Donations, Another Stream of Income For Websites

November 10, 2008 in News by Olgi Zenullari

Do you have an active site where loyal members are getting back day after day? Are you finally looking how to properly monetize your site? There are different ways from text-link sales to affiliate marketing. Many different sites or forums could increase their monthly earnings by 5 or 10 % if they would have a “Donation” script on their site
What is a Donation script?

A Donation script basically is a small script where different visitors are able to donate a particular amount of money. You can add a text above the donation form such as “All Your Donations Will Help Us Improve” and hopefully you are going to get some few donations per month based on what your site offers. If you offer qualitative content for anyone then they won’t mind donating $5 or $10 at you.

There is a psychological phase everyone passes during an excitement and he/she can even donate up to $100 because he might have found something he had been looking for ages. The donations can also mean a “Thank You” for the content or service you are providing. If you provide free content or a free open source product and if you get a lot of donations, this means you are sharing valuable information and others are respecting you by donating. If you do not receive any donations at all (even though you have a lot of traffic) then seriously your visitors suck aren’t interested on what you offer and are just one-time visitors

How to increase your donation earnings?

Many webmasters fully concentrate on donations as they know their potential. You should always diversify your income and never rely on just one source (Adsense). Different sites are giving away a backlink or a post when someone is donating. Personally I do believe that a Top 10 donations list would be essential in order to increase your donation earnings. If you give a backlink to the ones donating cash they will be satisfied that you are linking to them as its known as reciprocal respect.

Looking at the chart of TOP 10 donations, different guys would love to get the first place, this is based on my personal experience. Its somehow a personal pride to achieve number one rankings in different fields of life. Now imagine when 3-4 guys are donating just to become number one in your site! In this case not only you will have a couple of hundreds per month but you will also have some keen members who are loving to donate, whether its because your site is professional or whether they just want to rank #1 and get a backlink, thats not a big issue for you as long as you are getting fresh paypal cash!

Donations (even if they are not visible at first sight) are also placed on different blogs. Instead of a simple “Donations script” they are more customized and you can find them under different names such as “Buy me a Beer” or “Buy me a Biscuit”. They are normally located at the end of each post so once a visitor reads the article, if he found what he was looking for he could donate you some couple of dollars.

Conclusion

Donations have seriously a great potential on a site or blog. It will take you just 10-15 minutes to fully set it up and you will never ever have to update anything. Different bloggers are posting really useful content on their sites and getting cents from Google. If you would have a “Buy Me a Beer” plugin you would have tripled your earnings. Its a win-win situation for all and you never ever have to worry about anything, except of checking your paypal time after time