Forum Moderators: skibum
Read some threads about webmaster earning $100 or $300 per day, and I really feel completely disappointed with my performance! (to be honest I feel rather stupid!)
The story...
It took for me and my wife about 1.5 years of part time work and 6 months of super-extra full time work (14+ hours per day) to develop one of the larger websites in my country.
Some facts:
Ranking in my country (Alexa): less than 20
Alexa global ranking: Less than 5.000
Google PR: 5
Category: Relationships and dating
Registered Members: 45.000
New Members per day: 150
Unique Visitors per day: 5.000
Content: More than 300 relative and copyrighted articles
Forums: More than 100.000 posts in 7.500
Page views per day: 60.000+
Pages indexed by Google: 50.000+
Language: Non-English (and non Adsence approved)
Advertizing: None (At this time a ad system is ready which can target ads, according to: age, sex, marital status, hobbies, education, country, region etc)
After one and a half month later, introducing some subscriber options to our members we achieved a $30(!) per day income.
I feel that as a webmaster I'm a complete disaster! Especialy if you take in mind that this is now my full time job!
What will you do in my position?
How will use such a site to increase revenue?
Any ideas are most welcomed!
I'm new to this forum, but have had experience making a website profitable. My traffic is less than yours, but my site income (even excluding Adsense) is more than that of my full-time job. Here are some general suggestions:
1. Banner advertising. This is good for non-targeted or poorly targeted traffic. To be conservative, plan on $0.40 eCPM per ad element (banner or skyscraper).
2. Direct ad sales. Your traffic is high enough to warrant direct ad sales. Identify the industries and companies that would be interested in your traffic/topic, put together a brief online proposal, and start cold-calling potential advertisers.
3. Affiliate programs. There is a lot of trial and error using these, but when you find a good one it's like ... well, you know what it's like, you run a dating site.
I can't comment on the non-english traffic/ad sales. I realize these are very generic suggestions, but I would be happy to expand if any suggestion seems promising.
Without knowing which language/country it is hard to suggest particular programmes - I would be useless anyway as I only tend to do well with English speaking sites!
However the last poster was spot on - you need to make the most of your page impressions, and look for programmes that accept forums as well (some run of site advertisers could do this).
I especially liked the direct ad sales advice as this gives you the chance to charge much higher rates - you can even charge tenancy rates (x price for a month) to certain types of advertiser and given your industry that wouldn't be too hard to identify. You can outsource the sales of this initially as well.
I find your ideas really interesting. The problem seems to be that I invested a lot of time and work to be a decent PHP/MySQL developer than targeting in profit... :(
About your suggestions now.
1. Where can I find such banner offers? (Sorry which is the difference between eCPM and CPM?)
2. I already prepare a Brochure in order to contact big companies and advertising agencies. I think that with very competiting prices (about 1/4 of the average pricing) and by offering unique targeting options I will make them a tempting offer (or I hope so...).
3. I'm thinking of using our ad serving system to present affiliate programs depending on the demographics of each member. But:
a. I must find affiliates in Europe (to avoid import taxes for the visitors I send) and achieve a good conversion rate
b. How do I know which affiliate is a decent company and which is a crook?
c. I don't know yet if I can use an AM broker as CJ
Concerning the non-English language, it seems that finally is my largest problem of all :( and it's almost impossible to translate all these thousands texts to english even with a machine translation...
Please, expand your ideas, whenever you have the time and the mood
Alex
thank you for your advise.
The country is Greece and unfortunately is a small european country with its own language.
About the direct sales the only problem seems to be that only a very tiny piece of the total advertinsing spending is going towards internet (0.1% instead of 3.0% of the average of european union) and this 0.1% is divided among the 1-2 bigger websites owned by newpapers & magazines groups.
Any suggestions are most welcomed!
It took 3 years before my site started to generate real revenue (more than $500/month), and is (I hope) still growing. The lessons I'm learning now are how to approach advertisers, and what they are looking for.
In terms of direct ad sales, I have found success finding advertisers among small-medium sized companies, not large companies. A few thousand dollars a month is meaningful to them, but it wouldn't interest a big company. Three or five campaigns like that and you're in the $10k/month range - suprisingly doable.
More than targeting, the important thing for an advertiser is return on investment. Plan to work with the advertiser to optimize their returns from your traffic. Your job is to help them make money - find out how to do that with your traffic. Believe me, if you can make another company money from your traffic, they will pay. Adwords is trying to do that - giving conversion tracking and so on - but as a small publisher you can devote real, personalized effort to improve conversions.
As a simple example, I've shown advertisers how to build landing pages that convert. I confirm exactly how well the campaign is doing, so I can tell whether the money they're paying is worth it.
If you haven't already heard this, let me say it:
Text ads rule. Higher click through rate, easier optimization, and (anecdotally) better conversions.
In terms of banner ad companies, check out burstmedia, fastclick, tribalfusion, and many others you can find in a quick search.
A site I have visited, facebook.com, splits their advertising sales up by university. Meaning that advertisers can purchase ads that only get shown to people of that university. If your site is split into different geographical areas, you could also offer that region-targeted advertising. Smaller businesses might be very interested.
The approach of small-medium companies, is not a bad idea. Maybe I can explore first the members of the site. Most of them have their own business, or work in small-medium companies. The most of them are in the age range of 28-38 and I have a good participation of members in the range of 40-50.
Thanks again :)
Velmu,
As we already are a dating site, I believe that sending people to competiting sites, maybe is not a good idea. Maybe I must first find a way to increase my conversion rate of free-members to paying-members. At this point of time, I think that the conversion rate is extremely low.
Active members (logged in last week) are ~10% of registered members
And Subscribers are ~8% of active members
I would prefer to search for affiliates in no competitive markets first. And if I completely fail as a dating site, then maybe I turn my strategy towards a relationships vortal and start send people to other sites for dating.
Dalgar,
Yes, you're right. The problem is how to approach directly all these SMBs...
Thank you all for you ideas! And of course any other idea is most welcomed!
just some other ideas: you have a lot of data on your members, presumably (location, emails, etc.); the data itself, rather than the exposure, is something you might be able to sell to local businesses (e.g., local florists, wedding consultants, etc.). small businesses might be willing to pay to get direct contact information for those individuals (you'll need to get your legal policies straight though, regarding registration).
you could also help those local businesses market directly to your audience, via newsletters (and charge for product promotion in those newsletters).
another more unorthodox (but works sometimes) approach is to form a buying consortium with your large user base - e.g., give all your members a 5% discount on purchases of flowers at local florist x using promotion code z. you then get a referral bonus each time the promotion code is used. basically, you try to aggregate the demand of your users and use that to negotiate discount for volume (and in exchange you get a cut). harder to pull-off, but its done relatively often by group associations (industry or otherwise).
of course, you could also start charging for some type of dating service (e.g., charge users an nominal fee to make first contact) and see how that works out.
thank you for your optimistic words! :)
thank you for your extended comments.
Regarding the sale of the registration data to third parties, It's not our policy.
The news letters approach seems more interesting.
Regarding the buying consortium, it's something we have thought about, but I'm afraid that it maybe doesn't fit the site's scope. (Relatioships and Dating) or the other hand a approach towards group offerings (with the same other elements you mentioned) maybe it would be more acceptable.
Thank you again for your help!
