Next Step?

A problem of a different sort....

[Visi]

We have one of those sports hobby sites gone wild. Started many years ago the site was moved onto a shared domain in the last year and has increased in popularity every month. It's routinely found by all the search engines, is listed at 100,000 range in alexis, and has over 100 pages listed in the top 5 positions on google/yahoo. We have about 5,000 page views/day with 1000+ uniques. We are contained in all the major directories with the exception of yahoo. It's time to move to the next step, namely having the site at least pay for itself. We have looked at the book affiliates option, but not sure if they actually generate revenue? We have developed book reviews as noted on some of the other posts here specific to the pages.

So our question is how do you set up the business side of the equation? A little different from the normal "how do we optimize the site" for search engine question. Is there a good place to start for this? We do not have a unique product to sell at this time, and do not see us doing this ourselves.

A problem in reverse for many on this board to consider.

Thanks

[dmorison]

Hi Visi,

How sticky is your site? i.e. of your 1000+ uniques per day, how many are new and how many are repeat visitors?

What i'm pushing at is have you got a sufficient repeat demand for your content to be able to ask for a subscription? And if so, is your content valuable enough to ask a worthwhile (for you) subscription for?

All I can add is Good luck! I know of 2 _very_ popular sites (both ~ 500K hits per day) that are struggling to find a viable revenue stream.

[Visi]

Would have to say, information is not unique enough to ask subscription for, only the format is unique for the majority of the information. Although certain areas are unique they would be of a very limited interest to most visitors.

Looking at the stats the site tends to be "sticky" with 50%+ not coming through search referrals at this time.