Make Money From Free Products With Donations
By Richard
This is a popular passive income stream for lots of WordPress developers, especially of plugins, and is also quite popular amongst bloggers who pump out lots of useful content for free (eg Steve Pavlina) – not to mention a great lead generator for future premium product sales.
The idea rests on your product adding a ton of value to users lives and you systematically and nicely / in a fun way, asking for donations.
The way you frame ‘the ask’ is crucial and the payment system behind it also needs to be dead simple…2 clicks and I’m done.
I would never rely on donations as an income stream, unless you plan on building a bid audience, of which 0.01% might want to donate you a few dollars to buy a beer.
Even a huuuugely popular WordPress plugin like Contact Form 7 appears to desperately be in need of donations just to maintain developer support.