Make Money with Other Monetization Strategies
Affiliates offers, sponsorships, and ads are going to bring in the majority of direct revenue for most bloggers. However, if you’re creative about it, there are several other monetization strategies to be found. The most common ones are subscriptions, donations, and merchandise sales.
Subscriptions and Membership Sites
Users are not exactly fond of paywalls, but if you attract a loyal following you can offer monthly subscriptions in exchange for some form of exclusivity. You could offer extra features to pro users (such as your articles in PDF and audio format), access to exclusive content that’s not available to your regular readers , or exclusive access to a useful resource.
WordPress users can look into plugins such as wp-Member and WishList Member to obtain membership site features for their blogs.12 Users of other blogging systems may have to get creative to find similar features for their blogging platform or use third-party scripts or services. The risk of membership sites is alienating your user base and creating two classes of citizens among your readers (paying and non-paying).
Be careful if you decide to experiment with this monetization strategy. It has the potential either to generate plenty of income or to destroy your community, so tread lightly in terms of how you go about this approach. In particular, do not make your readers pay to read your blog posts. Doing so goes against the spirit of sharing your knowledge via blogging.
Donations
Receiving donations is much simpler than adding premium membership features to your site. You simply add a payment processor button (e.g., PayPal) and invite readers to donate. You can make it cuter and ask for a specific amount that would pay for a coffee, beer, or slice of pizza rather than having this approach come across as out-and-out panhandling. Add a nice coffeecup icon next to your call to action, and you may get a few donations here and there.
In my experience, donations are not a particularly lucrative approach to monetizing your blog. To make them work and be sustainable for you, you’ll need a particularly large audience of very loyal readers. Furthermore, you may have to motivate such users by recognizing them in a page on your blog. Another problem with donations is that if you try to earn money from your blog with ads, sponsorships, and affiliate offers, very few readers will feel like donating to you. And if you get rid of those revenue channels, you generally won’t be able to make up for them with donations alone.
I have tried a variety of donation-related approaches, including accepting Bitcoins and receiving micropayments via Flattr and Readability.13 Earnings were abysmal when compared to other revenue sources. One donation approach that I have seen work many times is having infrequent fund-raising posts,14 in which the blogger outlines the expenses and time commitment required to keep up the blog and requests (perhaps once a year) that readers to chip in to reach a specific amount of money.
For genuinely useful blogs with a loyal readership, such donation drives can quickly bring in a few thousand dollars in a matter of days or even hours. One such drive allowed Jason Kottke,15 a pioneer blogger, to switch to fulltime blogging back in 2005. But the model hasn’t been sustainable and his blog is now ad-supported (via The Deck). Keep this tool in your belt for when things are not going well economically. (Should you ever find yourself in extreme dire straits, remember also that your blog is essentially a virtual real estate asset and can, if worse comes to worst, even be sold on sites such as Flippa.
Sell Merchandise
Merchandise sales can quickly add up and, unlike the early days of the Web, you don’t have to ship products out of your garage. Using services such as CafePress, Spread Shirt, and Zazzle,17 all you really need is a nice design. If you did a good job in terms of branding and ensuring that your readers feel a part of a community, you may end up selling quite a few T-shirts and other types of merchandise with your logo on it. If you have a cute mascot like Reddit or Hipmunk both do,18 selling will be even easier.
Keep in mind that you don’t have to limit merchandise to your logo or mascot. With the help of a good designer, you can very easily create cute, fun, witty T-shirts and other gift shop-like items that are relevant to your niche and make some extra money via that route.
For example, I could add another source of revenue to my math blog by simply creating a series of math-related T-shirts designs that I sold for a markup over the base price I was charged by a third-party service. So far, I have not tested my hypothesis on Math-Blog, but I suspect it might work well. Much of what you’ll learn in the next chapter, when we discuss techniques to help sell your own products, can be applied to merchandise as well. Keep this monetization strategy as something worth exploring later in your life as a blogger, perhaps a year or two after having established your blog.
Categories:
Blogging
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