Forum Moderators: martinibuster
The revenue from this kind of traffic isnt big. The site will probably grow (I hope) to 100,000 to 200,000 impressions a day within two months and that will be nice, but I'd love to look at other options.
For that reason - are there any other recommended advertising venues worth considering? I.e. adsense competitors that have worked well for you?
I know this is a stupid question, but there seems to be so much out there - from real to dubious to totally bogus schemes, I'm not sure how to weed things uot.
For the record, my CTR is really low ;(
20,000 visitors (including repeats)
140,782 ad impressions
35 clicks.
:( :( :( :(
One interesting thing though, I just cracked 100,000 uniques for this month and I've had 18,000 visitors today so far (10:33am), so I strongly suspect I'll be breaking yesterday's record of 20,000.
This month is shaping up nicely - 66,000 uniques, 85,000 visits and every day has been profitable so far. Oddly enough, July 4th was a record (in terms of revenue). My unqiues are now averaging over 10,000 a day!
I've got a few more changes to try this month, along with the release of a program that I anticipate may bump my traffic a lot. (No its not some kind of ad clicking program, its a program that goes hand in hand with the site - those of you that know the URL, you'll see it in week or so).
So thanks again to everyone for your help.
Crossing my fingers towards my first $500 month.
Another point, you mentioned somewhere that you are getting around 35 clicks a day, how the rest of your 9965 visitors leaving your site?
Unless you have a forum site though (for which 0.1% CTR isn't that unusual) - your CTR is very low - should be possible to get 1 or 2 percent on most site's I'd have thought.
Have you seen the Google "heatmap"? that shows where viewers look on each page. Worth looking it up, and putting your ads in those spots.
You can also ask Google for AdSense optimisation advice which can be very good - it'd be easier for them to advise you on specifics, as they can see your site!
Don't forget to experiment with different sizes and layouts of ads - and check the results. AdSense is VERY tweakable - just about any chance in position, layout or number of ads changes the CTR noticably - so experiement a lot. With your traffic levels, you'll get a decent sample size within a day or two.
Good luck!
Another point, you mentioned somewhere that you are getting around 35 clicks a day, how the rest of your 9965 visitors leaving your site? "
You are welcome to be skeptical. All I can say is I gain nothing by making up numbers here. You all know that my ad revenue is waaaaay below others - forget the fedex club, im not even at the postage stamp club (ok bad joke). So, frankly, I dont feel like I've got that much to brag about - some of you make more than I do with adsense with like 200 visitors a day!
The real reason we have this kind of traffic? I'll try to explain as best as I can and hopefully you'll see that these kind of numbers ARE possible.
Key element to my site - People submit their own content.
If you submit something, then you have (presumably) an interest in showing it to people, or why submit it if no one sees it?
So, what happens? People submit content, they then take their link and they go around showing people it... maybe a few hits come from Yahoo conversations or AIM or irc or something like that, and some come from blogs, forums, opinion sites, etc - - places where links tend to get pasted/copied/etc.
Think of the site like you might think of LiveJournal. Why did LJ blow up so fast and become an overnight sensation? Part of it was a cool idea with cool software - yes - but a big reason was because everything on the site was created by people with an incentive to show it to others.
You do the math - one person shows their blog on LJ to 100 people. 1 person out of that 100 starts their own and 10 people from that original 100 show it to 10 friends... another 100.. Now you've got 3 people using hte site, and they each show it to 100 other people (probably by posting it around on irc, forums, etc) ... right? How long does it take before you've got 50 or 60 regulars? 100? Not a ton of time. Obviously, I'm making those numbers up, but you get the idea.
Other sites create this same incentive too - linkedin, friendster, etc - all these sites work because theres an INCENTIVE for the user to get more people on the site.
For LJ, its to get a regular blog readership - you write a blog so people can read it, don't you?. For linkedin, its to build your personal network of contacts so you can get a better job one day. For friendster, its basically the same thing or just to have a huge number of linked in friends. For myspace, pretty much the same as LJ. You follow? Each of these sites have one thing in common - the users, unwillingly, end up being the advertisers.
(I mean, I don't want to make the whole thing sound like a huge prymid scheme or something because it isn't. Theres no money payouts to users or anything like that, or some kind of affiliate program or any of that junk)
In essence, thats something like what I did. I got us a few hundred hits by showing friends (yes, this was a 6 hour a day job for a while, convincing friends to try the site), of those hundred, a few people used the site, and brought in a few hundred hits, again, a few from those hundred used it, and brought in a few hundred more.. Some people bring in a few hits, some bring in a lot (I haven't built a tracking system yet, but that would be cool to know) - but every new person the site "snags", is a new person out there advertising because of the built in "incentive" in showing off your content.
That, in a nutshell, is how it got to where it is. In essence, I've made my users my advertisers.
As for the 35 clicks and other 9000... They pretty much enter the site on whatever link they followed and they exit on that page. I'm working on changing that but right now, theres pretty much no obvious "stay here" after you've followed a link in so I'm working on highlighting other content so people stay on the site.
5% would be thousands of dollars a month. Now, I'm the one who's skeptical ;)
edit: haha, i just did the math.. i could retire on 5%. I wait with baited breath.
Not that it proves anything - its not hard to edit HTML so it could be bogus, but I thought I'd share anyway for those of you that are believers...
The page count is not accurate because the sub content pages pull from other files, so it counts the single page as several because of the includes. I havent quite figured out how to fix this with awstats. If anyone knows, feel free to say. In other words - NO, I've not done 1.2 million pages this month and im not claiming I have. This is also why things seem wierd - more visits but less page views - the number of includes varies from page to page, so depending on page hit the total can be inflated a little or a lot.
If you note the times, I'm also not running it on PST, which I probably should be so my day ends when google ends.
[edited by: Jenstar at 5:16 pm (utc) on July 7, 2005]
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Secondly-
If you are offering Blogs for others to use, that would mean that the ads are on pages that are NOT your content, follow me?
Your domain...but NOT your content.
The clock is clicking on you my friend.
I was doing essentially much the same thing and emailed Google to see if it was alright.
They must have misunderstood my question, as it never answered definitively.
I simply took the ads off any Blogs that I did not create, and put different ones on others' pages.
As for the stats?
I am a little skeptical on the uniques as well...sorry.
You must be posting and writing your hand off on forum sites with the link in your sig...or contacting every manufacturer that would like to get free advertising.
I've done extensive advertising as well for something similar as yours...it seemed like I wrote the words you typed. Most of our Blog members ARE putting their links in their sigs, and they all have less than 100 views after about a month.
Are you paying for advertising as well?
Hey...I'm not trying to bust your chops, just bein real.
If you can sticky me to help me do something similar, I'm all ears. ; )
So while you are wishing for more traffic I'm desperately trying to figure out what I'm doing wrong (as I can't really afford to pay for my hosting with my adsense revenue alone).
They even denied my application to adsense premium.
Those rates don't cover your hosting expenses? Thats over $1500 a month?
I've got a 20mbps unmetered pipe for $299/mo.
If you want I can have a peek at your site and offer some suggestions - I got a lot of help from people on this site and my ad revenue looks to at least double last months. PM me the url if you want.
I'm using roughly 90mbps and a few dedicated servers.
<snip>
[edited by: Jenstar at 2:39 am (utc) on July 8, 2005]
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Think of it more like having a main page that is edited by various people. The people editing are writing their own words and placing content they deem worthy on the site. So far, its worked fine.
On my planet you'd have to be brain dead to fail to make a fortune on 1 million vistors a day.
I know a company that went bankrupt with 6 million visitors in a month.
They weren't stupid or brain dead, a simple case of getting random visitors that weren't exactly interested in the topic. Not only did they not convert to sales they spent an enormous amount of money on useless bandwidth.
Volume is only good if they want what you're peddling.
Think of it more like having a main page that is edited by various people.
I have seen those, and find that an interesting concept.
Will have to look into it..thanks.
