WordPress MU

There has to be more than just adsense to monetize a blog with yes?

I'm thinking along these lines, check me if I'm wrong in my thinking, and help me with a way to implement them....

1. Referral programs: Choose the programs such as adsense, adbrite, rocket profit and the like that offer profit sharing incentives for referring people to them under your id. In order to do this you have to be able to post either in a page or you admin blog the java script code that go along with these so people can actually sign up.

2. Add sharing, the adsense deluxe 2 plugin lets you share the adds with your bloggers, you have to mix it with plugin commander to insist it to be used, the problem is that the farmers 100 theme pack is equipped with the wp-ozh special setup not for adsense deluxe2. Another problem is that no plugin exists to allow you to use other ad programs such as adbrite that also gives you referral incentives and will also integrate itself with other programs such as adsense and display the one that offers the highest pay rate. If there is please point me in it's direction.

3. Would something like Openld/openx allow me to profit share with other users? I would think that such a program would give me that ability to put ads from any of the above mentioned or other add sites and then display them through the templates and set up some type of their ads show a percentage, my ads show a percentage type set up? In doing so you have to make sure at the same time you aren't breaking any TOS's by displaying to many ads or ads of the same companies with different account #'s.

4. A payed tier where you don't profit share with them at all on their blog and give them the ability to place ads in the templates from their own affiliates, not just within the blog posting but also the header/footer or sidepanels of the theme they are using....wp-ozh seems set up to where you are just pushing ads on your users blogs as payment for letting them have a blog with no ability to share with them, and then you can possibly give them the option of not having ads displayed if they pay? Not quite what I'm looking for so if I go the adsense deluxe2 route I have to go into all 100 templates and replace the wp-ozh code with adsense deluxe2 code yes?

I don't know if any of this is coming out the way that I'm really wanting it to. I hope it is. If you can help direct me as to how to accomplish some of these things I would be more than greatfull for it. The key to income I think is diversity, getting income for referral to programs, getting income for ad display sharing, getting income from payed tiers for blog packages i.e. more space(not sure how much that is) more bandwidth(again not sure how much that is or how to track it) No ads of ours and the added ability to display different types in different places of their own.

You're treading into areas which you're not going to get much help, I'm afraid.

Simplest answer to this is as follows:

1) Create content that people can't get anywhere else.
2) Make it something they can't live without.
3) Offer it for free for a while, then either start charging for it, or offer even MORE of it for an additional fee.

Any other method seems somewhat scammy to me.

and once you do that, don't leak your niche on open forums like this one.

My guess is that Step 1 scares away 99% of the people who are thinking about monetizing their websites. It involves actual work.

Charging for a hosted domain seems like it could make money.

wordpress.com only make $10 out of this though.

Something could be set up with the enom api.

I found out this morning that if you only have one mu install you can host multiple domains on nginx without having to specify server names or virtual hosts in the nginx config.

As long as the domain is pointed to the ip address nginx will simply point all requests to index.php and then wordpress mu takes care of the rest.

So under this kind of set up you could easily set up domain registration and install with multisite plugin and enom api.

Except the current multisite plguin is buggy. :)

The "best" may to monetize an MU site is whatever works for you. Most of it involves work though. :D and the $10 / year domain hosting is a great price for users, but for admins, you'll need thousands of users going for it, so more than one model.

Do remember on the wp.com side they have diverisfied their income, like the VIP program, and google adsense.

AFAIK, OpenAds/ OpenX doesn't have a revenuse sharing model, but you could probably code that.

(Some of us have thought abotu this a LOT, but as noted above aren't sharing in a public forum at this time.)

http://ringofblogs.com goes to some length on stuff to try.