I Have a Great Site but Dismal Earnings

Am I Missing Something?

[NewSkool]

OK!

people laugh at earnings such as 10 bucks or even $50 a day.

i have dedicated my life to running my sites, i know all the tricks etc from ad optimization to SEO.

i make $5-$10 if LUCKY!

you constantly brag about your $1400/day but say its crap. "normal" work... how much do they earn? $100 a day is a very highly paid job. not something you make as a pizza guy.

so how can this be? how can people be lucky enough to make these amounts? is it just that? pure luck? it's so damn unfair and i feel like crying when reading threads like [webmasterworld.com...]

people simply dont appreciate good sites. they just ignore them and go for these crappy ugly bloated commercial ones and click their ads.

what am i supposed to do? this is all i know and yet its going to hell .

[edited by: mack at 10:53 am (utc) on Mar. 21, 2006]
[edit reason] Lets be respectful. [/edit]

[Matt Probert]

EPC sucks in my case... lot of traffic, quality content, but extremely low CPC... most times getting $0.05 / click :(

Considered a better ad agency? We don't carry ads under $0.20 eCPM as a rule, strangely we don't use Adsense <g>

Matt

[pacman2]

do you got some recommendation? i tried some of them (infinite-ads, TP), but nothing have given serious results yet

[europeforvisitors]

I think RonBurk may have nailed your problem with his comment that some markets (or topics) just pay better than others do. Even within a topic, different subtopics can have dramatically different earnings per click.

Also, different types of content will have different clickthrough rates and eCPMs. On my own editorial travel site, photo-gallery pages about Widgetville invariably have far lower clickthrough rates and eCPMs than travel-planning articles aboout Widgetville do, even if EPC is the same.

[Troutnut]

1.) If you think you know everything, you don't.
2.) Learn to write well. That makes a difference.

[edited by: martinibuster at 4:37 am (utc) on Mar. 22, 2006]
[edit reason] TOS 4 & 19. [/edit]

[imstillatwork]

people here will not tell you step by step what they do to get money, and they shouldnt'. It is their hard work, and won't always work for anyone else anyway. You have to read between the lines of thousands of posts here to get a feel for what is required to be succesful with your website.

How many hits do you get, BTW?

[NewSkool]

thank you for all the replies.

i am 100% certain that the problem is traffic. traffic, traffic, traffic...

and yesterday, for my main site, i got 3,475 adsense displays and 60 clicks which is a CTR of 1.7%

my second biggest site got 3,109 impressions and 5 clicks which is 0.2% CTR

make what you will of that.

[OptiRex]

NewSkool

You have been offered sticky free review!

Learn quickly otherwise you will never achieve!

[imstillatwork]

My little brothers new site that I built makes 2-3$ /day on about 100 impressions / day at nearly 10% ctr. I wish my sites payed that well. It's a nice content rich site that gives the visitors what they are looking for, and all the ads I've noticed are spot on. I'm sure the advertisers are happy too.

I think you need to work on your ad placements / layouts / blending. maybe your topics just plain don't pay?

[NewSkool]

well... i'm convinced that its traffic. how am i gonna advertise without spamming? i dont even know how spammers do their stuff anyway plus its unethical....

[ronburk]

well... i'm convinced that its traffic.

OK, then get to work on that. How big of a keyword net do you cast? What's your Google Stability Number [webmasterworld.com]? (I'm gonna bump that thread back up if it kills me :-).

Do you have a list of a couple of hundred relevant search terms ranked by their estimated payouts so you know where you want your traffic increase to come from? Do you have a content building plan that is focussing on dominating that "Top 200" search term list? Lots of single-keyword terms are hard to rank #1 for. Lots of 3 and 4-keyword terms are easy to get on page #1 for -- and lots of them have better CTR than the shorter terms.

There are many ways to skin the traffic cat. How many can you list? (If you can only list 1, time to stop posting and start doing a lot of reading.) Which ones have you tried?

[NewSkool]

well.. um........... i guess i have good seo BUT!

i dont have enough users i need users to produce content and they wont do it when there is nobody around they think its pointless grrr...

[martinibuster]

Is this a forum?

[NewSkool]

it is kind of. why does that matter? i dont use a script so its not a forum per se.

[mike73]

well.. um........... i guess i have good seo BUT!
i dont have enough users i need users to produce content and they wont do it when there is nobody around they think its pointless grrr...

I started with one user. I took about 2 years before it got hot. Now, the last 3 months, I get about 300 new users every month.

But I still average only about $4 a day.

[trillianjedi]

it is kind of. why does that matter?

Traditionally forums have a low CTR. In fact, any type of site that attracts "regular" visitors rather than "new" visitors generally has a low CTR.

There are exceptions, but it's quite common and known as "ad blindness".

I have had great experience with rotating ads on such sites - especially colour schemes (you can do this automatically in your AdSense code - see the control panel for info). I also have had great success alternating whether an ad is displayed or not using a cookie. I started a thread explaining that here:-

[webmasterworld.com...]

You will find that increasing traffic will, as a general rule of thumb, have a corresponding effect on your earnings. Increasing CTR is one thing that you can do that is in your control. Ideally you want to be tackling both.

TJ