So everyone has a website or a blog, or both. Many dream of retiring to a deserted island and running their networks of websites, getting rich and having this amazing work life balance. Well guess what? It ain’t going to happen, easily anyway. Of those with sites, many are limited by their developers to various CMS’s and expensive changes. For those who control and manage their own hosting, their main tool and marketing method (and Im talking small business here) is content and ofcourse SEO. You can get lots of content written around the world for $10 a 500 word article or less.

So setting up a site and getting content and even some basic SEO in place is simple, cheap and can be done by yourself with some experimenting and time. So anybody can publish and many are indeed. Whose making the money so far. The hosting providers and those selling ad ons for WordPress, Joomla, Drupal etc.

So now all are publishing, what are the monetisation options?

  • Ad sense, selling contextual ads from say Google
  • Selling a virtual product, like an E Book
  • Selling other ads or listings, if you can get them
  • Being an affiliate
  • Selling some sort of offline or related product or service

While all of these are valid, most of them require significant pageviews to make them viable. Click throughs can be as low as 0.25% on a banner or ad, affiliates also require conversion, so getting enough traffic takes lots of something.

To be continued…