How to increase revenue from a portal website?

We solely depend on advertisers.

[Miklo]

Does anyone have a clue on how to maximize ad revenue for a PR 7 website that attracts 1,500,000 visitors/month? We currently offer banner impressions and text links and use FastClick, WebSponsors and other add companies, but the income right now is only around $600/month and we want to increase this.

I would love to get some pointers on how to create good portal content, comparable to MSN content and on how to attract good advertisers. Would rich media banners be better for our website?

We have around 15,000 email subscribers who login to their accounts on a daily basis and other traffic comes from the search engines as we have a very high listing on Yahoo and Google.

Any help appreciated!

[edited by: Drastic at 6:15 pm (utc) on June 30, 2005]
[edit reason] removed specifics [/edit]

[kujoe]

Have you checked out google adsense?

[Miklo]

Yes, it seems that they do not allow our website because it is a portal. Secondly, even if we would be accepted for the program, I would not have a clue on which keywords I should focus.

Any other thoughts?

[bweebco]

What kind of portal is it?

My suggestion would be to build several sites around it, so if it is targetting webmaster, make a couple new domains for web tools, SEO stuff etc, target the high paying key words, link to it off the portal and with that type of traffic it will be indexed in google as well as get your visitors around 50 to 100 a day who will be clicking on high paying targetted ads.

[Joeseph]

You have over a million hits a month, why aren't you selling ad space, for say, $500 a month, or whatever?

Most people don't click on ads, so since you have so many people coming in, it's better to sell space.

[Miklo]

We are selling ad space, but somehow, it never gets filled, although we don't yell out to everybody: Hey, we got Ad space! But if people are interested, they can always contact us. We get some requests, but most of them want a free link and when I redirect them to the advertising rates (which are really cheap, believe me!) they do not reply.

[Joeseph]

Miklo, what's your site's address?

[dmerton]

I would look at FastClick if you havent already

[top5jamaica]

unusual to be getting that much traffic and making just that. do you use fa$tclick popunders at all?

where did you get it from that adsense doesn't accept portals? it would depend on the subject matter of your website ... so what industry/subject do you cover?

also miklo, you said "I would not have a clue on which keywords I should focus." ... how adsense works is that you put their code on your website and it will serve targeted ads depending on the existing content on the specific pages. so you don't have to worry at all about 'which keywords'.

[Miklo]

I can't disclose the URL of the website here as it will be immediately edited by the Administrator so if you want to know, just send me a PM.

We have applied for Adwords some time ago, but we were not accepted because they do not allow portals or search engines. (We also have a search feature on our website.)

Also, there is no real content on the website. There are some search features and streaming news. Most vistors have an email address with us and the rest is coming through search engines. We already use FastClick, along with some other advertising companies.

Hope this answers some of the questions.

[Drastic]

<aside>No problem to have your url in your profile - that's what profiles are for.</aside>

[Miklo]

Okay, I have added the URL to my profile.

Anyway, just another question: How do you add geo targeting for advertising? Can you do this yourself, or are there any programs available where you can add this feature for default banners/text links?

For instance, we use FastClick and Websponsors, but as far as I know, geo-targeting is not an option with these programs.

Just wondering how to do this or what code you would need to implement.

[div01]

You should look at selling text links.

[Miklo]

Okay, have done so with a firm called TextLinkBrokers.

Anyone have any experience with them? Anyway, we have decided to put up 4 text links to start with for $140/month. We will increase this if we like the links etc.

[Drastic]

Let us know how it works out.

You may want to take a look at AdBrite as well.

[sachac]

Sticky me your url and maybe I'll have some suggestions or take an ad if the demographics are right.

Kama