Matthew Rusk Student Entrepreneur in Residence

It is a question that I often get ask, indeed, one that I often pose to myself. “How can you make money from websites?” Or the rather more general “How do I make money on the internet?” In todays world there are literally billions of people on the internet, just waiting to spend their hard earned cash on everything from everyday items to luxury gifts there must be certain categories of business model that cater for these. There is a market for everything on the internet – so how can you capitalise on it?

Well broadly from all my experience in running an online business for the past five years there are basically 10 ways to make money from running websites on the internet (and to date I have only be successful in one method, in a small niche market). Here is the low down on how to make money from a website;

1. Advertising – literally the answer to every question I ever asked to a student with a business idea when I asked “how are you going to monetise it?”. The truth it unless you are Google or Facebook you are not going to be able to generate a primary income, comparable to your best friends that have just secured corporate jobs in London, from having pay-per-click adversing on your website. Even websites with thousands of hits per day will struggle to make more than a few pounds from their blog – think of similarities in Spotify for musicians. Pay-per-click is great but won’t cut it.

2. Sell Advertising – the second most common answer when people understand the financials behind pay-per-click adversing. This is a tough sell, you will need to approach a company and ask them to redirect X% of their adversing budget to your buy advertising space on your website. My question is to you – have you got the stats to back up your claim that adversing on your website will increase their businesses sales by X% or is X% more efficient than their current adversing? Without the stats why would any company risk the investment in advertising on your website? Still once you have built a brand it can be a great source of income providing that you keep adding value to the paying business.

3. Email Marketing – also known as list building. I have several books on this at home but am yet to read them – the old style internet entrepreneurs swear by them, but for me personally I have little knowledge in creating massive mailing lists & how to monetise them. Therefore I would give this as a neutral idea as I am not qualified to comment on it – read more by Googling “how to create a list building website”.

4. Create a paid board – job websites are a great example of this. Essentially people pay to be connected, whether it is employers paying to access employers (or visa-versa), plumbers and house owners or any other connecting of people. If you generate a good niche website that performs better than any other within that area of the market you can generate a great income – indeed, here at the Innovation Centre Environment Job is an example of this model.

5. Affiliate Marketing – the idea that if an individual goes onto a buy a product advertised on your website, having clicked on that link, then you receive a % of the sale price. Again a great source of passive income, but painfully low in terms of money coming in. Indeed, you are at the mercy of the product being so good people want to buy it. Possible but again a hard sell.

6. Sell Your Own Product – this tends to be the most profitable way of making money on the internet. Having a great product in the first place and using the internet as a marketplace for that product. The website therefore is only the shop, rather that purpose of the entire business. I have known students at the University of Exeter to make a decent secondary income – and at times primary income – from selling great products from their websites (Young Ones, Mammal Swag, Jollie’s Goods).

7. Sell a service – if you don’t have a product then selling a service, yours or someone else’s, will fulfil the same goal. In my instance I originally sold the service of “guitar lessons” before graduating to sell the service of “guitar students” to other teachers across the UK. Done correctly it can be a really lucrative form of income.

8. Paid Content – I have known of a few businesses at UOE that have created a website/app model around people paying for content. Indeed, there was a very interesting medical business that wished to gain students as subscribers for their exam-revision tools that looked promising. If you can explore a niche where (i) quality information is needed promptly and (ii) few other sources provide it for free it can work well. However, I would look at the examples of newspapers that have gone to a paid content model – The Sun for example – that must find it hard to compete against the many media outlets that can generate the same stories and place them online free.

9. Sell the website design – if you have designed the website yourself then sell the design to other people. This is great way of making money and you can continue to run your own website as it normally is, while advertising at the same time that people can buy the template you have designed should they like it!

10. Sell the website – literally the design, domain and content. I have heard of websites being sold for £100,000, if they boast great traffic in a field that a new company wants to get into – essentially they snap up the pre-existing website than take months to build up their own one. Having tried models 6, 7 and 9 I thought I would give model 10 a go this summer! Therefore I have created a website that goes after one thing…website traffic. I have no idea if anyone will ever want to buy it, but with over 44,000 searches per month in a low competition are of the market hopefully with a solid domain name I can get 20,000 hits per month on the website. Imagine being one of the definitive sources of information in this area of the market – I am sure that will be of interest to a company somewhere. However, trying to avoid the “if I build it, they will come” attitude I will try and monetise it in secondary ways with a collection of all the above methods. From this I will be able to feedback over the next three, six and twelve months – what really is the best way to make money from a website.

Posted under Innovation Centre, New Project, Student Businesses

On the 7th June 2015 Sir Bradley Wiggins did something that anyone who has the ability to ride a bike can – he hopped on his bike and cycled for an hour recording how far he had travelled. The very pureness of the record caught many people’s eyes, including my own, as unlike so many professional sports where it is hard for a “normal” individual to compare themselves to the “professional” (I mean how much better is Messi really from a player at my local 5-a-side tournament…okay, a lot but exactly how much) this record is simple and entirely comparable. Simply get on your bike and ride! In the case of Wiggins he smashed the World Record for the largest distance traveled in one hour on a commercial road bike – covering a massive distance of 54.526km (33.88 miles). The previous record held by fellow Briton Alex Dowsett, of 52.937km (32.89 miles) had been set in May, as a international resurgence of interest in “the hour record” became well underway.

Yet, the thing that I found the most interesting was the way Wiggins and cyclists that had previously attempted the challenge had talked about the hour record. It was always about the perfect balance of living on the absolutely edge – as Chris Boardman, former Olympic Pursuit Champion, said; a rider is constantly asking, “is my pace sustainable? If it’s a definite yes you’re not going hard enough, if it’s a no, you’ve overcooked it.” (The Guardian). Wiggins himself noted that although the first 45 minutes could be trained for the “the last fifteen is really what counts”, it is the unknown like “the last 100 metres in a 400 race, either you die or carry on. The bit you don’t look forward to but you just deal with it when you get there – a bit like pregnancy” (BBC Sport).

It really struck a chord with me, reminding me of challenges I felt in the very early stages of trying to create a business at the University of Exeter. Even before I had the idea that I developed into the business that I run today, I had such a feeling in Lafrowda that their was no “Plan B”, I had to make a business to generate money. As Wiggins says “either you die or carry on”, it was never in the physical sense but always in the mental sense – I wouldn’t give up on creating a business idea that worked.

In second year I went to a talk about business where I remember the speaker saying that creating a business is like going through pregnancy (interestingly something Wiggins also references), and might be as close that a man can get to experiencing what pregnancy is like. One of the big parts of pregnancy is of course pain – though I haven’t experienced pregnancy I can say that creating a business is also a painful experience. It is hard, sometimes it hurts mentally – you are tired, stressed, overworked – sometimes physically – for example when I would cycle to Broadclyst once a week to teach a guitar student who couldn’t make it in to Exeter as I needed the money – at times socially – the times I spent developing websites rather than out with friends. It is a sacrifice but something that is worthwhile because you are trying to achieve something that, although everyone has the capacity to do, only few will achieve.

As Michael Hutchinson, former national time trial champion, noted about non-professional cyclist and present of 5 live OJ Borg had a go at the hour record “there becomes a point where everything hurts, even things not involved. His eyelids will hurt, even things nothing to do with riding a bike” BBC 5 Live. OJ managed an impressive 39.61km and said it was the most challenging thing he had done in his life – while it might not be a World Record simply to have achieve a score was impressive (much like a first marathon). Out of all of this I would suggest that one thing has become clear to me – to truly succeed in anything, including business, you need to ride as close to the edge of your personal capabilities no matter what they may be.

Secondly, in all of the interviews the riders said that they would be happy if they knew that they gave 100% and “left the tank empty” at the end – few talked about actually gaining the record, just that they wanted to know they had given their best performance. Indeed, Wiggins stated if he didn’t break it but gave everything he wouldn’t retry as he knew he did his best. Therefore like business while you can measure yourself against others (especially financially), looking within and deciding “have I really given my all to this” is probably a better measure of your success.

And thirdly, pain is part of it. Pain is acceptable. If you are not in pain creating your business you are not trying hard enough – if you are blacking out because of too much pain then you are working too hard – you need to be on the edge a little faster than you think you can go but not fast enough so you can’t sustain it. It is within this paradox that you will succeed.

In terms of the development of the business over the last three weeks we have major progress. Thanks to the help of writers here at the University of Exeter websites like Singing Lessons Norwich and Piano Lessons Swansea have been successfully launched, both of which building on existing instruments within the location – along with the hiring the first drum teacher in Glasgow for the Drum Lessons Glasgow website which is fantastic news. Glasgow is such a musical city, with a proud history of generating fantastic bands with the likes of Biffy Clyro, Franz Ferdinand, Travis and Glasvegas all hailing from the city – not to mention the infamous early Oasis gig at the fantastically named King Tut’s Wah Wah Hut in Glasgow where the Gallagher brothers marched onstage, kicking off the band that was playing, to perform their early songs. In the audience was a certain Alan McGee who promptly signed up the band there and then, enabling them to release their debut album Definitely Maybe and go onto international stardom. The rest they say is history!

Photography: Radu Razvan

Posted under Business Inspiration