Can you monetize a free site?

[Steve32]

I'd like to hear your thoughts, I have Tumblr, Wordpress or Blogger accounts that can run free sites on them. I don't mention to things like affiliate marketing where you can put links, get clicks and get paid, I mean like ad revenues stuff like that. Would it be possible or should one really have to invest on hosting and money on your own sites?

 

[ericplotz1]

You can make money from free sites just like paid sites. Whatever the free site will allow.

Example, since you said Tumblr. YOu can set up a website on Tumblr and run Google Ads to it.

A smart thing (wish I would've jumped on it) would have been when Uber came out 2 years ago. Well 1 year ago they were offering like $500 to invite people to join. So basically $500 affiliate commission if you invited a driver to Uber.

What I could've, would've, should've did, was sign up to drive for Uber for a month and created little video tutorials and post them to my Tumblr blog. Transcribed also.

Then I would've have advertised the incentive of the sign up bonus.

I know someone that did this and made bank!

Some Web properties allow you to do things that others dont. You just have to understand your limitations and contain your tactics within that.

 

[Miguelito203]

You can run like adsense on sites like Blogger and stuff - did it back in the day. The reason people don't typically do that is because the actual owners of the free sites can take your site down at any time (or change the rules on you). This kind of stuff has happened in the past with sites like Squidoo and even Blogger. You don't even have to post anything spammy or racist or anything like that for them to decide to take it down. I've seen it happen to totally legit marketers (lost a lot of money) -- even happened to me back in the day. That's why people just got in the habit of getting their own domain names and hosting for everything. On the plus side, it's cheap.

Joey

 

[Muzzamil]

I'd like to hear your thoughts, I have Tumblr, Wordpress or Blogger accounts that can run free sites on them. I don't mention to things like affiliate marketing where you can put links, get clicks and get paid, I mean like ad revenues stuff like that. Would it be possible or should one really have to invest on hosting and money on your own sites?

Well you can make a free wordpress website and start blogging. Once you are getting a larger amount of traffic, you can get google ads and they will pay you up to $13 per click because they pay more to websites that are getting a lot of visitors. This way you can make up to $2000 per day because there will be a lot of people clicking on google ads on your website. Good Luck!

 

[Cameron Hill]

Hey Steve, good question. Yes you can definitely monetize free sites. By your Wordpress account I'm thinking you're meaning Wordpress.com, not Wordpress.org?

My problem with your question is, why do you not want to use affiliate marketing? And I wouldn't put links directly to affiliate products, especially from these sites. What I would do is use these sites to build a following, send people to a "squeeze page" (aka opt-in page), where you offer a free gift, eg ebook, video course, audiobook etc. You ask for their email address to send it to them, and then you capture the email in your list, send your list automatic emails as well as broadcasts, and make more money like this.

The benefits of this compared to what you're describing is that your email list is YOURS. Nobody else's. Nobody can take that away from you. You can save it, and even if the autoresponder company you were using crashed, you could still use those emails. The problem with other websites is that they can ban you at a moment's notice, permanently, without warning. You lose all your followers, and you have to start from square one. Also, people who do visit those sites will possibly never see you again. However you can continually offer affiliate products to people on your email list over and over. And you can sell it, and build a relationship with them, which really helps with conversion rates and CTRs (click through rates).

If you want some more detail on how this email marketing works (affiliate and selling your own products, ie vendor), I can paste a post I've just put elsewhere laying it all out step by step.

If you still want to go ahead with ads on these free sites instead, I can't really help you there unfortunately as I don't have experience with that (only Youtube ads, and the general rule of thumb for that is 1million views = £1000).

All the best!

Cam

 

[EpicGlobalWeb]

Unless you're a business owner who is used to paying for everything, I think people expect most of the internet to be free. Last time I checked, over 2/3rds of the internet was funded by advertising, which means people and their information are being sold in order to compensate for the lack of product or service sales in relation to total revenue.

Short answer - yes, through advertising. Advertising dollars run the internet.

 

[matteomatt]

Like some above me said, it is very easy to monetize a free site. It ends up being more related to how much traffic you send, but also there are creative ways to make money off a site for free. The majority of the internet is free, except in some niches.

 

[Dazin]

In my opinion, buy the hosting and domain to create own website and develop it. That's how you want to use this site for making money long term and sustainable.
Creating one free site Tumblr, Wordpress or Blogger is not guaranteed, because it is not owned or managed by you.

 

[eioapqoeke]

Capture leads in the market your blogs are about and sell them on places where business owners hangs around. First collect a bunch of leads and then sell to first few clients with trial offers and see if they are able to convert your leads in customers and then price each lead accordingly.