How to monetize online news site

Hello BHW,

I opened a news site about a month ago for where I live. It's done about 15,000 unique visitors the past 30 days; not all that impressive, but I expect it to scale up over time as I haven't spent a penny in marketing yet but I will starting in April.

Traffic is from Google/FaceBook/Sites such as reddit.

What I want advise is is on revenue streams. Affiliate marketing I may attempt from April onwards, I haven't touched Google Adsense yet as I understand for 15k/month I probably won't get much. I'd like advise on something worthwhile that I could implement into my website today.

Thank you.

Don't even bother Google Ads. They pay shit just because they can. Apply for Ezoic instead. Since they have their Access Now, they accept even from 0 pageviews.

You could try to sell banner ads for local businesses, if your site is dealing with local news.

Good to see you spent 0 on marketing.
Try applying to ezoic and adsense and see which pays more

Sell posts

Good luck with your affiliate ads. My science site is only getting less than 100 views/day.

15000 people in a month is great for a new site. If it's a niche news site I would start collecting emails to send them offers later, but for right now there isn't much you can do.

Filipinocoder said:

Sell posts

Click to expand...

I actually tried but I can't seem to get any traffic on Fiverr at all.

You said that you started a news site for "where I live."

How big is that coverage area?

Are you talking about news for an entire city or an entire region?

The smaller the coverage area, the higher the chance that you can get local sponsors for your news site.

As long as your 15,000 unique visitors are real, flesh-and-blood human beings, I don't see any problems with you getting specialized deals with local sponsors.

The best type of deal has some sort of "verification system."

What I mean by that is the sponsor will know quickly if their ad on your site is delivering real foot traffic to their brick-and-mortar business.

How would they know?

Well, they might advertise a special coupon code on your website.

When people from your area visit your business, they can use that coupon code to get a discount.

That discount code acts as a tracking system because people wouldn't know about the code unless they went to your site.

Another way you can make money off your site involves local press releases.

Many businesses open on and close on the local business all the time.

These new businesses could use all the publicity that they could get, and they can place a fairly inexpensive press release on your site.

At the end of the day, there are many different ways to slice and dice the advertising opportunities your website offers.

Again, this all assumes that the 15,000 unique visitors you get in the space of a month are all real people.

JohnDoe_ said:

Hello BHW,

I opened a news site about a month ago for where I live. It's done about 15,000 unique visitors the past 30 days; not all that impressive, but I expect it to scale up over time as I haven't spent a penny in marketing yet but I will starting in April.

Traffic is from Google/FaceBook/Sites such as reddit.

What I want advise is is on revenue streams. Affiliate marketing I may attempt from April onwards, I haven't touched Google Adsense yet as I understand for 15k/month I probably won't get much. I'd like advise on something worthwhile that I could implement into my website today.

Thank you.

Click to expand...

I would say that you could try to sell ads spaces to some other companies that would be willing to advertise on your site or to join some affiliate network and try to find advertisers that way, as a new site is often a suitable place for placing a different kind of offers and it doesn't need to be so niche-oriented. Also, you could maybe ask people to write some guest articles on the site or some specific news and pay you for that opportunity. Or, on the other hand, you could also try selling some texts that you wrote to some third-party services. I would suggest maybe that you wait to grow a traffic a little bit more before you jump into this, as paid ads will help you reach a wider audience and your site will become more appealing, so aim to test these things out in April when you start with your promotions.

Great job on building that up organically. Your best bet is to sell advertising to local businesses in that area. Gather all of your metrics/data so you can prove exactly how much organic traffic the website is receiving and start reaching out to business that have money.