LightSpeed » WordPress-MU http://lsdev.biz Website Development - WordPress - Cape Town Fri, 18 May 2012 08:52:44 +0000 en hourly 1 http://wordpress.org/?v=3.3.2 8 Ways to make money with WordPress MU http://lsdev.biz/8-ways-to-make-money-with-wpmu/?utm_source=rss&utm_medium=rss&utm_campaign=8-ways-to-make-money-with-wpmu http://lsdev.biz/8-ways-to-make-money-with-wpmu/#comments Tue, 01 Jun 2010 11:20:11 +0000 Barend Potgieter http://lsdev.biz/?p=3096

WordPress MU allows you to run limitless blogs and websites with one single install of WordPress. It is used by service based websites like Ancestry 24, HireBuzz, and most famously WordPress.com.

Setting up and maintaining such a large ecosystem of blogs is time consuming and expensive. It is only natural, unless you’re a philanthropist, that you’d want to make this investment work for you and make some money from the deal.

Here’s how:

1. Donations

Donations will not bring in a lot of money. It can be difficult to motivate users of your website to donate money to the running of your website and you will have no control over the amounts donated. Donations (barely) works for a site like Wikipedia because they are one of the largest and most frequented sites on the web and offer a unique service.

Your best bet is to allow donations by users, but use another of the models discussed below to finance your website and make some money.

2. Sponsorship

Finding a partner or partners that are willing and able to sponsor your website will rest on the possibility of you offering a mutually beneficial relationship for all parties involved. This model is also sure not to be very profitable.

3. Advertising

Advertising is a good way to bring in money to a site. The basic model is to set up your site so that nothing is expected financially from your visitors, while your advertisers only pay you after you accomplish certain goals such as sales or click-throughs.
Your main challenge when using the advertising model is to find an equilibrium between maximizing the number of ads and minimizing the visitors’ annoyance. This mainly has to do with the number, size and location of ads.

Flashing banner ads, bandwidth chowing movie ads and full page ‘Skip this ad’ pop-up Ads are to be avoided. The easiest way to go about placing ads on your WordPress blog is by using Google Adsense in combination with your text widgets. This gives you the freedom and control of placing your widgets containing the ads anywhere on your website that pleases you.

4. Subscriptions

Subscription can be a good way to make money with your website, but only if you can provide content or special features that is worth the price of admission. Many newspapers and Research resources that make use of this model offer a lot of content for free on their site, with ‘premium’ content’ only available to subscribers. This serves to let the casual reader experience what the website has to offer and if you work smartly with your content, it can serve as a powerful incentive to subscribe.

5. Selling Stuff

The business model for e-commerce sites that sell products is very closely related to the traditional Bricks and Mortar model as you have to worry about your gross margins and typically need to spend a lot of money on advertising.

With this model your site is aimed at promoting and selling products to the users.

6. Upgrades

You can offer upgrades that enhance and improve your website, or add additional functionality that is sought after by users. These upgrades can take the form of plugins, themes, extra storage space, the ability to upload video or any other novel or useful upgrade that users would want.

7. Affiliate Sales

Affiliate marketing is the practice of using one website to drive traffic to another.
Eighty percent of affiliate programs today use revenue sharing or cost per sale (CPS) as a compensation method, nineteen percent use cost per action (CPA), and the remaining programs use other methods such as cost per click (CPC) or cost per mille (CPM).

There is currently only one plugin that will transform your website into an affiliate marketing machine – WordPress MU Affiliate. It works with WordPress single user, WPMU, and BuddyPress. WordPress MU Affiliate allows you to provide your partners with compelling creative banner advertisements targeted to your niche market, without you having to touch a single line of code. It tracks unique clicks, signups, and paid memberships.

8. Supporter

WordPress MU Supporter is a plugin that allows you to offer and charge for premium features or use of your WPMU or BuddyPress site – collecting either subscriptions or single payments in return.

Features:

  • Premium Themes
  • Premium Plugins
  • Buddypress Integration, limiting messages and/or creation of groups to Supporters
  • You can rename Supporter to whatever you want… for example, ‘Pro’ or ‘Plus’ or ‘Premium’
  • Brilliant and powerful individual blog modification tools
  • Increase storage space for paid up supporters
  • Google Analytics for Supporters integration (supporters can get analytics if they sign up)
  • ‘Turn off Ads’ facility so you can display ads which are automatically turned off for supporters
  • If you wish, disable the “Write Post” and “Write Page” pages on non-supporter blogs (i.e. you must be a supporter to blog)
  • Allows you to provide a free trial period of supporter features to new blogs
]]> http://lsdev.biz/8-ways-to-make-money-with-wpmu/feed/ 2 WPMU DEV – Competition http://lsdev.biz/wpmu-dev-competition/?utm_source=rss&utm_medium=rss&utm_campaign=wpmu-dev-competition http://lsdev.biz/wpmu-dev-competition/#comments Fri, 18 Sep 2009 12:08:16 +0000 Ashley Shaw http://lsdev.biz/?p=1393 wpmuorg_logo

WPMU Dev Premium takes WordPress MU to a higher level. It offers polished themes and expertly crafted plugins to elevate your site.

By linking to  Countdown to 100 WPMU DEV Premium Plugins, Themes, Videos and More at wpmu.org, we might just be selected to receive another year of premium membership.

WPMU DEV Premium Plugins used by LightSpeed.

]]> http://lsdev.biz/wpmu-dev-competition/feed/ 0 BuddyPress to power the new Contribute to Change http://lsdev.biz/buddypress-to-power-contribute-to-change/?utm_source=rss&utm_medium=rss&utm_campaign=buddypress-to-power-contribute-to-change http://lsdev.biz/buddypress-to-power-contribute-to-change/#comments Sat, 10 Jan 2009 09:22:43 +0000 Ashley Shaw http://www.lsdev.biz/?p=310 I have been working with BuddyPress (BP) since its very early stages in April/May. What is BP?

BuddyPress will extend WordPress MU and bring social networking features to a new or existing installation.

As an avid facebook and WordPress user I have taken to the idea of extending WordPress-MU with social networking features very well. Foxinni was the first person to tell me about BP, the I caught my attention immediately. I started testing out the very early stages of the software in May 2008 while preparing to do a talk at WordPress Cape Town Meetup.

Andy Peatling is the lead developer on the BP project. Andy started the project as ChickSpeak.com a WordPress MU Based Social Network, see about blurb below:

ChickSpeak is an organization for young women created to inspire Big Dreams, Strong Values and Success in the world.


Here are some important BP links for more detailed info on the Automattic driven project:

Buddypress

The past few months LightSpeed has been Contibuting to Change (C2C). Traffic Brand introduced us to the DA who needed a small volunteer registration website called Contribute to Change. We started with a standard 5 page website designed as a landing page for a PPC campaign and volunteer registration formto allow people sign up and help promote the DA.

We have been researching the Obama political campaign and how they built My.BarackObama.com a.k.a MYBO to enabled supporters to be more involved with promoting the party. We have been busy developing BP powered volunteer system to drive the C2C website. This will allow people to join in and help the DA grow its support base. More on how to sign-up to the live system at the end of this month when it launches to the existing & new volunteers.

We will be making use of all the existing BP features and adding some interesting new modules. See details below:

Modules:

  1. Authentication modules – Google’s OpenID Endpoint + Facebook Connect
  2. Recruit a friend + Contact Importer – Friend importer tool and more advanced tools for recruiting new community members
  3. Spread the Word – Tools for mailing the press or prominent blogs
  4. User/Volunteer Points System – Volunteers earn points for every action and these are displayed in a sidebar widget
  5. Action center – User dashboard page displaying member points, call-to-action tools and much more
  6. Import Users – Import existing volunteers into the C2C BP system
  7. Events – Create/host an event, find events, featured events
  8. Go-door-to-door – Voters use this module to organise neighbourhood walks going door-to-door to discuss and help promote the DA
  9. Make Phone Calls – Talk to Voters, record/update details and promote the DA
  10. Mobile Theme – mobile theme for buddypress making the site more accessible to users

BuddyPress Modifications:

  1. User Sign-up or User Registration needs to be extended and integrated into
  2. Members Only system accessible only to registered volunteers
  3. Buddy Press Top Menu Bar needs to be extended to cater for the new volunteer tools by adding new quick links

Potential modules:

  • Facebook style bottom bar with Jabber Chat built in to enable volunteers to chat to each other trough the system

Some interesting research links:

I will be blogging further information in the weeks to come. Stay tuned in.

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