Best website for international buyers?

How do I earn from a website like Flipkart in India with only visitors, no buyers? Would ads help?

• Would this income without buyers help me at least to maintain servers? Or less than that? Or much more than that? So how much? Ofcourse I am gonna use cheap servers like digital ocean but still not sure how many servers are need. Is there any page that says this?(servers required per requests)

• Answer:

  The Short Answer :Identify Topic -> Publish -> Marketing -> Get Traffic -> Monetize -> Scale Up So by worrying about server load initially one is "putting the cart before the horse". The Long Answer: Identify Topic. You are looking to monetize a website or blog without selling anything. So it has to be a site or blog with rich content that will a need or help visitors in some way. That "some way" is what you need to identify - what is the niche or topic that the site /blog will feature. If you alone plan to write, you should have knowledge and adequate experience in that topic. e.g. you could write on movies or cricket - the two hot topics in India. But you need to stand out among the countless others who offer content in similar genres. If you plan on crowdsourcing i.e. ask your visitors to contribute, then you need to incentivize them for their efforts. Remember you should offer something different to stand out and not just recycle content from other places - online or offline. Your site will be simply dumped by visitors. Publish. This is when you begin planning and implementing your site architecture, design, hosting etc. There are enough blogs and websites who will help you with this. DigitalOcean or Linode or such VPS hosting will do initially. You can also consider RackSpace. Marketing. After you publish, you need to get the word out. Online marketing includes search engine, emails, social media marketing and more. Again these topics have been talked about enough on the web. Go search. Get Traffic. Hopefully, all that marketing will get you traffic. If your content is good / helpful, your visitors come back and you get more visitors too. Monetize. This is where you begin to start asking how to make money. Ads is certainly one of them, but you cannot plaster your site / blog with ads, which will simply put off visitors. They have to be related to your content to make them work. Another way is 'affiliate marketing'. You post links in your content about some products or services. If your site / blog is about technology, post affiliate links to Flipkart, Amazon etc who will pay you a percentage of the profits made. e.g. you write a post about "Top 5 Android Phones in India" and include links to those phones' product page (with your affiliate ID) on FlipKart, Amazon etc. Other ways are indirect monetization - by speaking / writing assignments e.g. Amit Agarwal of Labnol. Scale Up. If all the steps above are successful, congrats, you must be a pretty successful site / blog. Now, you should hire experts to get you to scale up. Based on the usage and other metrics, they will advise and implement this step. You can read about scalability on http://highscalability.com . Earning PotentialDepends. There are bloggers who claim to make 6-figure income (dollars) from Google Adsense or affiliate income. But, as with everything, they are very few. Most blogs and content sites simply fizzle away. So, it all depends on your hard work. If you fall for those 'sit-and-let-the-money-roll-in' sites and ebooks, you will waste your time and money. Instead, write good content. There are sites like copyblogger who help you write for the web (yes, it is different than writing books and on print media). Browse through popular sites and blogs in your niche and you will get an idea. As Vidya Balan (The Dirty Picture) would have put it - your site should be Content. Content. Content.