8 Ways to make money with WordPress MU

1. Donations

Donations will not bring in a lot of money. It can be difficult to motivate users of your website to donate money to the running of your website and you will have no control over the amounts donated. Donations (barely) works for a site like Wikipedia because they are one of the largest and most frequented sites on the web and offer a unique service.

Your best bet is to allow donations by users, but use another of the models discussed below to finance your website and make some money.

2. Sponsorship

Finding a partner or partners that are willing and able to sponsor your website will rest on the possibility of you offering a mutually beneficial relationship for all parties involved. This model is also sure not to be very profitable.

3. Advertising

Advertising is a good way to bring in money to a site. The basic model is to set up your site so that nothing is expected financially from your visitors, while your advertisers only pay you after you accomplish certain goals such as sales or click-throughs.
Your main challenge when using the advertising model is to find an equilibrium between maximizing the number of ads and minimizing the visitors’ annoyance. This mainly has to do with the number, size and location of ads.

Flashing banner ads, bandwidth chowing movie ads and full page ‘Skip this ad’ pop-up Ads are to be avoided. The easiest way to go about placing ads on your WordPress blog is by using Google Adsense in combination with your text widgets. This gives you the freedom and control of placing your widgets containing the ads anywhere on your website that pleases you.

4. Subscriptions

Subscription can be a good way to make money with your website, but only if you can provide content or special features that is worth the price of admission. Many newspapers and Research resources that make use of this model offer a lot of content for free on their site, with ‘premium’ content’ only available to subscribers. This serves to let the casual reader experience what the website has to offer and if you work smartly with your content, it can serve as a powerful incentive to subscribe.

5. Selling Stuff

The business model for e-commerce sites that sell products is very closely related to the traditional Bricks and Mortar model as you have to worry about your gross margins and typically need to spend a lot of money on advertising.

With this model your site is aimed at promoting and selling products to the users.

6. Upgrades

You can offer upgrades that enhance and improve your website, or add additional functionality that is sought after by users. These upgrades can take the form of plugins, themes, extra storage space, the ability to upload video or any other novel or useful upgrade that users would want.

7. Affiliate Sales

Affiliate marketing is the practice of using one website to drive traffic to another.
Eighty percent of affiliate programs today use revenue sharing or cost per sale (CPS) as a compensation method, nineteen percent use cost per action (CPA), and the remaining programs use other methods such as cost per click (CPC) or cost per mille (CPM).

There is currently only one plugin that will transform your website into an affiliate marketing machine – WordPress MU Affiliate. It works with WordPress single user, WPMU, and BuddyPress. WordPress MU Affiliate allows you to provide your partners with compelling creative banner advertisements targeted to your niche market, without you having to touch a single line of code. It tracks unique clicks, signups, and paid memberships.

8. Supporter

WordPress MU Supporter is a plugin that allows you to offer and charge for premium features or use of your WPMU or BuddyPress site – collecting either subscriptions or single payments in return.

Features:

• Premium Themes
• Premium Plugins
• Buddypress Integration, limiting messages and/or creation of groups to Supporters
• You can rename Supporter to whatever you want… for example, ‘Pro’ or ‘Plus’ or ‘Premium’
• Brilliant and powerful individual blog modification tools
• Increase storage space for paid up supporters
• Google Analytics for Supporters integration (supporters can get analytics if they sign up)
• ‘Turn off Ads’ facility so you can display ads which are automatically turned off for supporters
• If you wish, disable the “Write Post” and “Write Page” pages on non-supporter blogs (i.e. you must be a supporter to blog)
• Allows you to provide a free trial period of supporter features to new blogs