By Rich Whittle and Tim Kerber

If you run a web site, you probably answer a lot of questions from your visitors. And as your site traffic increases so do the number of questions.

This is an interesting online business model. It may prove to be a way to test the viability of a membership site. At the very least it could add another stream of income for some small business web site owners.

You want to be helpful, but unless you are are running a paid membership site, you could be losing time and money.

Here's how one web site owner turned those questions into a new revenue stream.

Question For A Fee

For 15 years, Kit Cassingham has been a top consultant and trainer for the bed and breakfast industry. If someone wants to start, grow or buy a bread and breakfast business, they contact her.

Kit's problem was that she loved talking about the business. But it got to the point where she had to stop answering people for free. She recalls that she had one person call and 'pick her brain' for an hour when she realized that she would never see a penny for that hour.

So, using Paypal, Kit launched a pay-as-you-go consulting offer online called 'Ask Kit.'

She offers multiple options for different budgets to get as much business as possible. Questioners can pay $27 to get a personal, emailed answer to a particular question or pay Kit's standard rate of $150 per hour (sold in hourly increments) for a one-on-one telephone session.

Here's Kit's web site: http://www.thebandblady.com

Notice how 'Ask Kit' is prominently displayed on every web page?

Here's how she set up her 'Ask Kit' page: http://www.thebandblady.com/ask-kit.html

Note: PayPal has no set up fee and charges only 2.9% of the transaction + a 30 cent transaction fee.

Additional Revenue Streams

The paid advice is not the only revenue stream that Kit has on her site. She also has a variety of related ebooks and related manuals.

You can see a collection of her offerings here: http://www.thebandblady.com/e-books.html

While browsing through her site, it occurred to me that she could profit even further by offering reprints of some of the questions she has already answered. She could put the questions on individual pages (for the search engines to rank) and partially answer each. This teaser could then lead visitors to her site to purchase the remainder of the answers for a small sum (say $3 or $5), all via paypal.

She would get a nice additional listings with the search engines and be able to resell the work she has already done for past clients.

Its an interesting online business model to take a look at. There are quite a few people who could probably adapt this to their own knowledge that they could offer others.