Paypal Donations as A Blog Monetization Method

One of the blog monetization methods which works very well in conjunction with other strategies is the donation model.  Asking people for donations to keep your site running can be somewhat embarrassing, this is why you need to “earn the donations” and provide great value to the community who use your blog.  People feel good about giving money to support sites which are useful to them, sites which provide tons of content for free or provide useful tools which might benefit them.

The Donation Model Explained:

In order for this blog monetization model to work you need to offer outstanding content, something that people will truly admire and consider worth paying for.  This model is not limited to written content alone, you could provide downloadable products that would save people time one way or the other, for instance there is a lot of people who love Japanese animations (and they are not kids!) - Japanese animation fans are able to “sub” some of their favorite series to English, they provide this subbed material for people to download from their site for free.

There are some rules and limitations to this model though, you need to make sure that you are sub-titling content which has not been licensed.  Another example following the same Japanese animation niche would be to create attractive wallpapers with their favorite action figures and give them away for free.  People who download all of this legal content will be enticed to donate to the site in order to keep it running and if you set a public goal you will be very likely to reach it, as long as you provide something people can benefit from.

The next idea revolves around Wordpress themes, you can basically provide a small portfolio of free themes to your visitors along with tutorials and extra materials to make it easy for them to install these themes on their blogs and understand how they ultimately work, people who download unique themes will definitively agree to donate some money to a site which is useful to them.  Following this line of thought, free ebooks can be offered to your visitors as well.

You might think that this blog monetization model is all about giving away free content but it isn’t, you should incorporate this method if your site provides some sort of strong benefit to your audience, however you can also use product reviews and affiliate programs to create extra streams of income which would be the optimal mixture of blog monetization techniques, don’t over-do it though, you need to complement the donation model with some other revenue model without using 3 or more methods because people will feel that the site is more about making you money than providing useful content to the community.  Test this strategy and you will see that the content provided will attract many one-way incoming links which will in term earn you some valuable page rank you can monetize through link or ad space sales.

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