Forum Moderators: martinibuster
I suppose I should continue and concentrate on building my content and traffic, but I was hoping to earn more and after 2 months I'm a bit discouraged. I'm not giving up but some encouragement, advice, or even commiseration would be nice!
Thanks,
Deb
But even useful sites can gather less than $10 in their first two months.
Your numbers are very comparable to the average jokes or games site.
Starting a site from scratch and having 4000 visitors a month is not bad at all, but you really need to get more traffic. Promise yourself that 500 page impressions a day would be a good target for the months to come. But I suppose <$5 for 4000 visitors (= page impressions?) is not very good. It means your ECPM is close to 1. ($1 per 1000 page impressions). Many WW-members have a ECPM that is 10 times higher or even more than that, so they would earn 10 times as much with the same traffic. So I guess you also might want to work on your content and perhaps your ad placement. If you are in a typical "low-paying" genre, like a forum, or a website about games or entertainment, you might want to cross-topic your content. So mix related topics. If your website is about food, also write about kitchens and restaurants. This way you attract new ads on your site that might generate better paying clicks.
If you want some more advice, just give us some info about your site, like the kind of topic your site deals with (no specifics, just the genre), how many pages/articles do you have and what do you do to get traffic. Best of luck!
It has an events calendar with almost 400 events, chat forums, free classified ads, free business directory, occasional news items about the sport (how our national team is doing competing internationally for example - sent by a PR firm complete with photos).
There's an online event entry system that I developed myself that nobody is using, some RSS feeds, and a couple of cute / useful things like current weather, gas prices, and a couple of one-liner jokes.
Not a huge amount of content yet.
I am advertising in a popular local directory (a book) listing all the sport's events that is due out soon, and at a local movie theatre. I have passed out flyers and fridge magnets at the place where I participate in the particular activity...
Deb
You might try working with your ad placement, particularly the link units. Many people have had some great luck with strategically placed link units as well as the ads. If you have made your ads stand out, try blending them more into the site. If you have blended them, try to make them stand out.
Mark the dates on which you made a change, the change you made, and keep track, and leave it for at least a week, preferably 2. (It sometimes takes awhile to see a trend.)
Basically, experiment. I've been experimenting with a lot of different things while I've used Adsense, but especially if you're just starting out, don't fall in love with one single way of implementing the ads: try different things.
Keep generating good and useful content, and building your traffic. These things don't happen overnight, but they do grow the more you hang in there and work on them.
JK
Jennifer
Deb
For comparison sake a site of mine with 4000 unique visitors consistently brings in $100-$200 a month.
You seem to have the traffic. I'd look into ad placement/colors and the size of the ads you are using.
Hal
Create a free download of whatever you are dealing with or something in the general area (nude widgets), post it on your index or a landing page. Go to Adwords and great an ad for the free download and let it ride on the content network for 0.01. If the keywords you choose has a search price of 2-5 cents make them live, over that forget it.
I average 2,000 clicks at 1.5 cents per day which brings me 3x from Adsense.
I ban all sites that advertise. And all sites not selling a real product.
Don't most sites that sell a real product advertise?
JK
About half that is CPM targeted to MFAs in my sector and I am sucking the life out of them at a half-cent per click.(revenge is sweet)
Not a huge amount of content yet.
IMO, that is the problem. Content draws users. Users lead to AdSense revenue.
I don't know if the kids know that one.
Or as my momma used to say,
If your fishin' for nice shrimp,
you need nice bait.
Find your highest traffic pages and put your advertising on them. Low traffic pages remove and replace with TF or Valueclick cpm. That will help with non paying page views.
In a few days check your channels and all the higher traffic pages that are getting little or no clicks remove and replace with the above.
In fact, I put cpm ads all over the site just to touch all the bases and take advantage of all page views.
It is working for me on my newest site.
Ann
Two pieces of advice:
1) Take a look at the Adsense heat map. That thing is worth its weight in gold. I relocated my ads based on the heat map, and I went from about $0.07 - $1.20 per day (low - high range) to $11.22 - $27.30 per day (low -high range).
2) Another thing I did was changed text on my homepage that was part of a graphic/macromedia flash file and just posted it on the page as raw text. This was merely superstition thinking that the Adsense "spiders/robots" would be able to read this text and put up better ads based on what my site was about. Whereas, when the text was part of a graphic, I doubt that the "spiders/robots" could read them. I may be wrong about that, but, the change did modify the ads that were showing on my homepage and made them more relevant to what my site is about. AND, it got rid of all PSAs which make no money.
Hope this works for you....it totally did for me! Good luck!
[google.com...]
Not in my case. I have a site about a collection of jokes that gives me a reasonable amount of income (ctr of 1-2%).
