Monetizing a website

I currently operate a website called Cloverport.com, and have found that when it comes to monetizing a site, in most small cases, if you are willing to put in the time, selling the ads yourself is the way to go. Cloverport.com is a very small town website, but I still get about 30 hits a day, so I can sell ads to local businesses (telling them that, well, the people that will be seeing their ad will be local, so it will be worth more to them and the user). In your case, you could sell ads to small companies selling 80's music, or whoever you think is a good match for your users and the advertiser, and tell them that the people looking at the ads are already interested in the material.

Another thing to consider if you sell your own ads is to determine how much one view of an ad is worth on your site. So, you might say one hit is worth 10 cents, and say you get 100 views a day, and will only sell 10 ad spots (nice easy math, ehh?). You would find a plugin that would randomly select the ad that displays every time a page is loaded. Then you would just go 100 * 0.1 = 10, then 10 divided by the number of ad spots = 1, so you could charge each advertiser a dollar a day. This is the path I went down for my website, because it takes the middle man (such as Google) out of the picture, and I just drive to their store and drop off an invoice every three months, and get a check in the mail, so it isn't to much of a pain for me. For you, you might consider an online payment method such as PayPal or just having them send you checks.

However, if you are getting thousands of hits a day, it may prove more valuable to you to just save yourself the time and let Google's ad algorithms take care of the monetization, though you may lose some of the money.

Good luck with making money for your content! By the way, what is your site address? I would like to check it out!

1) Set up an e-commerce portion of the site...and sell the population products that are relevant to them.

2) Sell ads to the site, figure out a way to only pass ads that are relevant to your population.

3) Make partners with other sellers, get sponsors and pass on deals to your customers. Get money for being an affiliate marketer (referrer)

There's no reason why you can't do all of the three above....but I would start with one before implementing the other. 2 and 3 would be the less intrusive.

Check out Johnstonefitness forums for a nice use of sponsors (but no adds) to monetize a site with a small (but significant and targeted) audience.