Newbie and advertising

[Nordin]

Hello,

I'm new to webmasterworld, and actually I was hoping that someone here could help me out, or could give me some hints/tips...

My site didn't get many visitors for a long time, then Google indexed it and more and more visitors kept coming...My site has a googlepagerank 6 now. Normally spoken I would get around 700 visitors a day. But since a posted a gamewalkthrough more then 4000 unique visitors a day found the site over the last 2 weeks. With some ~1200 daily returning visitors.

I do like the amount of visitors, but bandwith is going to be a big issue, since I got 20 GIG traffic and that's not going to be enough. Hosting is pretty expensive here in Holland. Actually, all I want is to cover the bandwith costs with some advertising.

I do have some Adsense ads on the site, but that's not bringing in any money. And I do not want the site all covered by ads, so I figured sponsering would be an option, but I have surfed the web back and forth and all I can find are 200 billion different affiateprograms, all saying they're the best and reliable etc.

I was thinking about reselling games (since there are a lot of games on the site), but I'm not a company...

Does anyone have an idea to help me out?

Greets Nordinho,

[DaveAtIFG]

You could get some money coming in within a few hours using Google AdSense. Then do your research on affiliate programs. Augment your AdSense income by trying a few different programs until you identify the one's that work on your site.

[Nordin]

Thx for your reply,

I already have the Adsense ads for a month now...bringing in $8 till now...I could go for a real eye-catching place, but I'm affraid that will scare off visitors...I just placed another one at a more eyecatching place, hopefully that one will generate some clicks...

[MichaelBluejay]

Okay, first off, just because you're located in Holland doesn't mean you have to be hosted in Holland. Your host can be anywhere. My host is 1500 miles from where I live. They charge $10/mo. and give me 25Gb of transfer. You can probably find even better deals but I haven't looked, because transfer has never been an issue for me.

Second, 4000 visitors a day should only put you barely over your 20Gb bandwidth limit, if it all. If each visitor looks at five pages and each page is 40k total with graphics, then that's 4000 x 5 x 40 = 800,000k = 781Mb = 0.76Gb. For the month it would be 23Gb. Hopefully your pages won't be 40k each, because the logo graphics will be cached and not reloaded from page to page. So if you're just barely going over your limit, upgrading to a slightly better plan (or a better deal with another host) would solve your problem.

Third, ad space on a website generally sells for betwen $1 to $25 per thousand impressions. If you have 600,000 page views a month thats 600-thousand impressions. It even $1 per thousand impressions you ought to be able to make $600/mo. from advertising. Approach businesses who are a good match for your site (e.g., game developers) and see if they want to buy an ad. If you're desperate you could offer it for as little as $100/mo. until you gain some confidence about your ad-selling ability. When you offer deals like this just tell the advertiser that you're only guaranteeing that rate for something like 1, 2, or 3 months. I get far fewer visitors than you do but my ad sales pay for my webhosting bill several times over.

Oh, and I hear you about not wanting to fill your site up with ads -- I accept only a few ads for my site, and I only allow text ads or non-animated banners. It's a little harder to sell a non-animated banner but it's possible, I do it.

Another thing you can do is to just sell something from your site, such as a printed, bound version of your walkthrough, or special info not in the walkthrough, or whatever. Price whatever it is at $9 and you should sell several a month, which will more than cover your webhosting bills.

Good luck!