How to Start an Online Magazine -- and Earn Revenues from the Site

If you are going to start an online newsletter, you can choose these business models:

1. Subscription based model = you charge a membership fee whether monthly or annual to read and subscibe to the newsletter. Be sure to have really compelling and unique content that others will not be able to get for free with your newsletter.

What others do is to give a free sample or teaser of the content -- e.g. the first 2 paragraphs of an article -- and to read more or access more content, the visitor has to subscribe and pay.

There are several shopping cart systems that allow for memberships like this wherein you will automatically flagged when a membership payment is due and to ensure that the subscriber is not giving away the password/username to others

2. Advertising based model = this basically means your entire content is free for all. Advertising can either be

• cost per 1000 impressions or CPM wherein you are paid for every 1000 visitor that sees the ad
• cost per click or CPC where you get paid everytime someone clicks on the ad
• cost per action or CPA where you get paid everytime a predetermined action happens (e.g. sale, qualified lead, etc)

There are several ways you can earn money from advertising:

a. Join an advertising network. Advertising networks are organizations that aggregate Web sites that offer advertising space, and sell banner ads (and other advertising options) across them. Traffic requirement is often a minimum of 5,000 monthly impressions, although many do not accept sites hosted by free page services.

• Burst Media http://www.burstmedia.com
• Fastclick (ValueClick). http://www.fastclick.com
• Advertising.com. http://www.advertising.com
• Tribal Fusion http://www.tribalfusion.com

b. Participate in contextual advertising networks. Contextual advertising are text ads delivered based on the content of the web page using an automated system.

• Google Adsense https://www.google.com/adsense/
• Yahoo! Publishing Network (currently in beta and available to US publishers only) http://publisher.yahoo.com/
• Intellixt http://vibrantmedia.com/site/web_01a5.htm
• Quigo Adsonar http://www.quigo.com/adsonarexchange.htm
• IndustryBrains http://www.industrybrains.com
• Commission Junction Evolution http://www.cj.com
• Kanoodle Brightads http://www.kanoodle.com/about/brightads.html
• Clicksor http://www.clicksor.com/affiliate_programs.php
• Contextweb http://www.contextweb.com/
• Bidclix http://www.bidclix.com/
• Bidvertiser http://www.bidvertiser.com/

c. Sell advertising for your site directly. This is admittedly a more difficult route for a small business site wanting to earn advertising revenues. But hey, as they say: "no pain, no gain!"