How to be Websmart

We feel that any consumer information site should participate in a full disclosure policy. In other words, you should know how a site makes money, so that you can take that into consideration when you browse through the information on that site.

Our primary purpose is to develop strategies (or discover services) that save people time, money, or effort, in the best way we can. We do this in good faith. Yet it’s hard to prove this intention to our readers - the best way we know how is to provide our ideas, and allow the community to decide if they are really helpful to consumers.

But another way we can hopefully display our good intentions is to be forthright about our revenue streams with our readers. We do hope to make money with this blog, for different reasons (Kesav, for example, will face some hefty law school loans when he begins graduate school in the fall).

We want you to know how we make money. We believe that being upright and honest (and specific when possible) about our revenue opportunities will give you a better perspective on our blog. By knowing how we make money, you can take that information into consideration when you judge how useful our articles are.

How to be Websmart makes money three ways.

1. Donations

By far, our most important source of earnings are donations by our readers.

Kesav once read about a lady who ran a restaurant in some mid-western US state. Apparently, she had menus with no prices on them. People came to her restaurant and ordered the food they wanted. After they finished eating, they paid her the amount of money that felt was fair for the food they had eaten.

We feel the same way about this blog. We want How to be Websmart to be free - we like the idea of ‘free information’ on the Internet. But we also feel that if you save money, time, or learn something useful - we’d hope that you donate to our website what you feel our analysis/information is worth.

A donation, no matter how big or small, helps us know that what we are doing matters. Sure, the money is important. But the act of giving money on your part is one way to show us that we are on the right track - that How to be Websmart is a good idea.

You can make a one-time donation by PayPal or major credit card by using the appropriately labelled box in the middle of every page. The donation amount is set by you.

You should know that there are no additional benefits provided for donations, and that all donations are voluntary on your part. Also, donations are not tax deductible in any way.

To all our donors: we appreciate the support.

2. Affiliate or Referral Programs

Affiliate or referral programs are programs offered by companies to send web users their way. Basically, if a webpage sends a user to a company, that company pays the webpage ‘referral’ revenue. That revenue could be a flat fee (such as: $1 dollar for each person who signs up) or it could be a percentange based transaction (such as: 3% of every sale generated by a referral). Affiliate or referral programs can be thought of as financial incentives to promote electronic word of mouth.

Our policy is: we write a useful article first. We find useful online websites and companies, and devise any strategies. If there are referral links we can use, we sign up for them later AFTER we’ve written our article. That way, we hopefull craft the best strategy, and then make money if possible.

With respect to referral links, we get paid by companies, not by you. So, for example, Ebates.com will pay us $5 if you click through us to its webpage, sign-up, and use its service. But Ebates is free for you. It costs you nothing to use the service.

Nevertheless, we feel you should know about any affiliate programs listed in an article, so you hopefully don’t feel we’ve been sending you to sites/services simply to make money.

At the end of every article, you should see a Disclaimer called Full Disclosure. If there are referral or affiliate links in an article, we’ll publish it under that heading, so you know how much money we earn or percentage we get from those links.

By building referral links into our articles, our hope is to create a win-win situation for our readers and ourselves. For example, if your use our article: How to Shop at AllPosters.com every time you shop at AllPosters.com, hopefully our steps will save you money, because you can easily and quickly find coupon codes. And the simple fact that you clicked-through our AllPosters.com link and make a purchase generates revenue for our site, at no extra cost to you.

More often than not, you’ll find that a specific article does not make us any money. If we don’t earn any money from a particular article, we’ll note that down too.

There will be rare cases when you will see what appear to be banner affiliate links in our articles: for examples, check out our articles on saving when you eat out or how to get free business cards online. The reason we have image links in these specific cases, as opposed to text affiliate links, is because when we went to find referral links for these articles, we found that the specific affiliate programs we signed up for did not have text referral links. In these cases, we try to find the least obtrusive image referral link we could find, and use it in the article. If you know a way we can change these to text links, please let us know.

3. Ads

We have ads - but our current policy is to put ads in the column to the site of the article, or at the end of an article, and mostly keep keep ads out of the main text. We try to keep most of our ads as text ads to keep this site easy on the eyes, and hopefully have Howtobewebsmart.com load relatively quickly.

Our most visible ads (at the top of the center column) could be thought of as ‘billboard ads’. Basically, the more people we get to our site, the more we can sell our adspace for. We like these ads, because it provides us with an incentive to provide good content. The better the content we provide, hopefully the more users we attract, and thus the more we can charge for ad space on Howtobewebsmart.com.

In the rare case that we decide to put advertisments in the main text, they will be clearly labelled ‘advertisement(s):’ or ’sponsored link(s):’ with the link after it.

So - we do our best to be honest with our readers about how we make money, while using all advertising and affiliate links in accordance with the agreements we have signed with particular companies.

That’s it! Is there any more information we could include in this description? Is there any way we can make this better? Let us know below!

Thanks for taking the time to read this page.