Monetization of web projects at the initial stage. Personal experience

This post was born after several discussions in topics about startups. This is my first post on the hub, I ask you not to hit hard =).

There is a problem

Everyone is tormented by the same question: “I made a project, people seem to go around. Is there an advertisement for this project? But will this scare away visitors? ”
I will try to state my vision of monetizing web projects at the initial stage of development. By the initial stage, I understand exactly the moment when, it seems, the main functionality is already working, and the services are running, and we are promoting in different ways, but there is still not a large flow of visitors. Unfortunately, quite a few projects do not have “explosive” attendance dynamics and freeze for a long time at this stage.

Who will give us the money?

I'll start from afar. We all roughly imagine how sites are ranked in search engine results. The search engine analyzes the request, evaluates the internal (meta tags, title, page content) and external (frequency of the site’s citation, links pointing to the site) factors and gives the sites most relevant to the request.
Currently, internal factors are losing their “weight” and external factors, namely external links, have the most obvious impact on ranking.
There is a whole industry of website promotion - SEO. These are the guys who, for a certain fee, arrange some “dancing with a tambourine” and our site comes out on top in search engines for the requests we need. SEO specialists know which links, from which sites, with which anchor text and environment they need to put in order for the desired site to “pop up” in the search results.
And here we go on stage! We have a playground! With high-quality (conceived, user generated) content! And there are tons of pages! On which there are practically no links "outside".

How to implement?

My experience shows that at the initial stage, the income from the sale of links can be quite good and can greatly exceed the income from contextual advertising. For example, my modest investment and finance blog now only brings about $ 60 per month through links. Of course, this is a little - but the penny is not superfluous =). Moreover - links do not bother users, unlike obsessive advertising.
Now question number two. It’s clear why someone might need links from our site. The question is - to whom and how to sell them? I use two different link exchanges - Sape and Xap .
The first ( Sape ) is focused on the unit sale of expensive links from heavy-weight pages (main and secondary pages). In sapeYou can specify the price for each link sold, manually enter into sales transactions, and so on.
Xap is designed for the batch sale of hundreds of links from "small" pages - with a high level of nesting and low PR. In Xap, fixed prices for links (depending on TCI and PR). Another difference between Xap is that for the sale and purchase of links inside it, the internal currency, ksaps, is used. However, this currency is easily converted to Webmoney.

Summarizing - the recipe is simple!

So, in steps:

• We are registered in Sape and in Xap.
• We place their code on the site.
• We are waiting for the moderation of our project.
• On the home page and high PR pages we sell links using Sape. On all others - with the help of Xap.

It should be borne in mind that external links leak from our site part of its weight - PR. Therefore, borscht with sales links is not worth it. In my opinion, the optimal maximum selling links is 6-8 per page. The cost of links depends on the parameters of our site and individual pages, which can be estimated using the pr-cy.ru service .
Guys, if you find this article useful and decide to register for the sale of links, you can do it through my partner links, I will be pleased: http://www.sape.ru/r.89dbff2c23.php and http: //www.xap .ru /? p = 119562245 .
In any case, if questions arise - knock on ICQ (137111868), I will be happy to help!