Context for my question: I'm a developer who's terrible at monetising, or even marketing, side projects.
The site: https://reqres.in/
And put some sort of analytics on that button you can track. Once someone clicks it do a simple alert(“we don’t have a pro plan at this point but thanks for showing your interest. We will follow up later when we do”).
Then, let it sit for a week. IF you get some non 0 amount of clicks, reach out to the people who clicked it and ask what they’d like.
That should take you less than an hour to implement and be a great first step.
As someone who did a startup before, it was surprising to me when I first learned how eager people are to throw money something that made them feel better. A part of me just went "ooh API stuff" and hoped for more.
You don't need to be good at "monetizing" to just ask people how you can improve. Throw a little survey box in the corner, and the people that use this thing enough will let you know what would make their lives better. Those people will use that thing, and you ask them to contribute ($$$) a little bit so that you can do more of that. Some of them will do it.
congrats on building something useful, most companies struggle to do that, looks like you're about to kill it!
Instead get a custom advertising deal. Tech companies often have a large advertising budget and they can't spend it on billboards. You can try to contact companies like Twilio, who want to target developers. Give them a rate card (like $1000 for a top banner of a certain size for 1 month, $300 for a bottom banner, etc). In the rate card also include how many unique visitors you're getting and how active they are.
You can also put up some affiliate links. Like Triplebyte occasionally gives out $5000 if you refer someone who gets a job through them.
A friend of mine had a blog with less unique visitors, but using these techniques, he went on to build a million dollar company. You've got the asset, now you just have to monetize it.
1) install basic advertising via AdSense. 4.5mm visitors will monetize
2) affiliate link to a useful, paid product that your users could also use. If they click through the link and buy, you are paid a commission.
3) limit the # of API requests. Charge $X/mo for more than Y requests. Offer an unlimited plan for a higher price.
Once you have that data you have a very clearly defined target audience to go after via a product or custom advertising
- You can use it as an enabler aka Lever to get your next job, consulting gig, projects etc.
- You can run small ads that are contextual to your visitors and call it a win - win
- You can understand the type of use cases your visitors are coming in for and depending on the kind of jobs they are doing/using you for start a Pro (and Possibly Plus) Plan.
- Or you can do a mixture of all of the above.
What should you do? Decide if you are excited about doing this and also the time you want to spend doing all this. Depending on those you can choose to do whatever you want to do. Hope this helps and best of luck :D
- For the traffic: do the users just find it on Google Search, and then leave immediately? What are they looking for?
- For the requests: is it all from 1 or 2 users? Are there many users? Can you talk to them (email, chat box, ...). Do they use it for personal projects or for work? etc.
Once you have an idea of what's going on, you could start charging money, potentially.
Good job! It's time to start sucking just a little less at monetisation (0.2% or more, ideally).
If you want to bounce ideas feel free to reach out, but there are good starter tips in the other comments!
Check stats carefully