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I was thinking of using Adsense, but after I've read about the stopwords policy... Too many words are banned: "a**, s**t, id**t, a****le, bu****it," etc.. That generally means that I cannot use Adsense, unless I edit my posts.

How else would I go about making some profit out of my site?

I don't want to use things like popups, text-link ads, I can't post many shoplinks, and my site is too small to sell adspace.

For specific reasons, I also don't do videos, am not planning on starting a forum or premium content, or anything very close to what's in this sentence.

The reason for this post is basically the fact that I've seen sites without any ads, huge sites, and I started to wonder: how do they make money? That was Gizmodo to be precise.

Some info about my site: It's a blog where I review games and post news. There is no forum, no registration.

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  • lmgtfy.com/?q=how+to+make+money+from+a+website There are literally hundreds of ways of making money. A simple Google search goes a long way. At least show that you've made some effort at this. You didn't even tell us relevant details about your website. I.E. is it a blog? a forum? etc.? What's the content about? are there areas where users must login to see?
    – Randy E
    Sep 5, 2012 at 11:54
  • Right, sorry about that, I'm used to not giving details, as people aren't interested in them. Let me edit the post.
    – Jack
    Sep 5, 2012 at 12:03
  • Okie dokie :) Unfortunately most people in the world don't care about the details of our websites, but those that want to help us do!
    – Randy E
    Sep 5, 2012 at 12:05
  • 1
    Added information that i could think of. :)
    – Jack
    Sep 5, 2012 at 12:14

2 Answers 2

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You could easily incorporate affiliate links into your reviews for places like Amazon where they can purchase the games that you're recommending. You just have to remember to have a disclaimer on your blog about making money from links as there was a law passed about a year or so ago that oyu have to do something like that.

Another thing you could do is contact publishers of the games you're talking about, or the developers depending on how large the company's are, and discuss advertisement options with them. You want to make sure whatever you decide is relevant to the topic of the site.

I know you said you don't want to use text link adds, but it would be an easy monetization for the site, and an easy step to add, to add an affiliate link to where to buy it at the bottom of the article. Something like "To purchase this game visit [insert link]."

But another question is why are you using those words to begin with? I can understand wanting to do candid reviews but if you're wanting to monetize it many sources of income prohibit text like that.

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  • Because some of those words are part of the language, and an occasional use of them is okay, as I see it. I'm not talking about using 20 of them in a post, I'm using about 2 or 3 in a long post. But anyway: store pages I do that already, but most people are buying stuff on Steam. So far, those links were completely useless. advertisement options do you think it's okay to do it? I mean, contacting a company and asking if they would like to advertise with a site who reviews their games is kinda odd; nonetheless my site isn't very big.
    – Jack
    Sep 5, 2012 at 13:44
  • @Jack I'd be very reluctant to do so. Even if you're completely above the board and objective in your reviews you've created the appearance of a conflict of interest by taking money from the company selling the product being reviewed. Sep 5, 2012 at 15:47
  • @Randy E Indeed my thoughts, and if we're talking about affiliate game links, that's what I would be going for. The only other option that I can think of is game stores, which, as I've mentioned, is quite useless. I certainly wouldn't want to advertise other sites like mine too.
    – Jack
    Sep 5, 2012 at 16:05
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    It seems like you've shot down most conventional means of monetization - Affiliate links, adsense, banner ads, text link ads, direct ads etc. - It may be a good time to consider if this model is what you're looking for, perhaps it's best to leave it as a hobby, or use it to get exposure & a paying gig reviewing games, or maybe you want to turn it into one big project and get it funded on kickstarter, you could build a big user base then sell the site to a larger company and so on. There are infinite options but none of them will produce results if you don't try them.
    – Joshak
    Sep 5, 2012 at 16:24
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    I've not done anything with CPM ads so I can't recommend from persona experience, but here are a few links that compare networks. problogger.net/archives/2008/03/03/… and socialcompare.com/en/comparison/…
    – Joshak
    Sep 6, 2012 at 17:48
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I'd say check out affiliate programs for monetization given your stated parameters.

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