There are something like five things you can sell via or over the Web:
i) sell products which you buy or make yourself (ecommerce)
ii) sell services which you generate (x-as-a-Service)
iii) resell other people's products or services on commission (affiliate marketing)
iv) sell your audience's attention (advertising)
v) sell your audience's behaviour (usually to advertisers or publishers so they can sell more advertising – behavioural targeting)
That's what you've got. Only two of these directly require you to take payment, but they're the easy ones to understand...
Collect your audiences personal details and use them for nefarious ends while twirling your mustache and hiding out in a secret lair in a volcano. (Kinda like how Zuckerberg does it)
In the case of a personal websites, that something else might your career, raising your profile to potential employers/contracting clients.
It's not strictly making money itself, but in the long run, it might have a very decent ROI.
But you'll need quite a lot of traffic in a reasonably high-purchasing-intent niche.
I started out with Adsense and it scales pretty well. I now have two direct advertisers paying me monthly.
So basically, it's ad-driven. And that model can definitely work.
Just really curious to hear your story.
Like I said below, I only got direct advertisers in July, so it took awhile to grow. I was making about $1200 / month from Adsense in May/June, and some of the space has been sold to direct advertisers and I still make about $900 / month just from adsense, plus more from the advertisers.
I'm still looking for more, but the project has taken a backseat to my new project: Djangy.com
I've learned that these things unfortunately take time. Trust needs to be built, traffic needs to happen, and companies are sometimes understandably reluctant to shell out a bunch of money for some ad on a website they don't really know anything about.
But if you can provide actual traffic for them, they'll pay for it.
Don't underestimate that, if you're willing to put the effort in and do ad sales.
Quick pitch - I work at isocket, a company that makes it easier to manage your direct sales. We take care of billing/invoices, scheduling campaigns and stats. You can focus on the human part - selling - which we can help advise you on.
I want to see what people say before I provide my example...
Interesting stuff!
Before affiliating with eBay and Amazon, I would do a fund drive every couple of years. You know, "Hey, we've got 80,000 monthly unique viewers, if every one of you pitched in a quarter, I'll never bug you about cash again." Asking for donations once every two years is much more effective than leaving up a 'donate' paypal button, in my experience.
eBay and Amazon have easy to use APIs that can generate affiliate links which can bring income. You can either build out a merch page a la http://theninhotline.net/features/merch/ or if you're writing about stuff that might have related reading (or in my case, music) link to stuff on Amazon within your content every now and then.
Having said that, don't make a post just so you can link to Amazon. Don't let your affiliation drive your content. But if you think linking to a book might genuinely be interesting to your audience, do it, and use an affiliate link.
I look at ads as a last resort, but that's because I'm odd. I've only rarely put ads on my site, and only on a direct-sale kind of thing. MTV contacted me asking me if I could link to something of theirs, I wrote back and asked for what I thought was a reasonable price (based off what I made in Amazon and eBay) and they agreed to pay for the link, which I had creative control over, and which featured in my sidebar for a month.
Looking at quite a few sites, I see results that are counterintuitive: for instance, you can make more money running ads on a Chevy forum than you can on a Cadillac forum.
You might think that Caddy owners have more money than Chevy owners, however, it turns out that Chevy owners like to trick out their cars with aftermarket parts and Caddy owners (even poor owners of 20-year old Cadillacs) like to have OEM everything... Most of the ad spend is on aftermarket parts... GM isn't going to spend money on caddy forums because the people on Caddy forums know more about GM's products and GM's product plans than the people who make the ads.
I think it's also about supply and demand. Even though people spend a lot on cars, car products and car services, my experience is that there are a lot of topics that pay better than cars. The trouble is that there are too many car sites out there already, so the spend gets diluted Every gearhead and his brother has a web site about cars.
You've got to watch out for "otaku topics" like Anime. Unfortunately, anime fans are weirdos (the kind of ~guys~ who dress up like a purple-haired princess for Halloween) who don't spend a lot of money on stuff, and particularly don't spend a lot on anime because they download it all off bittorrent long before commercial dubbers start negotiating for the rights. 2/3 of the people who like anime already have a website or a livejournal or deviantart page about it, so talk about dilution... Christ, you can't pay for the storage and bandwidth costs for your images...
- Bill on a per-use basis
- Hours of usage are prepaid like calling cards
- Ads
- Selling data collected to others (and it doesn't even have to be personally identifying customer info. I worked for a company that did speed tests and at one point a company in another country that knew of our speed tests wanted to buy our speed test result data. We never sold it, but sometimes offers come to you!)
- Donations (via paypal, etc.)
Can it generate enough money from Ads? Not as well as it used to be able to, but yes it is possible. Is it likely without much effort? Depends on amount and kind of site traffic and content of the Ads.
You need to have confidence in what product or service you are selling, though, and have a potential/real customer feedback loop setup from the beginning. You shouldn't rely on Ads alone. If no one is coming to your site, they won't click on the Ads.
If it's content-driven, you can do premium content stuff (like eBooks, downloadables, etc.)
And when you say "enough money," how much are we talking about? It's all relative: the more traffic you get, the more money you get. I would focus on growing your community and audience before even thinking about monetization. Have that behind your head, of course, but you're not going to make money if you don't have traffic or a community. You're not going to make anything significant if your product sucks. Focus on the product first, the money will come eventually. It's an investment of time and a bit of money (web hosting on a VPS is like $20 a month and you just scale when you need to).
Instead, you should talk with your customers (or potential customers) to see what their needs and pains are and base your business model off of that research.
A better strategy (and one that I'm using on NotaryCRM.com) is to sell the audience something else that's useful. In my case, notary publics get a free listing in my directory but I try to sell them on a CRM system to make their lives easier.
