Forum Moderators: martinibuster
It has blended ads in the hot spots, it is ranked number one for every targeted keyword and phrase, it is the number one niche industry reference site, it also has Adsense running consistently on every page and outperforms every one of its competitors for visitor numbers, back links etc.
Let's also assume that earnings have been increasing very nicely month on month although the EPC has declined over the past 12 months it is holding steady at present, however because of lack of time let's also assume one does not have the spare time to construct any new pages at the moment.
At which point would one assume saturation point for a site that no matter what one did it could not increase earnings without dramatically increasing traffic?
Bearing in mind it is the number one site, how would you try and drive more traffic to the site at minimum cost?
At what point would you hold up your hands and say, "I can't do any more until I increase the quantity of valid reference pages substantially?"
I'm not saying anybody could not do it but the site is like one's children...and yes, I do know they leave home one day:-)
I get a pretty good chunk of my traffic from my content appearing on other sites.
I get a pretty good chunk of my traffic from my content appearing on other sites.
As in what way? Do you mean articles or back links?
The problem I have is that, realistically, our portal site is the only one in our niche which is kept up-to-date and relevant, some sites have not been touched in years!
I think it's time to concentrate on the physical business...
At which point would one assume saturation point for a site that no matter what one did it could not increase earnings without dramatically increasing traffic?
I assumed saturation point about 4 months ago but changes in SEO, AdSense tweaking and minor redesign increased the revenue, nothing more.
Do you mean articles or back links?
In my case it's mostly photos that folks take from my site and post on other sites.
Most of those other sites are forums, but some are content sites with-in my niche, and a few have been mainstream publications that need images to accompany articles online and sometimes offline.
Not all of those give a live backlink.
I had to make a choice about how to deal with this use of my images, because a huge amount of the time permission is not requested.
I decided that it was in my own best interest not to make an issue of the lack of requests for permission. Some ask, most don't.
Instead I followed what I was seeing other similar sites in my niche begin to do, put the url on the images.
The day I did that, traffic went up over 20%, so did my income. The percentage of my traffic generated by this shared content has continued to grow.
This worked for me, but I realize not everyone would be comfortable with it, or have the type of content that would lend itself to the same course of action.
But the shared content is an idea that I think could be adapted to a wide variety of topics. It might take some thought how to make it work for any given site, but the payoff could be pretty significant.
For one thing, it might greatly reduce a sites reliance on search engine traffic. That's certainly true for me.
Today less than half my traffic comes from search. Yet my search traffic has continued to grow, it's just that the traffic from shared content has grown faster than search traffic.
That makes the thought of an update going against me a lot less nerve racking.
Instead I followed what I was seeing other similar sites in my niche begin to do, put the url on the images.The day I did that, traffic went up over 20%, so did my income.
I also have a lot of images and it is through the search engines that I am found. I had considered doing the same however assumed, maybe naively, that people who copied them would just crop the photos or not bother with them if I used a watermark. How do you display your url?
I'll consider it for my next update when I have an extra 400+ image pages to build.
Far to many webmasters forget how they got their self there and end up killing the web site.
I totally agree however it's difficult to admit that there is no further natural growth since the niche simply does not have millions of businesses or people clamouring to find the products every day.
Saying that's the limit without adding more and more information and pages means I shall have to find that time to complete all the additions.
The other side of that is that most of the images are traveling with hobbyists who have no objection to my url being in the image.
To me, it does look less professional than placing the url in a border at the bottom of the image. But that's more work, and more easily cropped off.
