These all sound like perfectly reasonable ideas. Advertising is a tough way to earn money these days, but it's easy to set up if you're willing to use a standard platform like AdSense. I recommend against managing it yourself and trying to personally locate advertisers so as to enable complete privacy. That will not have positive ROI.
You sound confident that you can get 10-100k readers per article within a couple of weeks. That's a large enough audience that you actually could make money advertising, but it's also a very big ask. It might be worth re-examining that assumption -- do you have specific evidence for it, maybe in the form of prior efforts at building an audience? I'm certainly willing to read whatever your write -- you've been incredibly helpful here on RU and demonstrated mastery of your subject, so I suspect the rest of your work would also be high-quality. That said, RU is a small community. How are you going to acquire the rest of that audience -- do you already have a large following on Facebook, Quora, or another significant community? How will you get the word out? If you really can get 100k followers then I would recommend going the Patreon route. The average Patreon user gives about $3, so if you can get 1% of your readers to sign up then you'll be making significant bank and you'll have a relatively predictable income stream. I would definitely suggest having multiple reward tiers, since price anchoring is a thing, and don't be afraid to go big on the higher-level one. I also suggest having your highest tier being one where the reward is access to you personally; I have a $200 tier with the reward "4x / year I'll read and comment on up to 5,000 words of your writing, or we can talk for up to an hour on Skype/Hangouts/whatever." This was created at the explicit request of a reader. A friend of mine has a similar tier that he's also gotten a patron for, so mine isn't a one-off. Affiliate links are not evil as long as you explicitly label them as such. Something like "Hey, if you want to buy the product I just described, could you please support me by using my <affiliate link>? It doesn't cost you anything extra and it helps me a lot." Merch is also an option. It's easy to sell T-shirts, mugs, etc with your brand on them, and to do so in an on-demand way so that you're not holding inventory. Merch also segues well into dropshipping; if you write an article about (e.g.) great car tires, you could have a "Buy Now" link that will purchase them from an appropriate dealer and have them shipped to the person. Again, you aren't sinking money into inventory and the source is glad for the business. You can either arrange a commission with them (making it effectively an affiliate link) or you can charge a slight markup. If the source doesn't have an affiliate program and you want to dip your toe in the water without going to the effort of integrating a dropshipping service then you could keep it manual at the start: Have the reader pay you the price + a slight markup via PayPal and you purchase and ship the (e.g.) tires manually (presumably through the source's website). If you find a lot of demand, automate it. Good luck! On Sun, Jan 27, 2019 at 3:26 PM Neil Van Dyke <n...@neilvandyke.org> wrote: > > (This isn't Racket-specific, in my immediate case, but perhaps it could > also be relevant to Racket-related writing efforts.) > > I'm thinking again about how to monetize the following, near-term, > without just selling out my users to 'analytics' profiling... > > A couple/few years ago, I wrote a bunch of articles&outlines¬es on a > topic I learned pretty well, which is of broad interest, and (I later > learned) is of especial interest to many wealthy dotcom people. I also > wrote some blog site generator software in Racket, using > `html-template`. I got distracted by consulting/job-hunting, a huge > real startup idea, and paying rent, and never launched this side thing. > > Here's an incomplete idea of possible steps or elements (and please > pardon me for not saying what the topic is): > > * In some medium, release a few articles at once, then start > drip-feeding further articles from the pipeline. > > * The medium might be a Web site, or a phone/tablet app (or both, with > HTML5 Offline, or an app wrapper and dealing with the Apple and Android > stores), or some site like Medium.com (though I hear Medium.com might > already be falling out of favor with content creators). > > * Patreon/PayPal/Bitcoin for donations is very attractive. I'd prefer > to keep all the writing content freely-available, though, and not bother > with things like early viewing, even though Patreon seems to like > premium bonuses. > > * Many of the articles naturally have very honest tie-ins with products > sold on Amazon and other places. Maybe Amazon Affiliate kickbacks can > still be lucrative? > > * A few of the articles have honest one-time tie-ins with other, > non-Amazon products/services for which I've found affiliate programs. > (Simple made-up example: if your topic wasn't about automotive > maintenance, but a single one of your articles was, and it turns out > that an oil change chain company you'd recommend anyway happened to > offer a referral fee for signups to their subscription service, you > might decide to go with the appearance of possible conflict of > interest. Either in the editorial text, or in a site-specific and > article-specific ad.) > > * Maybe also monetize the initial articles with ads, or some > pageviews-based fee from something like Medium.com. (I coded a text ad > feature, which floats the ads adaptively for both desktop and > smartphone, so I could even sell a small number of privacy-respecting > ads directly, without violating privacy with pageview-profiling web > bugs. Say, if a manufacturer of a product relevant to this topic wanted > a plug on each page, and I could charge by clickthrough.) > > * Allowing commenting on the articles on this topic seems likely to > permit a sticky discussion community of interest (there are already some > such forums, but their cultural spins would alienate many). But then I > have to provide both the software (or outsource it to an embedded dotcom > that will spy on all my users), and some adult supervision throughout > each day. > > * Try to build up (and own) a list of email addresses of people who like > the articles, or at least get them to install an app, so we can reach > them later, with follow-on products. > > * Maybe produce a few high-value supplementary YouTube videos, for > possible monetization there, and also to cross-promote to my main medium. > > * At some point, I'm going to exhaust most of the genuine "background" > material in articles, and, rather than just keep milking that with > lower-quality articles that say less, I'm thinking re-edit and fill out > the earlier articles as book chapters, and publish a book. This could > be marketed through my current site/app, and with the email list I > collected, and other book-promotion channels. > > * After that, I'm thinking the service is maybe more of a community of > interest, with more news-like posts, and discussion forums. One > differentiator might be that my thing would have a reputation for > respecting privacy (at least one of the articles will talk about the > relevance of that). > > The main barrier to launching is that money is tight, and I can't afford > to be working on it without almost immediate revenue. I don't want to > start launch, and not get enough money to make me think this is going to > work out near-term, and have to abandon it before I finish building up > my reader base. (Most likely scenario of a fizzled launch: articles get > stolen, which happens a lot in a closely-related topic for a different > audience, particular others move in on my novel spin, and I've lost my > chance. I must have a hundred startup ideas, and they're almost all > disposable, but, since I've spent years on unusual background for this > particular one, it doesn't seem disposable like the others.) > > Let's say that I could have on the order of 10K or 100K readers per > article, within a couple weeks. How could I almost immediately turn > that into significant revenue, in a non-evil way? > > -- > racket-money is private. Please don't quote/forward/etc. elsewhere. > http://www.neilvandyke.org/racket-money/ > --- > You received this message because you are subscribed to the Google Groups > "racket-money" group. > To unsubscribe from this group and stop receiving emails from it, send an > email to racket-money+unsubscr...@googlegroups.com. > To post to this group, send email to racket-mo...@googlegroups.com. > For more options, visit https://groups.google.com/d/optout. -- You received this message because you are subscribed to the Google Groups "Racket Users" group. 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