Website Monetization

I’ll do a little whining here, so bear with me.  I do not do that a whole lot.

For those who visit this website regularly, you like noticed that I’ve got a lot more advertising in recent posts.

Basically, it has dawned on me that I should really keep this hobby of mine revenue neutral.  Another problem that I am facing is that there are some brands out there that will have nothing to do with me (that is sort of a side effect of being honest), so to look at those products I have to buy them on the open market, rather than borrow them from the manufacturer.

Well, since it is important for me to keep this hobby separate from the family budget, I have to look at different sources of revenue.   I really do not want to switch this to a subscription model, so I am looking into putting in some generic advertising and at having affiliate accounts.  To that extent, I signed up with a third party that does affiliate referrals with a bunch of companies, including Brownells and EuroOptic.   That is why you are beginning to see links to these two companies.  I will probably add a few more as I go along.  Unfortunately, some of my favourite vendors do not do affiliate marketing, so I will have to figure something else out.

I am fortunate in that my audience is usually fairly sophisticated and aware of all the different retailers they can get best prices from.  The unfortunate part, is that I worry that all these affiliate links will not get me anywhere since you guys come to this website to do some research and probably already have a particular vendor in mind.

Technically, I also have generic Google and Amazon ads for any sort of shopping optics of otherwise, but for those to be significant, I need a lot more website traffic.

I am not sure how to really resolve this, since this was never intended to be an advertising machine or even a mass market information source.  When I got started with sporting optics, I could not find an unbiased information source that had technical expertise, so I decided to become one.  In the world we live in, anything with the words “technical expertise” is unlikely to ever become “mass market” anything.

In other words, if you want to support my work, click on the Amazon and Google links.  If you will be buying anything from Amazon, start on this website.  It costs you nothing extra.  If you are looking for a specific product that I have reviewed, consider purchasing it via one of the affiliate links I put in.

I’ll give it a go for a few months.  If a desired effect is not achieved, I’ll have to come with something else that generates revenue without compromising the integrity of my reviews.