Home          Articles          Interviews          Lists          Our Magazine          Message Boards         Free Classifieds         Get Listed      

Ways to Make Money with Your Literary Magazine?

There are 4 ways most sites are make money on the internet. They are the same for every site. The only variation on these 4 sources of revenue is audience. I will be right to the point about these revenue streams. We at EWR have used all of them, and I’ll give you my experience with each.
 

Quick to the point:
 

Pay per click

Pay per click is just like it sounds, you get paid for people clicking ads on your site. There are two types of ads, usually, intext (those little blue double lines) and side banner ads like what you get from Google Adsense. Pay per click is a great way to start making money. It’s fast and easy, but it is usually a low earner.

Affiliate

Affiliate marketing is where you promote products on your site, and if your readers click the ad and BUY something from the affiliate, you make a percentage. This is the way many blog owners are making so much money. It can be a high earner.

Sell something

It takes a lot to get this up and running. You can sell a t-shirt through services like Cafepress or your magazine. To be upfront, this will not make you a lot of money. It is hard to put together and a low earner for most sites. This includes selling your own ads. If you sell ad space on your site, most of the time you’ll find that you will make very little money.

Contests

Contests are a great way to promote your site, and a bad way to make money.

The Explanation
 

Pay per click.

Some advertising systems on the internet use this type of model to buy and sell users. Basically the way it works is that advertisers pay so much per click, and you put ads up on your site and take part of the profit for clicks. Yes, this means that every time someone clicks on your ads you get money. There are different types of ad services, Google adsense is at the top. With Google you sign up for an account and begin dropping ads on your site. Most of the time you can not do this with a free site, so make sure you have your own domain name. We like and use Hostmonster.

This is the beginners way to make money on the internet, and it should bring in enough revenue to pay for minor costs like domain hosting and domain purchase over time. It is very easy. Google does most of the work for you. Their ads target your audience. This means their software reads your site and picks ads to place there. You have many sizes to choose from.

Some people are worried about the look of adsense. You can pick if you want text ads, which look like little text boxes with different color writing in them, or you can pick a banner ad. This means a picture will be shown instead of text ads. Your choices are a little limited, but most of the time the ads are pretty appealing as far as banner ads go. If you are a purist, and you don’t like the idea of putting other peoples ads on your site, you may want to think of doing something else all together. There is a purity to literary magazines, but your audience should be able to understand that you need to support yourself and your site.

There are also intext link services that you can advertise with. These are those little double underlines you see all over the web. They pop up when you hang your mouse over them, and they do pay per time they are clicked. You can sign up with Infolinks or Kontera.

Apply to these services, if you are accepted, you can easily implement them. They are very easy to use, and even with low traffic they will bring in some revenue.

Affiliate Marketing
 

An affiliate marketing program is a program that gives you money if someone clicks on their site from yours and buys something. It is harder to do, but it will bring in more revenue. It can be a much bigger money earner. The way it works is that you put a link on your site and then sell their product by promoting it. At EWR we only pick affiliates that 1. have something to do with our target audience, and 2. services that we think are fair and worthwhile. The only affiliate programs we use, are of affiliates we think will help our readers and are useful. There are affiliate warehouses out there like LinkShare (Click here to become a LinkShare Affiliate!) that have done a lot of the work for you. If you sign up with the, you will have a store of different marketers to choose from. They might have 100s of markets for you to pick from.

Selling things

Yes, this is the time honored way of making money for many literary magazines. For instance selling an issue or a T-Shirt or something to do with your magazine. This is a more advanced method of making money. You’ll have to have a way to buy and sell products on the web. Pay pal is the easiest way to take purchases over the web from consumers, but remember you’ll have to ship and do everything else in the real world with a real product. You can use a company like Cafépress but you might find that they take so much of the revenue, you will be left with little money after all is said and done. If you have high traffic on your site this might work for you, but speaking in general terms, it is not a way to make good revenue. Most literary sites would have a great deal of trouble sustaining themselves this way.

Many of the best literary magazines in print do not make money. They are not profitable, so it is better to look at the money making side of your site as a website that can make money. Selling copies of your literary magazine will never do it. Selling ads yourself isn’t going to cut it either.

The services I talked about above are the method by which money sites are making a profit. The best way to look at this is that you are going to bring services and products to your readers that are valuable for them. They may come to read a poem, but if they leave through a link that is about publishing their book, it may help them. If bloggers talking about their kids can do it, a literary magazines, with interested readers, people submitting their work can do it.

Contests

Most of the time contests are used to bring in traffic, but they can be used to make a little money. It is not a great method. Even with high traffic some sites out there are loosing money when they give away cash prizes. If you have a reading or entry fee you might collect enough to break even, but most of these contests, like I said, are promotional, not money makers.

Summary
 

In the end pay per click and affiliate marketing is your best bet. If you are just starting, or if you are just starting out making money with your site, start with pay per click programs. See what you can bring in. Then you have to increase your site traffic. I’ll address promotion of your literary site in a later article.

It is true that some sites bring in a great deal of money on the internet. Right now blogging is still the hot thing. Many bloggers do make good money, but they do it through the programs I just shared with you. Your literary magazine probably won’t bring in millions of dollars. The market for them is small, but it can make enough to take some of the burden off you for running it. If you have started a literary magazine you most-likely love writing and writers and the like, so why not make it worth your while and begin to make a little money to sustain the publication. Many literary magazines come and go everyday. I see them start, and I see them fold. That doesn’t do anyone any good. Treat it like a website that can make money. Be patient. Give it time, and with pay per click or affiliate marketing you should be able to start to see a little profit, maybe even enough to pay some other bills besides the cost of your site.

There are bloggers making lots of money, I’m not going to promise that, but with the internet, anything is possible. 

Other Important Articles

The pitfalls of literary magazines and websites

Get everything you need to know on starting a literary magazine by signing up for our mailing list. Get the details.

About us                                Advertise                              Site Map                                   Link Exchange                                Connect