My Site gets 17 million hits a month and makes no cash

money, advertising help

[hankddog]

So I heard about this website from a podcast and I thought what perfect people to give me a hand. Sounds like you guys had a great time in New Orleans.

I've been creating websites for the last 5 or so years and one of them, a pro wrestling news site using ASP.NET, has really taken off. Last month it got
Unique visitors:
160816

Number of visits:
406958

Pages:
4271496

Hits:
17158139

I made $#*$!.xx. I use Google adSence, Advertising.com and Momma Media solutions.

Does those numbers seem right? I think those numbers should alteast bring in $1000. I read somewhere that my main competitor made $80,000 one year. My Alexa ranking is in the top 30,000. What am I doing wrong? I have mostly banners and one pop up. Are there other things I can do to try and make money?

Thanks

[edited by: eljefe3 at 4:34 am (utc) on July 5, 2005]

[MrSpeed]

I don't think the numbers you quote are so bad considering the topic of the site.

Celebrity, humor, video game sites etc... are some of the hardest sites to make money from. Your visitors are not there to buy or research something to buy. They are there to freeload and look for free pictures of Stacy Keibler ;)

[ska_demon]

A 0.4% conversion rate on a site like yours would certainly be considered average. Maybe you should look at putting some links to related material such as books, videos, tickets to live shows etc. Give your users something else to look at, something that will grab their attention and make them want to open their wallets. There is a lot more you can do than just contextual ads.

Ska

[hankddog]

So you are talking about something like Amazon.com? Do you recomend other programs?

[Matt Probert]

Are you doing 4 million pages a month? If so, why not try the bigger agencies - Fastclick and Casale?

As people say, your readers (like ours) are after something for nothing, so CPM adverts may pay you better.

Matt

[hankddog]

We are doing alittle over 4 million pages a month. I will give them a try. Anyone ever try that paypal donation thing?

[hdpt00]

I would try and get your PR up as high as you an and sell text links.

[ccam96]

Some other possibilities include affiliate links to ticket sales sites such as stubhub or wehaveseats.com. You may even be able to link directly to wrestling events through deep linking or datafeed.

You could also promote DIRECT TICKET® Pay Per View which offers boxing, wrestling and concerts and then include a link to a satellite dish service to “sign up” for service. Many of the satellite dish service people pay nice commissions ($100 and up for signups).

[Psazf]

Hi All,
Sorry the question from a some new guy in these matters. When you talk at

Unique visitors: 160816
Number of visits: 406958
Pages: 4271496
Hits: 17158139

what do you want to mean with each of the 4 variables?

Thanks in advance for reply
PSAZF
(Portugal)

[isuccess]

The trick is to find out more about your visitors. One way of doing it is by setting up a small poll or survey booth on your site. What you want to know is what they are interested in. Once you've gathered the answers, set up affiliate products (links) that address their needs.
That should generate "some" additional revenue for you. Keep up the good work. Getting unique visitors is a big accomplishment considering the 54M domain names out there.

[ska_demon]

Psazf Bom Dia

Unique visitors: 160816 * The number of unique individuals that visited the site. This should include bots and spiders.

Number of visits: 406958 * You can see this is about 4 times the number of unique visitors. This suggests that the unique visitors went to the site about 4 times each in the month.

Pages: 4271496 * This is the number of pages viewed by all the users in the month period.

Hits: 17158139 * This is the number of file requests for the site. This includes page views and bot visits.

Hope this helps

Ska

[Psazf]

Hi ska_demon,

Thank you very much for your explanation. Now I start to understand your metrics!

By the way (bom dia!) - are you portuguese?
If so, can you please help me (and maybe others) with my questions in topic "http://www.webmasterworld.com/forum20/4792.htm"?

Thanks (Obrigado) and kind regards
PSAZF
(Portugal)

[ska_demon]

Psazf

Sorry I'm not Portugese. I used to own some land just north of Sagres. Carrapeteira I think it was called. I had intentions of moving out there so started to learn to speak the lingo.

Ska

[hankddog]

What is your thoughts on eBay as an affiliate. Any luck with them?

So basically what I'm getting from everyone is that banners can make you some money. Selling things on your site is where the real money is to be made?

[ska_demon]

So basically what I'm getting from everyone is that banners can make you some money. Selling things on your site is where the real money is to be made?

Banners are generally the worst converting form of advertising. A text link can often be very effective.

ie Get Tickets to the next big show HERE!

People would be inclined to click to see how much the tickets are. Bang! Cookie dropped. You could have a month or more where if they return to the ticket site you get credit for the sale.

You need to think about incorporating ads into your site where they won't look out of place but also will encourage people to click on them.

In my experience this is an order of effectiveness.

Best: Text Links
Next: Product image links
Worst: Banner Links

Ska

[Psazf]

Hi ska_demon
I know Carrapateira! Nice place.
It's about 250Km from where I live (Lisbon) but I already had some holidays there.
Kind regards
PSAZF

[shri]

Humor me for a few minutes.

Your EPM (earnings per thousand visitors) is the number that you need to look at. Don't get bogged down in page views and "hits".

>> 623 / 160 = 3.9 (approx)

Basically you're earning about $3.90 for every thousand visitors which is actually not too bad.

Here's what I'd do. Assuming you want to grow this into a business.

Look at the number of visitors per country. Do you get most of your traffic from US or non-US sources? Do this by investing some time and may be a few dollars into a product like MaxMind.

Look at running a survey on your site to figure out how many of your visitors actually have the ability to buy something online (gender, age and income are important).

Once you've isolated the source of your traffic you can then figure out how to find good affiliate programs and sources of income within the major countries.

Fan items like posters, t-shirts etc would be useful only if the merchant can ship to the countries your visitors come from.

Ebay might be a good program if you have US visitors. Use their editor kit to target collectibles.

Amazon will give the ability to setup DVD, toys and other related items.

>> I think those numbers should alteast bring in $1000. I read somewhere that my main competitor made $80,000 one year.

The difference between $623 and $1000 is marginal to be honest. Tweaks in your adsense location / blending can get you there if done correctly.

>> $80,000

Again, depends on how much your competitor is working on monetising the traffic.

[hankddog]

So I haven't had any luck trying to sell things like DVD's, tickets or ringtones. But some tweeking of the google adsence might be making a huge change. Thank you all for your help. I will let you know how I did at the end of the month. What work and what didn't.

[questwtg]

You should start your own web site advertising. Like $200. for one week of text or banner ads on your site.

[hankddog]

Thank also brings up a good question. I have been approched by some people about advertising. What types of rates do you have? Also, what do you think my rates should be? From what people have said on this forum, my site gets about 4-5 million page views a month. Which is the real number to look at.

[Inquire]

How can you make zero cash with those kinds of numbers and AdSense ads up? Surely some visitors click?

[Michael Anthony]

Site getting loads of traffic but making no money?

Just close it and build a profitable one - much easier than trying to flog a dead horse!

[jsanders]

Sell the ad space. Advertising space is worth what you can sell it for and although people do make some money on affiliate programs and adsense, there ARE advertisers that want to reach this (and any) group -- you just need to find them or sell them (or get someone to do it for you).

Too many web publishers are content to collect pennies on the dollar for what their ad inventory is actually worth by letting it go to affiliate for free or getting a few bucks here or there for adwords. Just my $.02.

[hankddog]

It makes money just alot less than I thought. Have you guys heard of Vibrant Media IntellITXT?

[mojomike]

web metrics :

[targeting.com...]

download the pdf file and print it out ( 62 pages )

if you are truly into maxing out the performance of earnings of your web site, than this is the first step in knowing where your clients are.

I used this paper to learn,
a) where my clients were coming from ( taught me to spend my personal ad dollars better )
b) Where they would stop and leave ( taught me where to leave out going links that would get clicked )
c) Where they were passing and reading certain pages ( taught me exactly where to place the cpm ad's )
d) how to maximize the value of a user ( taught me ( well more like I came up with the idea ) how I should open a forum and maximize the revenue from a mailing list, I learned that my users were from 17 to 35 years old, would read my e-mails, 33% would go to my site after reading the e-mails.

So I tell everyone that they should read this white-paper, then really spend the time and energy ( which is a lot ) to execute the process of learning about their users and the web site.

So things that I learned that helped, color change in the text might stop a user and have them click a link. redesign of the paragraph layout might hold a person slightly longer and you can get off another extra click %.

Mojomike

Mojomike

[hankddog]

Cool. I will read that. Thanks. Has anyone ever heard of adbrite.com or use it?

[Phillipx]

im currently using adbrite and it seems to work ok although I dont get nearly the hits that some people here get I have managed to earn .50

[andrewteman]

Have you tried tell-a-friend programs? We run a tell-a-friend afflilate program that can help you generate some serious cash from tell-a-friend links on your site. I saw that someone mentioned how it is difficult to make money from humor sites and the like, but we have some humor webmasters that pull down over $10,000 a month with some of our programs.

What about reg-path advertising? Lead generation is a huge space right now, and payouts for online lead collection are very solid. Do you have a registration path on your site? Meaning, can you become a member, and/or sign up for certain areas of your site?

[Lapka]

andrew:
what do you mean by tell-a-friend affiliate program?

Could you point out an example

thanks

[andrewteman]

My bad for not posting a link. See an example here...

[bizliterature.com...]

Scroll to the bottom to see the "tell-a-friend" form. The forms can be implemented on your site in many ways, and are fully customizable from look and feel to amount of advertising contained on the form. All ad revenue is split 60/40 to the publisher, and with the right amount and type of traffic, can make publishers a lot of $$. Shoot me a note if you want to chat more about the specifics. Would love to give you the low down.