Forum Moderators: skibum
Background: Site is 5 years old. It is a local city based message forum. It has some automotive content, but most of the site is off topic.
Some stats from the month of April with Geo-IP reporting:
United States Tampa 6982276 21.3 %
United States Reston 3389550 10.3 %
United States Saint petersburg 2181079 6.6 %
United States Orlando 1239199 3.7 %
United States Clearwater 1168462 3.5 %
United States Herndon 754191 2.3 %
United States Brandon 704399 2.1 %
United States Valrico 560557 1.7 %
The vast majority of my traffic is located around my city. Which I would think would draw good locality based advertising.
Some other April stats:
Day------------visits---Pages--Hits---Bandwidth
01 Apr 2005 6351 203890 1132227 6.80 GB
02 Apr 2005 5988 156091 847546 5.62 GB
03 Apr 2005 6040 173830 983311 6.60 GB
04 Apr 2005 6465 203754 1124077 7.41 GB
05 Apr 2005 6472 226451 1233798 7.96 GB
06 Apr 2005 6213 222879 1196517 8.06 GB
07 Apr 2005 6571 231324 1251650 8.13 GB
08 Apr 2005 6254 180659 1030276 6.83 GB
I have a number of advertisers that I sell banners to locally. But, not enough to make any good $$$. I am not a good salesperson, so selling banners for a website face-to-face isnt the best idea!
My local advertisers get anywhere from 5-100 click throughs a day. But, I charge them on a monthly basis, not on click throughs.
My google ads only get like 10 clicks a day. They are also horribly targeted. I am assuming that the low clicks throughs on my google adds is due to them being horribly targeted.
I have spent the past week reading only about SEO, and advertising programs. And am about brain fried on the subject.
How can I make money off this site? Is there anyone who does regional advertising that could benifit from my site?
I am just curious what I should be spending my time trying to fix, or do. Should I be trying to optomize my site for adsense? I am not trying to drive more hits to my site, I just want to drive advertising revenue. The site is already growing faster then I can put hardware in the server.
There are no stupid questions! This stuff evolves so fast, no one can claim they know it all...
Here is a quick tip on how to improve targeting of Adsense Ads on your pages: If your pages are tightly focused on specific topics, it would help Adsense MediaBot to better target the ads it serves up on your pages. If you have pages that talk about many different topics, you may want to consider breaking them up into sevaral tightly focused pages. Doing so should improve your chances of getting well-targeted ads. Try different Ad formats, placements, and color-schemes. Monitor the CTR, and total revenue for each of those variations and you may find a setup that gives you better results. HTH.
