Forum How Do You Moneytize Your Site
 

I'd love to hear back from other site owners, how you generate an income from your site. I started a motorsport history website in early 2011 for fun, to write a few historic articles and share some old photos. The site has grown steadily just through word of mouth and people stumbling upon it through Google searches, and it now has 660 members, gets 6,000 unique visitors each month, and just over 160,000 page views per month.

Its growing steadily, and as a result the time I'm investing in it is also increasing. I recently calculated I was spending approx 25 hours a week on it. But, the site generates NO income. It makes no money whatsoever, other than a very small amount once a year when I create some related clothing to sell. Whats more, the time I'm currently spending on it isn't enough, I need to invest more hours into it to make it better, but I have a business to run, and my site is distracting me from my business.

I'm really passionate about the site and its content, and if I could, I would run it full-time, but I'd want it to generate enough income for me to be able to do that. I don't just want it to pay its own running costs, it actually needs to generate an income.

I'm at a point now where I need to start getting serious about this. I have different ideas on what some options are, but don't really know what will work and what will provide the best results. I did consider charging an annual subscription, but feared it may actually kill the site. If 3,000 people paid a subscription of $45 per year, that would be fantastic, but I really have no idea how many would actually pay, and to me this is high risk.

I also recently contacted a company called BuySellAdds, who specialise in generating pay adds for websites. They want me to spend more time adding more articles, to further boost visitor numbers. So this is something I'm working on. Another option is Google Adsense. But this is not something I have much knowledge of. Do others here use it, and how effective is it? Do the ads Google bring to the site relate to the site, or are they just random, eg, Viagra, McDonalds etc?

Anyway, would love to hear back from other owners as to how their sites generate an income.