Introduction

I deeply appreciate your willingness to support this site in whatever way you can or choose to. For anything that you do to support this site, I sincerely thank you.

Websites like this one have numerous methods available to them for generating revenue. These include advertisements, sales of products, affiliation programs, donations, and many others. Some are intrusive, some not. Some require you to say, "Yeah, I want to contribute now" and take an action. Others rely on what you do on the site to generate revenue payments from other sites in ways that do not alter your experience on the site.

On this page I want to explain each of the methods that I have considered for use on this site. If you have any questions or want to send me a comment on my use of one of these methods, or to suggest another method, please Contact Me or leave a comment at the end of this page.

PLEASE NOTE:  This article is thorough. However, it is not necessarily exhaustive or complete. If you feel that anything here is confusing or incomplete, or you believe a particular point is missing and should be addressed, I urge you to Contact Me.

Affiliate Marketing Programs

An example of an Affiliate Program is Amazon’s Associates program. When I place an entry for a book on one of my pages or posts, I can make the cite for the book into a link that will take you to Amazon’s page for that book if you click on the link.

Although Amazon.com could change its rules in the future, at the moment I receive a fee from Amazon if you actually buy the book during that specific Amazon visit or within a specified period therafter. If you decline to buy the book, I do not receive a fee. In all cases, the price you would pay for the book is not affected. I should also note that Amazon does not currently allow me to provide a link to a Kindle version of the book, which is normally cheaper. If that changes at some point in the future, I may be able to start linking to Kindle versions for some of the books I cite.

Other affiliate programs have different rules, but they all rely on you voluntarily choosing to click the link that will take you to their product page associated with that link on my site. (Please don't forget to come back to my site after you go to their product page!)

Several companies provide affiliate community services both to merchants that wish to run an affiliate program and to sites like TheLiberative.com that would like to earn money by providing affiliate links on their site. I have chosen to join the affiliate community run by ShareASale.com, primarily because they both have an excellent reputation and also provide affiliate programs for some products and services used by TheLiberative.com and TheLiberative (me).

In general, whether with individual merchants (such as Amazon.com) or with an affiliate community such as that provided by ShareASale.com, my intent is to obtain support for TheLiberative.com in an honest and relatively unobtrusive manner. To a significant degree, I also intend that specific products or services showcased on TheLiberative.com should be ones with which I have personal – and satisfactory – experience, and I will note that whenever possible.

As of March, 2010, I have three affiliate programs active with ShareASale.com: (1) for ShareASale.com itself, (2) for the Thesis theme that I use on this website, and (3) for PhonePower.com which provides my home phone service via VoIP. These three are good examples of the type of affiliate program I will generally choose to use on TheLiberative.com.

I also have an affiliate relationship with my webhosting company, Bluehost.com.

I will be adding other merchants or affiliate services as I go along.

Affiliate banners appear in the footer of each page and occasionally at the bottom of individual posts.

I hope that you find my implementation of these affiliate links acceptable and also useful. If you wish to comment on these affiliate programs, please Contact Me to explain your concerns or to make a suggestion on how to improve the implementation.

Donations

I am not a tax-deductible organization. However, on the web, the word "donations" is used more broadly. If you believe that my work and other material on this site has been of general help or value to you, then you can click on the Donation button shown in the sidebar. This is for donations to express your appreciation for the site as a whole.

I may also place a Donation button next to a specific downloadable item in the main part of a page. This kind of Donation button will be obviously associated with the specific item and will not be located in the sidebar. (Of course, you will still see the general Donation button in the sidebar.) If you like the item, you can use its accompanying Donation button to express your appreciation.

Again, using a Donation button is always voluntary on your part. Please accept my gratitude for using one.

I have made arrangements with PayPal to use their Donation service. Note that you don't need to have a PayPal account in order to make a donation via PayPal. I am displaying the button here below, so you can see what it looks like.

Feel free to use this button to make a donation!

Monthly, Quarterly and Annual Subscriptions

I encourage active supporters of the site (including you, of course) to set up a subscription to pay a small amount of money on a recurring basis to support this site. To that end I provide two different options, one that uses PayPal’s subscription service and the other which uses Amazon’s subscription service. You may pick either one.

To create a new subscription, or to cancel an existing subscription, you need to go to the Subscription Management page. This page will help you take care of all matters related to setting up, modifying, or canceling a subscription. You can always find the link to the Subscription Management page in the sidebar's "Please Support This Site" section.

Since I give you two options for creating a subscription (one for PayPal and one for Amazon), to modify or cancel a subscription you must remember which of the two services you used to create the subscription in the first place. If you try to cancel a subscription with PayPal, and PayPal tells you that no such subscription exists, check your Amazon account to see if you actually made the subscription through Amazon (see three paragraphs below for details on how to get to your subscription page at Amazon).

I should also note that you are able to go to your PayPal or Amazon Account page and login there to manage an existing subscription. For example, with PayPal you can go to your PayPal account page and check the "Recurring Payments" (or some similar title) section on that page. It may list your subscription to this site, labeling it a recurring payment, a subscription, an automatic payment, or a preapproved payment. You may be able to modify or cancel the subscription there, instead of using this site's Subscription Management page.

PayPal Subscription Terms to Keep In Mind: In general, I believe PayPal cancels a subscription as of the date of the next payment due, instead of giving a refund partway through the paid term. (However, you will have to see what actually happens when you try to cancel a specific subscription.) This would mean that, if you cancel an existing subscription, the subscription will continue to run until the end of the paid-up term. Also, recurring payments being made through PayPal can be canceled any time up to three Business Days before the next payment is to be made. Otherwise the payment will go through. Please note that these are PayPal's requirements, not mine.

Amazon Subscription Terms to Keep in Mind:Every personal Amazon account is associated with a personal AmazonPayments account. Go to AmazonPayments Login and log in using your personal username and password. If you have an Amazon subscription, you will see "Subscription Details" as a selection. Go there to cancel an existing Amazon subscription or to change your payment method. Note also that you can go there to find out more about Amazon’s terms related to canceling subscriptions and payments.

As a last resort, you can ask me to cancel your subscription by contacting me, making your request, identifying PayPal or Amazon as your service, and supplying the email address you used when you created the subscription (I need that email address to find your record and will keep it private). Use my Contact Form to send me this information. Obviously, I would appreciate it if you would try the automatic buttons on this site first or login to your PayPal or Amazon account page, since these methods should work most expeditiously. If you email me, it may take me a couple of days to try to carry out the cancellation. Whether I am successful at canceling your subscription or not, I promise to email you back with the results. Please note that my contact form is not secure, so don't send sensitive information.

Again, to create or manage a subscription, go to the Subscription Management page.

If you don't wish to Subscribe using PayPal or Amazon but would still like to support this site on an on-going basis, I suggest that you check out the next section on the Kachingle option.

Kachingling: Allocate Money to Sites You Use, Including This Site

Kachingle.com is a very interesting service that lets you set a specific amount of money that Kachingle will bill you each month. Kachingle will watch which sites you visit, but only when you go to a site that has a Kachingle logo on its pages and only if you authorize that Kachingle logo on that site.

At the end of each month Kachingle will divvy up your monthly fee and hand the appropriate share to each kachingled site where you have authorized them to track your use. Kachingle does charge a fee for this service, by taking a portion of your monthly payment from each payment made to your Kachingled websites.

I offer Kachingle.com's service as an alternative to PayPal or Amazon subscriptions because it is easy for you to set up and use, and it enables you to reward the sites you want to reward (provided they are members of the Kachingle network, of course). The service lets you share your popular sites with others and to see other kachinglers' favorite sites. It is that latter service, of sharing sites, that can create additional value for you, value beyond simply using one of my Subscribe buttons described above. People are paying real money to the sites in their lists, which means there is a high likelihood that the sites at the top of their lists are providing real benefit to their visitors and therefore could very well be worth a visit from you.

So check out Kachingle.com, watch the slideshow on their home page, visit their blog. See if you like the service. If you do, then join the Kachingle community. I'm a member, of course, and have provided a Kachingle Medallion on my pages in the sidebar. Here is an active Kachingle Medallion for this site:

If you are already a member of the Kachingle Community, go ahead and click the medallion to activate TheLiberative.com as one of your active sites. If you are not yet a member, then you can use the dropdown menu to go to Kachingle.com and register. If you do so, Kachingle should send you back to TheLiberative.com once you have completed the sign-up process.

I hope you will do this. It's easy, and it provides support to your favorite sites on an on-going basis.

Shopping Carts and eCommerce

Although I am not currently planning on selling physical items, I do plan to offer downloadable items that may require payment before you can download them. These items will be obvious, because they will have near them on the page a PayPal "Buy Now" button or a similar button from Amazon or another service. If I use a cart, then the arrangement will be somewhat different, but in all cases the buttons will be obvious.

Advertising

Advertising looks like a mixed bag for this site. I don’t want intrusive advertising that makes the site's material hard to read or concentrate on. However, it may be a useful way to add extra revenues when I can insert them in a way that is not intrusive.

As of the end of 2009, my site is too new and small to be accepted into Google’s AdSense program. Once I do get into the program, Google-provided advertisements may appear when you do a Search of this site. The Search Box in the sidebar is provided by Google, and they can and do include advertising on the search result page. Personally, I don't find that intrusive, since the search results page is about finding anything related to my search. In that context, advertising can help rather than be intrusive. I hope that you end up feeling the same way.

I have also begun using Amazon banner ads in my sidebar and my footer, as well as occasionally at the bottom of individual posts. Affiliate connections are covered in the Affiliate Marketing Programs section above.

The more that you and other visitors support this site with Donations and Subscriptions, the less pressure there will be on me to insert ads.

If you would like to send me a comment about my advertising methods or how they are presented, please Contact Me.

Closing Remarks

I have provided a description of the various methods I use or may use to generate revenue to support this site and me. If you have anything you would like to add on this subject, or have another method of revenue generation that you think I should look into, feel free to Contact Me.