Forum Moderators: skibum
So far, I'm guessing it would be:
1.) Adsense
2.) Travel affiliate such as expedia/lodging.com
What are some others?
Perhaps travel posters for the locality, too?
What about Expedia or Lodging.com? Do they have any tools or banners that are worth using?
And CJ.com?
We run a general resource directory for our city and usually get an advertising request a day and end up converting one or two a week @ $200/month. Pays a few bills...
Don't ignore this part of the business.
My main competition is from places like expedia, hotels.com, etc that are buying adwords/rankings.
How do you compete against that? I am hoping to make mine more user-friendly and community-based (user reviews, fresh articles, etc).
Am I on the right track?
Sounds like what you're trying to do is build a community.. thats tricky and hard work (very hard work). Online travel is a very tricky space... some people are doing well and 99% are not.
I'm not in the travel area .. but one of my sites does allow people to review and rate doctors, gyms, services, bars and restaurants as a part of a local community website.
...No....
I... uh... don't have any websites... I just hang out in the forums alot. ;)
Also, think of Tanagable items...
Lugage,
Clothing for the climate,
Maybe Swimsuits, who knows.
If you have a good banner managing system, try a little of everything, watch which one's get the most hits, and find more like that.
Depending on the type of site you're running, some bits eg - hotel bookings detract from the independence of the site - ie if I'm selling a room at a hotel - or running an add for it - is a user still going to trust what I have to say? In our case we decided (for the moment) given the glut of hotel booking sites already online, the last thing the web needed was another room booking vortex, and that way we keep our independence which people seem to value.
We initially put adsense on as a test, but it performed way beyond our expectations, so far very targetted and very healthy click throughs - of course, individual mileage will vary from site to site.
For the moment I'll work with CJ to test the water as I'm new to afilate stuff and their interface seems easy to use and pretty intuitive - too US-centric for my tastes, but can work around that. If it ends up generating suficient income I'll put more effort into it and approach vendors directly.
Regardless of all the above, I still put the bulk of my time into content content and more content creation. At the end of the day that's what is most important and will distinguish you from your competitors.
Hope that helps
