Money Honey: The List of Revenue Generation Ideas

Summary: The purpose of this article is to describe several ways that you can make money on the internet. The main idea is to provide you with options and insights. People with small and medium sized web sites, such as blogs, will benefit the most from this article.

Ideas and Inspiration 
This article will provide you with a checklist of ideas to review, and some reference points. I've included many examples to make the idea more tangible, and to give you some models to follow.
You should consider each idea as a starting point, and you should match your business objectives to the potential revenue generators. Note that the impact of each idea is not discussed. That is a matter of implementation and execution.
  
List of Revenue Generators

• Banner and Text Ads: Display ads for clients on your web page. Generate revenue by impressions (CPM) or a per click (CPC) basis. Note that text ads currently seem to be the most friendly way and accepted way to display ads, but banner ads are still viable for income. Examples of text ad tools include Google AdSense, BlogAds, and MarketBanker.
   
• RSS Ads and RSS Premium Feeds: The idea is to place advertisements into your web site RSS feed. There are many good places to learn about RSS (e.g., RSS weblog, RSS tutorial, RSS usability guidelines), and you should, before diving into RSS advertising. An example of a RSS advertising company is Pheedo. When you subscribe to Daring Fireball, you get access to subscriber-only RSS feeds.
   
• Classifieds: Provide readers and advertisers with the opportunity to list goods and services for sale via your web site. It might also make sense to set up a personals section of your web site. An example of a company that might work with you on setting up a personals section is Spring Street Networks.
   
• Sponsorships: The concept is to get individuals and organizations to sponsor content on your web site, or in your newsletter. They subsidize the content that you generate and write. This is a friendly way to get money from advertisers who do not wish to blatantly promote their goods and services.
   
• Donations: Ask readers for donations. The most popular mechanism for this is PayPal (instructions), but other mechanisms exist such as the Amazon Honor System and Bitpass.
   
• Pledge Drive: Set up a system where the web site periodically asks readers for money. While this is similar to the donation revenue tool, it might also include a request to have readers send in items to sell or auction off. And, it might include live chat sessions or instant messenger sessions to support requests. Think about how National Public Radio and local not-for-profit broadcasters survive (e.g., WESM 91.3).
   
• Sell Site-Related Merchandise: The idea is to sell products that reflect the web site brand. Many people would be happy to buy products that include logos, comments, and characters from the web site. A good example is the Homestar Runner store, particularly Strongbad merchandise. You can sell your own stuff (e.g., t-shirts, baseball caps, bags, posters, and more) through CafePress. It is painless.
   
• Affiliate Links: This is an arrangement whereby when a person clicks on a link on your site and makes a purchase from another site you earn money for enabling the transaction. For example, you can earn a commission based on the amount of the purchase or a payment for the traffic (pay-per-click). The most well known affiliate program is Amazon Associates. There is a lot of good information available on affiliate programs. For example, check out Allan Gardyne's AssociatePrograms web site.
   
• Job Postings: Solicit organizations to pay to post jobs on your web site and in your newsletter. This is particularly effective with highly focused web sites. One effective method is to create a jobs page. Find jobs for your readers (e.g., Monster and HotJobs) and post them on your own jobs page, then get organizations to pay for premium placement on the jobs page and in your newsletters.
   
• Premium Subscriptions: The idea is to get people to pay to view premium content on your web site, or gain access to special features. For example, with Salon Premium you get daily exclusives and they kill the advertisements. Slashdot does something similar, except you pay to kill ads a page at a time and you see content earlier than non-subscribers. The approach that Mobile Gadget News takes is that if you are an MGN subscriber, you get free stuff, you are automatically entered into all of their contests, you earn you earn discounts, and you have almost-instant access to the minds behind the site. The idea with all premium subscriptions is to give people extra goodies and content, and reduce pain associated with advertising.
   
• Pay for Access to Full Information Stream: This isn't quite the same as gaining access to premium content. Instead, the idea is to give subscribers access to all the news that is submitted to a web site that accepts news. One of the best examples is Total Fark. The Fark web site posts about 30-40 stories per day. By subscribing to Total Fark, a subscriber gains access to 1,000-2,000 submitted stories, unfiltered, in real-time. There is more, of course, but the idea of having people pay to see your full operations is the key here. It is more about offering people an inside look, and raw access rather than specially filtered information.
   
• Offline Events: Surprisingly few people with web sites capitalize on their potential ability to get people together offline. There are plenty of tools available now to help people set up offline meetings with people who have similar interests, such as MeetUp, Orkut, Ryze, Friendster, and LinkedIn. The idea is to get people together, perhaps like a party or speaking event, and charge them for access. This is a way to make money from the internet, not on the internet.
   
• Pay to Post Comments: The concept is to ask people to pay a fee if they want to post comments on your web site. Anyone would be able to view any content, but only subscribers or paying customers could post. Perhaps people would pay on a per-post basis using micropayments. One interesting advantage of this approach is that there is motivation to generate good comments, since it costs money to post. An example of a site doing something like this is the Something Awful forums. The sites currently charges a one-time fee of $9.95 for the right to post messages to the forum.
   
• Lottery and Contests: Provide people with an opportunity to win money, goods, or services in a 50/50 or lottery. Perhaps this is an added bonus for people who subscribe or pay for other things, such as job postings, classifieds, or subscriptions.
    
• Corporate Buyout: One method of making money is to have another organization buy your organization. If you are good enough, perhaps Gawker will buy your blog, for example. Another example is that eBay bought a 25% stake in Craigslist, and still another is that Google bought Blogger. The bottom line is that valuable web sites and valuable tools are noticed. Larger organizations will buy smaller ones, and that can be your plan to make money. Build value then sell.
   
• Offline Media Distribution: Generate unique, original, interesting, and valuable content online and then sell it offline. For example, articles and interviews can be packaged and sold as a book, CD, or DVD. Recently, this is exactly what Joel Spolsky did with his Joel on Software book.
   
• Premium Content Offerings: Put together a Greatest Hits or Best Of series of content and sell it as a special package. Perhaps re-edit the content, or add comments, or add some other value to the material online. A similar idea is to lock down old content and ask readers to pay to access the archives, perhaps with an improved search mechanism or personal touch (e.g., author adds special notes or answers specific questions about the material). The idea is to repurpose your old content.
    
• Help People Online / Consulting: Provide real-time consulting advice to people. Allow people to pay to access the brains behind the web site, newsletter, or forum. Google does something like this with Google Answers. If a web site owner is an expert, that owner can do ad hoc consultation. This can be done via email, forums, IM, blog comments, webcams, or WebEx (disclaimer: I own stock). The idea is to provide help to people via the web and ask them to pay for it.
   
• Provide Additional Technical Functionality: People can pay for web site tools and services that they cannot otherwise obtain. For example, Systran provides Altavista with language translation technology, which in turn yields Babel Fish. The idea is to either be the source of the technology and sell it as a service, or use technology to offer people a service they are willing to pay for.
   
• Auctions: Take spare inventory and sell it via auction, such as through eBay. Better yet, for those organizations without merchandise, auction consulting time, advertising space, and other non-tangibles and services.
   
• Newsletter Ads and Sponsorships: Assuming you have a newsletter, which you probably should, you can get advertisers to place advertisements and sponsor content. Targeted ads at the top of the newsletter are effective. Be sure the list is opt in only.
   
• Paid Alerts: Offer truly cutting edge information to people, send it to them faster than anyone else, and charge for it. The idea is to be a great news source and offer people a way to stay on top of things. This is done for financial information, e.g., stock alerts, but it can be done for other information as well such as competitive information. For example, take a look at the New York Times News Tracker.
   
• Grants and Endowments: It is possible to get grants for your web site, particularly for writing. This is a revenue generation idea that is well suited for bloggers and other content creators. Creativity is required, but the opportunities exist. Do some searching on Grants.gov to find potential matches, and see The Foundation Center to learn about individual grants. Be creative.
   
• Business and Service Listings: Set up a page for businesses to list their products and services. A good example of this is the UPA People Pages. The Usability Professionals' Association (UPA) allows any consultant or organization get listed on their People Pages by paying $100 for a 12-month listing. If your site is highly focused, and you do not directly compete with the people and organizations listed, this can be a good way to generate money and provide a useful service to readers.

Conclusion
There are obviously many ways to generate money on the internet. The list above does not cover every scenario but hopefully you have been inspired. A core idea is that you can generate money. It is being done all over. Indeed, many people are making a living through the web. You can do it too, if you apply the right tools and techniques.

Suggested Reading
The BloggerCon wiki for Making Blogs Make Money
So You Want to Join the World's Grubbiest Club: Internet Entrepreneurs (Philip Greenspun)
How to Make Money with Your Blog
Making Money From A Content Site
Weblogs and the Mass Amateurization of Publishing (Clay Shirky)
Making Sense of AdSense (Anil Dash)
Blogging for Dollars (Matt Haughey)
Selling on the Web the Easy Way
Cre8asite Forums - Business and Marketing
How to make money with an online news web site (David Strom)
Money for a Small Business