Shoemoney shows how to make money

If you don't read Jeremy Schoemaker's blog Skills to pay the bills: Shoemoney, you're missing out on some great advice. Jeremy just posted his advice on five ways to generate revenue for your website. Contextual advertising — which includes AdSense — is just one of his money streams. The others include:

• Subscriptions — asking people to pay a fixed fee for a certain number of months and giving them access to special/private features of the site
• Donations — actually go and ask people to donate money to pay for the upkeep of the site
• Selling goods — become a retailer and find something that you can sell for a good markup
• Affiliate programs — let someone else pay you a commission of their sales for driving traffic to them

As you can see, Jeremy is more than about AdSense, and for him it's working great. I'd like to point out a few things, though:

• Subscriptions work best if there's something you can offer — In Jeremy's case, the subscriptions are for special access to his forums, although as he points out he doesn't specify exactly what they get.
• Selling stuff is work — Going from displaying ads on your site/blog to actually selling tangible goods is a big step. If you do the selling yourself, you have to deal with shipping, returns, sales taxes, etc. You can definitely do it, but you're starting a whole new ball game. (You'd probably want to investigate some good books on selling online, which includes selling things on eBay — the same issues apply).
• You must do some programming — To go beyond contextual advertising you really need to start getting into web server programming, creating dynamic pages, installing forum software, etc. Most of the stuff you need is out there either for free or for a fee, but you'll end up wanting to tweak things or add in new features, etc., and at some point you'll probably find you need to learn a bit more about how it all works and how everything gets pieced together. This is a big step for a lot of people.
• Traffic is still key — Somehow, people have to visit your site. Obviously, forums are one way to do it, providing you have great content available from the forum community. Search engine optimization is still important.

AdSense publishers looking to diversify their income might want to consider asking for donations and joining affiliate programs before trying the other two. Or look at other advertising programs, too. When it comes right down to it, Jeremy's basic advice is simple: diversify!

Eric Giguere is the author of Make Easy Money with Google, a real (printed!) introductory AdSense book for non-technical people, available at all fine bookstores. Be sure to download the free sample chapter for more information about the book. Or add it directly to your Amazon shopping cart!

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