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Comment by seanwilson | Hacker News Reader

Do you charge for a product? Why don't you run ads? Do you have affiliate links?

I'm not sure what can be suggested if you don't have some revenue generating conversion goals. Trying to get mailing list signups, social follows and social shares can't hurt though.

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1. I do charge for products — just not the more interesting open-source ones that tend to do well on HN & Reddit. (Also, my income from client web design & writing is probably loosely affected by the success of my blogposts and open-source side projects.)

2. I don’t run ads (at the moment) for both practical and philosophical reasons. (Practical: most of my sites don’t get enough steady traffic to generate much revenue. Philosophical: ads are annoying and I block them, targeted ads invade privacy, and ads are designed to get people to buy things that they (probably) don’t need.

3. I’ve considered affiliate links in that past, but haven’t used them yet: like ads, the benefits don’t yet seem to outweigh the costs. Aside from Amazon, which seems to be the most popular, what affiliate networks would you recommend?

Fair enough, but I don't understand what the big deal is. I'd try ads, affiliate links and monetising existing free projects myself. If you're going to make your interesting projects free, avoid ads and avoid affiliate links you're not leaving yourself many options. Would you have any income at all if you extended these ideas to your client work?

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