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Ask HN: Monetise a blog in 2016

17 points by 10dpd ↗ HN
I have a minecraft Wordpress site that I bought on flippa a year ago that has 70k sessions a month and earns about $80 a month from Adsense.

How can I increase the revenue on this site in 2016?

8 comments

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loumf
I would normally say that niche blogs are better off having members-only features, but worried that your sessions might be kids.

If that's so, making sure you are very mobile-friendly and looking at app-install ad networks might be better than adsense.

bazillion
Check out my plugin http://pleenq.com/ -- for a minecraft blog, it might be neat to link images on your blog to where people can buy things like thoe J!NX replicas, t-shirts, etc.

Here's an example of the effect it creates: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=8GfKBvs53Ss

When users click through and buy something, you'd get a percentage of the sale. It could also be a lot more beneficial to users than just showing banner ads.

If you combine it with actually providing a benefit (i.e. a diamond block linking to the wiki page on diamond blocks), your users might very much appreciate the functionality.

herbst
It is still simply not working for me on chrome.
iSloth
If it was mine, I'd be offering Minecraft hosting and using that blog base as lead generation...
thenomad
Or find a Minecraft host that has an affiliate program. Considerably less work than hosting yourself.
iSloth
True, but generally affiliate programs are a one off commission at point of sale, where as the hosting is a reoccurring revenue that builds a business. Depends on what kind of time/effort your willing to put in, and if your trying to build a business or just some low effort income.
thenomad
Your business in this case is the website. I've personally built affiliate-based infosites that yielded significant income off CPS (what you're calling a one-off commission here) for 3+ years, and that's nothing compared to the really successful examples of the genre - www.smartpassiveincome.com, for example, uses exactly this model and has generated $40k+ per month for a good half-decade or so.

It's a fairly standard model for monetising a website - essentially the next stage up from monetising via an RTB platform like Adwords, in that you put a bit more work in choosing and testing appropriate offers, but (should) end up with higher CPMs as a result.

Also, revshare is entirely possible with a lot of affiliate deals, and even if it's not offered "out of the box", it's possible to negotiate it if you want to. There are pros and cons to that approach - it's definitely not a straightforward "revshare is better" equation.

If the OP has expertise with system administration and Minecraft hosting, plus the copywriting, customer support and sales ability, starting a second business in Minecraft hosting to monetise the site is also a valid potential option, but it'll eat a lot more time that OP may not have, and has its own failure modes that just running a leadgen business doesn't.

jordansmith
Reach out to minecraft servers to buy advertising.

BuySellAds.com

Minecraft hosting affiliate program. Bonus if they have a recurring cost per sale model