There are two decisions that have been hanging over my head for a while now regarding PizGloria:
1) While apparently very rare the site does occasionally go down or is unavailable. I didn't know much about web hosters prior to creating the site so I was using a free web hoster named FreeHostia. This is the web host we used as students a few years ago while doing night classes for the 10 week web course I undertook. After speaking to one of the techies at FreeHostia I have decided to stick with them and pay a small fee per month to improve the website's reliability. I really can't complain though as they were previously hosting my site for nothing !
2) "To ad or not to ad". Many friends have suggested I should add adverts to the website because of the number of visitors I've been getting. My boss at work constantly tells me how many AdSense dollars I'm missing out on. But even now I'm paying for the site to be hosted I still want the site to be ad free. I'm not rich or anything and I understand why others may want to have ads on their own sites. It would certainly be cool for the site to pay for itself. I just want to try and resist for as long as possible, hopefully forever.
Re point 2. I understand the dilemma. Ad free does look a lot nicer, but I'm sure it would be nice if the site at least partly covered it's cost.
ReplyDeleteLinks to the books on Amazon might be an option. I believe you get a small percentage of every sale the link results in. This way it's a relevant (and helpful) "ad". You could have one "shop" page for them (keeps the "ads" limited to one page instead of being all over the entire site), or one "item of the day" under the "book cover of the day" on your front page.
I don't know how much money that would really make (I suspect not much, but who knows), but it could be worth a go. A donation button to "help keep this site up and ad free" is another option, but I don't know much much that would make either (probably even less).
Thanks Luke, I like some of those ideas.
ReplyDeleteI'd be interested to know though how much money people really make from ads on their sites (or donations for that matter!)
BTW: I've enjoyed reading your film reviews at Writings on James Bond http://writingsonjamesbond.wordpress.com/ . Great stuff