There’s so much choice when it comes to monetizing a blog. Some bloggers look at actually never putting advertising on their sites, and then relying on the revenue that their eBooks or downloads generate.
This is not a terrible business plan, it is just a little linear, and cannot always work for everyone. If you are thinking you have maybe missed a good opportunity for monetizing some recent traffic you had, then that is probably true.
There are many ways to make money with your site – but here’s a couple of things you probably never considered:
A Tip Jar
Sometimes, when you are providing a free service to people, and relying maybe just on Adsense or other contextual ads, you are missing out on the people that have truly found your content helpful and would like to return the favor by tipping you a few bucks, or “buying you a coffee” as most sites seem to promote.
You can do this quite easily by having a Donate button on your site by Paypal, or you can use a service like ScratchBack, which is an active widget on your site that accepts tips for you. Your visitors can tip you, and in return they get to post a text link to their site on your website.
RSS Ads
RSS is a great way for your readers to keep up with your blog’s updates, and RSS is widely used by millions of blog readers every day. If you are wanting to keep the ad space on your site down, and only want to have peripheral ads showing to your visitors, then RSS ads may be a solution. Pheedo operate a great platform for having ads in your feeds, and they allow you to customize most of the settings with ease. You can see from their site just how simple they like to keep things.