Methods to create a paid information website

05/30/2018, by J.-C. Colette

You want to create an information website and you wonder how to make your site profitable. Here we tell you the classic methods to make it pay.

Increase in power of the Web site

Those who want to create a website often opt for an information site because in general, search engines rank articles higher than the other pages. A very good ranking in search engines usually brings many visitors. But the website traffic depends on the interest of the subject, the quality of your articles and the number of competing sites. To get a site out of anonymity quickly, there is only one way: to advertise and try to multiply the links to the site. However, you must be careful to optimize its pages to satisfy certain requirements of the search engines in order not to waste its time or its money.

Yes, that's right, basically it's like paying to be read! When you find that your site has enough visits and articles you will be able to set up means of payment.

Payment Methods

What are they?

• Advertisements on your site
• A payment system on your site and offer paid documents or paid videos
• Links on a known platform and propose products (still having a connection with your site).

Even though the automatic advertising banners of some providers are easy to set up, they are note very profitable, unless your site is successful. You can also write some advertising articles on your site in exchange for a few deniers, and put yourself in the shoes of a blogger, but that will not bring you enough money.

One solution is to write articles more complete than those of your site, eBooks or create videos pertaining of course to the main topic of your site and sell them directly on your site or on an online sales platform.

The interest to sell on your site is not to pay its presence or its promotion on an eCommerce platform, but the disadvantage is to be obliged to install a payment system like PayPal which is not within the reach of everyone. This may not even be possible on some sites (unsecured or managed by content managers that do not have an eCommerce module).

You then have several solutions: charge a subscription that allows customers to access paid information or use a shopping cart system allowing visitors to choose to buy one or more products. You may notice that many newspapers have adopted a subscription payment system.

Advantages and disadvantages of these methods of payment

Advertising in the form of automatic banners is not always very effective and can even give a bad image of the website. Some webmasters are quite reluctant to charge information for several reasons:

• The site will go into the commercial site category and inevitably lose a few visitors. The decline in traffic is not very good vis-a-vis the search engines. So, this will increase the advertising budget
• Paid information must be different from those that everyone can find on any other site, which means that you must waste more time writing.
• It takes more work, since you must continue to write some free articles or presenting the paid items to attract visitors and of course to write the paid items
• The security of the site must be strengthened.

On-site advertising still has advantages as it prevents site visitors from taking their wallet out.

The subscription system has the advantage of being able to retain subscribers. Article payment has the advantage of giving visitors a certain freedom.

Success is not guaranteed, but to promote it we must avoid choosing the areas of information that are too competitive (difficult to keep a high ranking in search engines) or otherwise lacking interest. But you may not have a choice.