It seems like you are very well against banner placement and ads. I have seen people on adense and yahoo make considerable money while keeping the ads discrete.

Another thing to consider is that you have a great domain name and an avid readership. You could market your domain through apparel, such as using cafepress. You could sell subdomains, technews.maxpower.com. Or you could sell email accounts. Some of the ideas are probably not worthwhile, but it might generate a line of thinking other than paid advertisement.

Selling one paid ad would work as well.. I have a website release coming up that I think would do well if there was an ad on your site..

I am using adsense currently, and have been playing with different positions, and styles for awhile now, and I can’t seem to get any substantial clicks no matter what is done. I have been adding external tutorials so people would at least be able to find something of interest on the site, but I will focus more on adding original content to see if that helps at all.

I just want to have a site where people can find good tutorials, and not be required to sort through many that are useless to them. I am still working on a solution for this, but I think many of the points you have made here will help with this as well.

Thanks,

Drixer

I see myself switching completely to Text-link ads in the future (if I could fill up the other text-link ads positions).

1. Well, actually it kinda is these days. Dreamweaver and an internet connection seem to suffice for slightly web-savy people. And blogs, depending on if you’re running it yourself or not can be even easier. I tend to think the net has become oversaturated with crap because of the “napsterization” of the web. Make things easy enough and suddenly everyone has access to things they didn’t even know about before… in the end it ruins it for everyone else.

As far as building a reputation and doing work for people in the area, building contacts, etc, that’s what I’ve done most of my life (not always as a web monkey mind you, lol) even when I did have other steady jobs. Eventually you can’t go anywhere without people asking you computer questions and your friends only calling when they need computer help. It comes and goes in cycles for me since I always want to help people but I tend to do too much for too little.

Also, I think you have the web-site construction being hard and the content being easy mixed up. Most of us that do this kinda thing regularly have to resort to special tricks to get any kind of feedack and content. The original base content part is like pulling teeth and then, even though told in the first place, they may not even be able to find the time to add content. I’ve ended up ghostwriting on occasion. Seems silly, but the average person that really really wants to be online just can’t cut it or make the time to keep things up to date.

2. Sponsorship seems like a reasonable idea especially if you believe in the “product” being featured. I remember hearing that Google was going to start penalizing for those sorts of sponsored text links but I don’t remember the specifics and I can’t imagine how they’d do so. Perhaps it’s only when you go through a middleman and affiliate code shows up in the links? Either way, a no-follow would fix that if they’re looking for hits and not PR.

3. I think you know how I feel about contextual (ha!) advertisements. lol. I totally agree about not plastering ads all over. Some sites that used to be decent reputable sites for reviews/information are now downright embarassing… have you looked at Tom’s Hardware lately. You can’t tell what’s advertisement and what’s menu and that’s just the tip of the iceberg… I don’t think there’s any space left on the pages for any more ads. I run one browser with adblock etc and another without just to monitor the trends in advertising and how bad it’s gotten.

4. Oi, unless you work full time on worthwhile free projects and do support for them 24/7 please don’t ask for donations. Everyone has donation buttons on their sites these days and while I’ve donated in the past to people that I thought really really deserved it, I’ve developed a strict policy against it. See my post on how to donate. I just had this conversation with Christine of UTW. I can’t give her money, but just the same I’d like to do something for her to show appreciation I feel she deserves and doesn’t always get. There are means besides money gathered from a paypal donation button to get something back for your efforts. Plus it’s more meaningful when it’s personal.

Then again, I’ve gotten to the point where I go to a movie for which I paid an outrageous amount and then they ask me if I’d like to donate to X Fund for kids with Y Terminal Illness… and my response is simply, “no, I’ve got enough of my own medical bills to pay. Would you like to donate to my fund?” They usually laugh but never donate to my fund. The sad part is I’m serious about the first part of it.

I believe anything worth-while and worth doing will pay off one way or another in the long run. I also believe mixing money with hobbies is a dangerous game.

So, sorry to rain on your parade, but I’m once again mr. negativity meets mr. bullheaded man of principal, haha.

Where you been? Welcome back! No more writing about monetization, it’s monotonous, lol.

Drop me a line man!

Ja