Monetize Your Fansites and Make Money

Monetize Your Fansites and Make Money

Do you have a fansites about something or are thinking about creating one? Whether or not to monetize it may be one of your biggiest questions. You should always consider make money out of your content either to have extra gaming fund, upgrade your servers, or even pay for the monthly hosting fees and domain costs. If you do pay for all of these costs just to have your fansite, you may eventually get tired of having to pay for all these yourselves. Below I will discuss some of the tips that you should remember while thinking about monetizing.

1. Ads will NOT turn away your visitors

It does not really matter what you believe, having AD’s on your site usually do not lower your traffic. It could only turn away your traffic if you remove everything and replaced them with AD’s, so do not do it. By having simple banners and buttons on your fansite, you really do not distract your visitors and they will still always come to your site for content if they are good. Having AD’s or not makes no difference.

2. Ads income Alone May Not Cover All Your Cost

When you are first starting, you should realize that your initial cost will always outrun your AD income. There could be a couple of reasons for it, the first is that if you are having a video game fansite, the AD payout on those is usually low due to a low paying keyword. The second reason could be that your traffic is either low or not unique. The final reasons could be that your site has a low payout due to its young age. You should never monetize a site just because you think you can make a living out of it. Usually, your cost outweighs your monetizing income.

3. Think About Donations

Consider requesting for donations from the visitors who would benefit from your fansite. Get a simple PayPal account and get started asking for funds, every little bit helps to pay for the initial expenses. The more donations that you can get, the less money that you may have to pay from your own pocket.

4. Research and experiment with different venues

Research and experiment with different ways with different ad serving companies, ad positioning, or even affiliate marketing. Different methods may work out for your fansite depending on what kind of site it is.

5. Lots of Traffic is Needed to Make Good Money

You do need to maintain a lot of traffic in order to make good money. Consider various promotion methods to let people know that your site exists. Although more traffic does increase the amount of your cost, however by having more traffic, you have better odds of making money from your fansite.

6. Content is King

Without the informational and interesting content, you will not be able to have repeatable visitors who are interested in your site. Make sure that you stay up to date with the topic that you are covering. Constantly write new and make new related content so that more people will come to your fansites regularly.

7. Community is Queen

Maintain a healthy community relationship with the “fans” of your fansites is important. When you have a fan site, you do have a small community of followers who visit your sites often to get information. Listen to your community and followers to maintain a healthy relationship is the sure way to get the repeated visitors. You also get the benefit of word-of-mouth advertising from the happy people who get what they need from your site.

8. You need to be passionate about your site

If you do want to monetize your fan site, after all you should still need to be very passionate about what you are doing. If you are not interested in the fan topic that you are covering, the chances are that you will lose money from your initial cost without making it back later. You will most likely stop your fansites and give up. Having a successful and money making fansites takes a lot of hard work and time.

Hope these tips will help you achieve the best fansites that you can make, while making some side income that will make you happy.