The first thing that I need to say is that making money is not everything. Not all of us start blogs or websites with the goal of making money as our priority. With that having been said, if you are planning to make money with your website or blog, do you know exactly how you are going to do it? In other words, do you have a plan in terms of what revenue models you are going to use? It’s also good to have an overall plan as i have mentioned before in an earlier post.
The purpose of this post is to try to help you decide how to best monetize your blog or any other website. There are a number of different revenue models available and it’s not all about advertising. Advertising is a without a doubt a great way to make money with your site but it’s not always the most efficient way.
Advertsing-Supported Revenue Model
This model is your basic advertising model in which your website will display an number of banner ads, text ads, google adwords etc. You, being the publisher will be able to decide what kind of ads are displayed, from whom, as well as the sizes of the ads. This type of revenue models is all about getting as many page views as possible so as to get as many clickthroughs on your ads as possible.
Advertising-Subscription Mixed Revenue Model
This model takes advertsing a step further in that you are now creating a second revenue stream through charging a subscription fee for a particular service or product that is received by the customer on a regular basis. As an exampe, many sites charge a monthly fee for access to certain private sections of the site. Now when you combine this with advertising on your site, you are using your site much more optimally.
Fee-for-Transaction Revenue Model
This model is great when your website provides a product or processes transactions on the user’s behalf. There is no need for any advertising to be placed on your website and very often it’s better not to have advertising because it sends a certain message to your customer. I’m not saying that you shouldn’t place ads on your site at all, it’s perfectly acceptable to have a few ads on your site. I’m simply saying that sometimes the impression given to the customer regarding the quality of your service or product, which you are charging for, can be influenced by having “unrelated” advertising all over your site.
Fee-for-Service Revenue Model
This is the final model that I am going to mention, but is by no means the final one available, you can successfully combine all these models and you can come up with new ones too. In this model you charge the customer based on the service that you provide, you could be a consultant or you could be a web designer, it doesn’t matter. Having a blog is a great way to promote yourself or your service and very often no advertising is required to successfully make a profit. However, there is nothing wrong with supplementing you revenue with an additional advertising revenue stream.
The last thing I would like to say is that what I have described above is merely a guideline to help you to be able to plan. I wouldn’t dream of suggesting that you should limit yourself to the above models, all I intended to do was to help you to become aware of the fact that there are many more ways of making money than simply placing banner ads on your website.
I hop that this information was helpful. Please feel free to give your comments or opinions, I love to hear from my readers!
