Forum Moderators: skibum
I currently have an e-commerce site, and it's been going for a little while now, but I've always been interested in online advertising and revenue from other sources.
I'm getting to understand some of the jargon and acronyms, and I've been reading a number of posts from this site (worth the subscription, definitely) and I have a vague understanding of the multitudes of skills that are required to put a working site together I think.
Knowing that I have holes in my grasp of the subject, and not quite knowing how to ask the right questions - I thought my post might be helpful to other newbies.
So far (in no particular order, sorry), I personally (so I'm ignoring things like presentation, content quality etc. because I take them as given) have learned that:
1) Adsense will make you more money if you selectively filter out poor/bad ads.
2) Building niche sites work
3) Hubs and satellite sites, broken neatly into different topic areas work
4) Ad-placement in terms of location and depth helps a lot
5) Companies like CJ which can be used to place links/banners/ads on your site, and they pay per click (even if the customer does not buy anything at the other side).
6) Companies like Ebay/Amazon that pay - but only if the customer signs up or buys something within a number of days if they go through you first.
7) Google doesn't like gambling links on the same site as Adsense
8) Be aware of when engines reindex your site(s). Don't make significant changes while it's crawling?
9) Be aware of when to promote your site more heavily - there are topic-biased peaks and troughs in a year.
10) Consider the use of automated keyword managers if you have a zillion sites (this is my own inference, but I'm sure it's on this site somewhere if I searched...)
11) Links from other sites are better than no links from other sites, and are more likely to raise your PR
12) More sites/visitors/clickthroughs = more revenue
My questions (and there may be more that I should be asking, but I'm not aware of them ... please offer any assistance if you feel like it):
* Am I always guaranteed revenue from a niche topic? That is - should I find a niche I like first (let's assume I can write/construct a good site about anything), or should I look through all the affiliate companies and find a suitably well-paying group, and THEN create the site or topic?
* How will people find you if you're a start-up page? I know you can use Adwords, link exchanges and wait for organic crawls - but then, am I underestimating how truely 'niche' some topics can be? Are we talking near googlewhacking level here? :)
* Does it matter if I buy a domain now, and slowly populate it? Or does it work best if I have a complete site offline, then put the whole thing online in one go so as to appear more complete?
* Or maybe I should just think about having an 'aged' site which gets crawled... instead of worrying about content yet?
* I'd love to ask what kind of per-click prices people here get, but perhaps a better question is - what ranges of per-clicks are available? What's the lowest and highest you've had? (is this a newb question?)
Am I heading in the right direction? I think my confusion at the moment stems from the fact that there are so many 'affiliate'-type companies, I don't really know what criteria I should be using to choose them.
Thanks for reading... I hope this'll be useful for someone else.
12) More sites/visitors/clickthroughs = more revenue
Depends on who you ask. I think that you probably can't rely on one site for your livelihood, but I do think quality within your niche is better than quantity. I would feel proud of your first site before building your second. then make your second better before going on to your third...
I work mainly in B2B spaces, so volume is nowhere near as important as quality.
1) Adsense will make you more money if you selectively filter out poor/bad ads.
I would rather bet on:
AdSense will make you more money if you quit displaying ads to traffic that is poorly qualified to buy the products/services they advertise.
I think CJ and Linkshare are both geared more towards a cost-per-action model rather than cost-per-click. In other words, you'll make more money by inserting links from different merchants (via cj) in order to make a commission per some kind of sale or lead.
5) Companies like CJ which can be used to place links/banners/ads on your site, and they pay per click (even if the customer does not buy anything at the other side).
There may be a few CJ affiliate programs that pay you per click but 99.9% only gives you a commission when you generate a sale or a lead.
