Forum Moderators: skibum
The site has been up for 3 years. It's got pretty decent SEO. It currently gets about 1.8 million hits a month and growing. It gets over 11,000+ visits a month. 2 months ago I started collecting email addresses when you click on the pictures and I currently have about 2,500 legitamate opt-in subscrbers for a newsletter that has yet to go out.
I've put adSense on most pages, and it really doesn't do much at all. Maybe $50/month.
My question is HOW do I make money on this site? I will be the first to admit that I'm a great creative guy and a lousy business guy. I don't know what to do here. It's not a huge site, but almost 2 million hits a month seems pretty substantial to me. And it's a very targeted audience - young people probably 18-35, trying to figure out where to go out at night..... and then throw in some lookers that just want to scope out the hot girls.
My thoughts are I need to hit up bars, clubs and promoters in the area and try to get them to banner-advertise on the site. When the email database gets large enough, I can charge them to advertise on a calendar-of-events type newsletter that goes out. And they can advertise their club/event.
Anybody have any thoughts/ideas? Am I on the right track? Is there something I'm totally missing? Right now I make $50/month on this site. Can I ever make enough money to do this full time - say $5,000 a month? Is that possible with the traffic I have now or do I need to build way more traffic first? I mean I started this thing for fun, but it's big enough now that I feel really, really stupid for not making more money on it.
I think the key is to partner with a club, and tell all those guys looking at pictures that the next event will be at Bar X, and then they'll go there to see the girls in person....
Yep! I totally agree with that one. It's definitely not the "I'm shopping" user. It's the information foraging user, and they're just out looking at the girls. Although it is a nightlife site, not a porn site. It exist to identify "good" spots to go to. 2 things that I've heard that I think might work would be an affiliate program with an online ticketing site - I actually approached one but they aren't taking on any more affiliates until they complete a huge site redesign on thier end. So that's on hold. I think another good idea as someone suggested - some sort of a guest list where I get.... whatever, $2 or $3 a person for everyone who signs up then shows up at whatever bar.
1) the site will get rejected for being "adult" themed
2) if not rejected you'll have a site covered in tacky smilie ads with shockingly low CPM rates.
I've tried them and ditched them.
