You may have noticed when you view one of my technical articles, a panel appears on the bottom of the page asking for a $5 contribution. I decided to ask users for voluntary contributions to fund the DotNetNuclear training materials. I call it a contribution, not a donation for a reason. Many bloggers used to ask their users for donations and would place a Paypal donation button on their website. This is very problematic because Paypal has cracked down on people that ask for donation when they are not a non-profit entity and aren't using the proceeds for charity. My contribution button is a standard Paypal item checkout - not a donation.
I know what you're thinking...who would pay to read your blog? Well, my technical articles are more than blogs, they are code projects and/or videos that teach about a particular topic. These articles/videos take me on average 10 hours to put together. I can't really sustain publishing free tutorials indefinitely.
There are subscription-based training sites out there like DNN Creative and DNN Hero which do a really good job and are cheap (I have had a subscription to DNNCreative). But I thought it to be an interesting concept to put my stuff out for free public consumption and ask $5 per tutorial to users who benefit from it.
I think it is a pretty good concept. Only time will tell how profitable it will be. Please comment and share this article with others and let me know what you think.
Oh...and by the way. This one's free!