How to generate income from your website

There are several ways that your website can generate income for your club. In just about every case your potential income is determined by how popular your website is - in other words, how many times it's visited by non-Rotarians.

All options require that your club has the discipline to keep website information up to date, as well as have strategies in place to increase website traffic and increase the size and reach of the contact database.

Here are the most likely sources.

Google Adsense

This is a service provided by Google to their paying advertisers, whereby you allow third party advertisers to show their advertisements on your website in return for a small fee whenever a visitor clicks on any given advertisement.

Pros:

- Easy to set up
- Money for doing nothing

Cons:

To be viable your website would need hundreds of thousands of visitors, possibly millions, each month
-Your income is likely to be minimal, quite possibly in Cents rather than Dollars
- You might end up with advertisements for organisations you'd rather not be seen to support
- You might display advertisements for products and services that compete with your important sponsors
- More and more applications are being used to block adverts on websites, particularly pop-up ones.

Event bookings

Event bookings via your website is the simplest way to ensure that you get paid in advance, or can easily keep track of attendees who don't want to pay on line but haven't yet paid.

Pros:	- Payment in advance made directly into your bank account (assuming you're using the NAB-sponsored StreamScape service) - Potential clients expect to be able to pay on line - Potentially increase ticket sales because the process is simpler than filling in printed booking forms and posting a cheque
Cons:	- Requires a payment gateway (provided as part of the StreamScape website) - Will attract a small transaction fee

Sales of merchandise

Common examples of online merchandise or other fund-raising products include recipe books and Christmas puddings.

Pros:	- Increase sales of your products - Simplify the selling process
Cons:	- Requires a payment gateway (provided as part of the StreamScape website) - Will attract a small transaction fee - May require some sort of delivery / fulfilment procedure

Business directory

An online business directory (built in to all StreamScape club websites) is an excellent way to generate ongoing club income, as well as to deepen the level of engagement with donors, supporters and sponsors.

Pros:	- Generates a regular income for the Club - Provides a stronger relationship with supporters, sponsors and advertisers - Differentiates between different levels of sponsor support
Cons:	- Requires some administration to ensure billing and payments

Once your contact database reaches a certain threshold (which varies depending on the spread of your target audience) you can then provide sponsors the opportunity of perhaps sponsoring a monthly newsletter.

For example, no sponsor will be interested in paying you to send a bulletin to 45 members. They are, however, likely to be excited by the opportunity to reach 5000 readers of your regular newsletter.

Pros:	- No cost to provide the chargeable service - provides added value to your sponsors and supporters
Cons:	- Requires a contact database of meaningful size - easy to abuse by having too many advertisements in the newsletter

Google Adsense

Event bookings

Sales of merchandise

Business directory

Newsletter

How your website holds you back

StreamScape can help your club