Ask IH: How to monetize my website?
Over the past year I've built a website for people who want to find their next DevOps conference to go to. It's ranking in the top 3 for the relevant search terms and it's getting about 3k - 4k page views a month.
Recently, I also started building a mailing list which now has about 300 subscribers.
Any ideas how I could monetize this website? One of the ideas is to offer "sponsored" slots for conference organizers to highlight their conference on the list.
One idea: DevOps Job Board
NomadList did this for digital nomads quite successfully, maybe you could do the same for DevOps? https://remoteok.io/open
Great idea
Usually DevOps conferences are quite expensive to attend to.
You should probably have a look if there's any affiliate program with the ticket reseller.
Yes, you are right. DevOps conferences can easily go over 2000 USD per ticket. Affiliate programs might be an option but I'm not sure if there is enough traffic to generate any meaningful income with affiliate links.
Instead of giving suggestions out of the blue, could you answer why 3k-4k people visit your site? What do they look for? What do they hope to find? And how do they end up there (more than just searches?)—do they stick around (low bounce rate?). With the answers to these questions it could be more easily to identify an opportunity.
Ads, affiliates and sponsored posts will likely only make sense with 3k-4k visitors a day.
They come mostly from searches (95% of traffic) for terms like "devops conferences", "devops conferences in 2019" etc.. So they are looking for their next conference to attend.
The site has only one single page so naturally the bounce rate is high as there is nowhere else to navigate on the site.
Capture emails and see to segment users on geography, specific interests, willing to travel, etc. Give them a personalised calendar or email updates with direct link to the website/ticket service for a small fee per year (go for a one-time purchase).
Can we also assume companies pay for the tickets? If so, that's an angle worth looking at.
In any case: it's worth to talk to current subscribers. Send them a short survey, see what they were after, who they are (freelancer, business owner, CFO, etc).
Yes, it's the correct assumption that it's mostly companies who pay for the tickets.
Could you expand a little bit on the idea of a personalised calendar? Do you mean something like calendar at meetup.com with a list of events that user is planning to attend? Are you suggesting to turn it into a membership website?
How do you do segmentation? Currently, I have one sign-up with only email to fill out. Do you ask per email for further information? What's the best process for that?
Maybe a blog? If you already got a following start a blog where you discuss dev ops, through that you'll be able to advertise products to get some affiliate commision
Good idea! I could probably develop the site into more of a DevOps portal, including blog, resources (e.g. books, courses), job board etc.
From an SEO perspective you could consider creating separate pages per conference so you could potentially rank for individual conferences. You could then look to partner with the conference organisers whether that is to sell affiliate tickets or and I personally think this is an area which feels rather untapped is the ability to remotely and / or virtually attend conferences so the conference organisers who film their conferences could offer a virtual ticket to attend remotely with video, chat, remotely ask questions etc integrated or just the ability to watch the videos after the event for a fixed fee. You could then sell these packages and earn a percentage of the sale off the back of that.
Thanks for your comment. I think creating separate page for each conference is a great idea and it would probably bring in much more traffic. It requires significantly more effort to execute though but I might give it a shot.
Great - I think you could fairly easily test the water with this by starting small with a select few conferences and see how your pages rank for those - you could probably fairly easily come up with a boiler plate page for this. Remember to internally link them and optimise the pages from an SEO perspective e.g. H1's, Image names (alt tags, titles), exact keyword mention in title, name your pages the same as the conference themselves and put them as close to your root as possible.
Yeah, there you go, as long as you maintain a professional attitude and don't give off the vibe that you are desperately trying to get people to buy stuff through your affiliate link you should eventually start getting a bit of an income :)
Work on SEO and slowly extend the website to offer more value.
Also, a side note, I see your website is up on GitHub, is it free to use? or what's the license? :)
Yeah, I host the code on GitHub because it's basically a static site so all the source code is public anyway. I haven't thought much about licensing, good point, I need to look into it :)
(BTW, I'm also in the capital area. Didn't think I'd bump into fellow Helsinkiläinen on IH :))
Some ideas
Maybe put your newsletter behind a paywall and market it a bit differently: "Be the first to know about new DevOps conferences."
If these are like other conferences, they will probably have earlybird offers when they are initially announced. And if you can be really good about notifying people about these offers at the time of announcement, the hard-core conferences goers might pay you for it.
You can also use Amazon Affiliate links to promote related products on your website without it looking like advertising!
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