I need help monetizing. I feel like a fish out of water!

Hello WF Members, as always I am writing this with the hope of receiving honest, constructive feedback based on your experiences and knowledge.

I would like to start by thanking you for taking the time to read this, it is somewhat long and detailed and I thank you for forgiving my lack of knowledge when it comes to monetizing a website. I would also like to say that while I frequently feel as though I have a "winning idea", I am overcome with feelings of negativity and "fear of failure" that many people have from time to time. As well, I want to say I am very humble as to my successes so far - By that I mean I'm not expecting to make $1000, 500$ or even $100 in a month, yet, - I just want to know what you think is possible with what I have to work with.


First off, I have been familiarized with a few of the ways of making a profit from traffic on a website/online buisiness, through WarriorForum - I will name the ones I have come across and feel as though I understand the most basic premise of how they work : Adsense, Paid Banner Ads, Clickbank Products, Amazon Affiliate (Item Reviews), Fiverr, and also paid services (for instance, you provide your website visitors with a service they need, they pay x dollars and you profit)

Now, I would like to give you an idea of what I have to work with. Right now, I have two web properties that co-exist together - one is based off of social media website Tumblr and the other is a "spin-off" of that blog I created when I realized people loved what I have been creating on my Tumblr blog.

I started my tumblr around 6 months ago. Each month (the last 4) I have had 43,000-50,000 unique visitors to my tumblr page, and 90,000-10,000 page views per month. I post two unique items I have personally created per day, every day. It has Page Rank 4, and this tumblr blog ranks as #1 for my niche compared to other tumblr blogs in the same niche, and Google brings in I think over 1000 uniques a month by keywords, maybe a little less or more. I have not done any monetizing on this and I will explain more in a later paragraph.

I started my own website which really branches out from this and is much more customizable. I offer things like recipes, product reviews, a blog, tutorials, in my area of expertise. It has an attractive theme, simple interface and quite a bit of "depth", in my opinion. I currently get 600-1000 unique visitors a day, but they are all from my Tumblr account - maybe 1-2% are from my Facebook fan page/Twitter and other sources I have just started working on. I also have started list building by offering an "issue" of all my content created each week. It currently has around 400 subscribers.

On my website, I create every article, recipe, tutorial, and review honestly and with the intent of helping others. Of course, this takes plenty of time, and while I love doing it, I can't continue without seeing some form of revenue. As of now, I have created a review section and also a shop with Woocommerce which allows people to support my site by buying the product through Amazon affiliate links/my shop button amazon links. Of course, I don't expect to see any large revenue from this yet - But I have had success! I've converted 4-5 people and made about 8 sales so far - they are low ticket items though, and have only brought in 5$ which does not surprise me at all. I don't send people directly to my shop/reviews, I send them to my site hoping they will get there themselves, which some do.


My question is, what is my BEST option to do now? I am perfectly fine seeing my website/list grow by social media and other sources, but I would love to monetize my blog and website by offering something I can make a decent profit from reliably.

The thing is, I really dislike ads. I think one reason so many people love my tumblr is that I don't put ads on it, which leads me to a dead-end as far as monetizing goes. I know 50,000 uniques a month can make a profit, but I'm a little scared to try anything new. I know I could offer certain services to people, but I don't know what to charge, what would drive people away and what would make people come back for more.


Again, thank-you so much for reading, and any feedback would be very much appreciated. I would love to get some more ideas for this and lastly I apologize for the length of this post.

All the best.

Iceapplez