This post is by Michael Pollock, the original owner of Small Business Branding. Yaro Starak now owns and produces the latest content for this blog.
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My new friend, Yaro Starak (Entrepreneur’s Journey), has an interesting post titled: Making money from a website – is advertising the only solution? You should read the entire post because it’s a great summary of many online revenue options. In particular, this paragraph is something to build into any strategy you might create:
"The smart entrepreneurs
don’t plan to make money from just one channel of income, they employ
many. You should provide advertisers with comprehensive campaign
options including different banner positions and text links. Offer a newsletter and eCourse,
sell your own products and services, sell other people’s products and
services and join affiliate programs. Mix in a subscription based
service and/or premium content and you have a collection of 4-5 sources
of income from your audience."
From a branding perspective, I’d suggest caution, however, when it comes to offering a lot of affiliate programs, unless of course this is your main revenue model. Some people make thousands of dollars a month by just marketing affiliate programs.
If that’s not your core brand though, too many affilaite programs and links can dilute whatever your core brand is. Likewise with advertising. It can be done subtly without getting in the way of what you’re really selling/branding.