phrase (or something to that effect): “I have this idea for a website, but I don’t know how to make money with it.”
Paid vs. free is an ongoing debate in the online world – I doubt it will ever end. But the biggest concern about making money from a website has to do with whether charging for it would drive visitors away?
Some people will surely leave – not everyone wants to pay if they’re not sure what they’ll get. If everything is free, then more people can access it and it’s easier to spread. But if everything is free, how do you make money?
With an online store it’s easy – a store makes money by selling stuff. Of course you can use any of the methods that will be described in this series with online stores, but that would be secondary. In some cases that would be overkill.
What about web applications? They are both similar to and different from content websites. They are similar in the sense that you don’t buy anything like from a store, but you get the value from it indirectly by using it.
They are different in the sense that there is one way to use content – you read, watch or listen to it, you’re done – whereas web applications can sometimes be accessed in a variety of different ways (like using Twitter through third-party applications).
Plus, you don’t always want to be interrupted while using them – like having ads flashing around you while writing a document with Google Docs. For that reason I’ll leave it up to you to decide what works and what doesn’t for web applications.
Because of all that the series will focus on monetizing content websites that are primarily free to access. We will discuss the advantages and disadvantages of these five options:
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