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However on the Adsense side and in this forum people say completely different things. There is always people saying websites like the above are purely made for Adsense or for AM and offer no content. People advise to create lots of good content, build up site rep and your Adsense gains will come.
I currently only have the one website and 90% of my revenue comes from this one site. The topic is not seasonal, but summer is always a slow period since less people are online. The site has been built up over many years with hundreds of hours spent on it. It ranks in the top 5 for a number of its keywords on Google and probably gets about 2000-5000 uniques a day and maybe 15-30k impressions daily. The design is very user friendly and looks very pleasing. I am happy earning $20-$40 a day (although more would be nice =) ), but thought it might be a good to maybe expand into other sites during slow periods like now. I am now not so sure what to do.
My site has probably hundreds of pages on content, and probably thousands of pages for images. Problem is a large number of people come to the website look at the images and then leave (hopefully by clicking on the adsense ads). It would not be feasible to simply recreate the hundreds of hours work on this website just for another $40 a day.
I currently use affiliate programs to a degree but they earn pittance. Should I create some of these so called datafeed sites for affiliate programs - since the trend is lots of these sites earning a few $ soon adds up. I have seen some of these so-called sites for say travel and hotels. All there is just adsense ads based per region or country with pratically no content. Apparently they seem to be earning well. Are content websites dead? Should I even bother to research, code and write another website?
I've tried everything to drive traffic at the this one site but because its a slow period nothing really helps. It would also be a good idea to diversify into other subjects but I dont have a clue what to do. Some say anything can be sold, others say it needs to be something you are interested in, while others say pay people to write content based on high-paying keywords. How should I expand?
AdSense outearns the affiliate programs, but the interesting thing is that some content pages on my site do well with both, while some do better with one or the other....
There is more than one way to skin a fish. I would suggest you follow your interests.
Firstly, DO choose something you are interested in. BUT of course, try to find something that you are both interested in, and that has market potential. Big tip here: niche down. The smaller your niche, the more you can target, the more targeted your users will be. Less spend, more make.
Secondly, while some people may make good money with these generic sites with little unique content, I recommend the unique content approach. Don't be lazy... make a value based site that google will like, your customers will like, and that will cost you less to advertise down the road if you choose to try out PPC. (my thinking here is higher quality score = potentially lower CPC).
And anyone who says adsense makes more than affiliate marketing? This is a ridiculous generalization. Affiliate marketing can make much more if you are focused, do your research, and yes, find those well paying merchants. Think 20 cents a click is good? If I divide my revenues from merchants by the number of unique visitors I send them, you're looking at about 80 cents a click or more. It's not easy and it takes more time than adsense because you have be a marketer and master the pre-sell.
Now that I think about it, when people say adsense makes more than affiliates I think they are referring to when you stick an affiliate banner or link up, just as you would place adsense on your site. I can understand why this doesn't work. Affiliate marketing doesn't work so well when it is passive. It is important to pre-sell the products/services you are affiliated with to be successful.
(and hey, you can throw a little adsense on as well to catch casual surfers, though some would consider this leaky)
So think about what you enjoy doing. I love affiliate because I love marketing. What appeals to you?
...since it is a good idea to use datafeeds to generate thousands of pages, and with some tweaking and personal customisations, create large product based websites. These web pages contain little content, maybe the picture of the product, description, price and maybe some unique information to set your website apart from the rest. Apparently in some cases the uglier the design the better, since 'niceties' such as design only distracts the user from clicking on buying the products...
Huh? This advice sounds like it came from someone who is trying to get more pages in the search results than from someone who is giving advice on making sales. Even then, sounds like a recipe for duplicate content, added "unique content" aside.
This 'thousands of pages' model isn't necessary for focused, successful affiliate marketing. Perhaps it is good for the adsense model (although I'm not really convinced) but affiliate marketing is really about subtlties, tweaking, and psycology... not broad brush strokes. You need a streamlined focused site, and streamlined, focused traffic. Quality.
...unless of course you have thousands of products. :)
On the other hand, affiliate programs can produce excellent results on a content site if your target audience is researching ways to spend money (and, of course, if you have enough traffic). In my experience, affiliate programs work best on a content site when you have enough information on a topic to attract repeat visitors and build user trust.
Now for AdSense:
You say that users are looking at your images and leaving without clicking ads. That's because they're interested in looking at pictures, not in spending money. I see the same pattern on my travel site's photo galleries: Photo galleries have an abysmal clickthrough rate, compared to the CTR on travel-planning pages. And that's fine, because every page doesn't have to make a lot of money. The problem comes when a site consists [i]only[/] of "loss leader" pages, which appears to be what's happening on your site.
What's the solution? Depending on your topic, maybe you can build some new content that brings in a money-spending crowd. (For example, if your images are about dogs, maybe you can use the existing site as a starting point for a larger site aimed at dog fanciers.) Or maybe you'd be better off starting a new site on a more economically productive topic that you know about and are passionate about.
Hunderdown thanks for your, as always, excellent advice. Although I would be interested in your lengthy essay answer =)
Ah koncept, having an interest in a high-paying area is the key! My current site is about a subject which I suppose is pretty big, and maybe I have done the wrong thing by attempting to cover a number of different 'areas' to do with my topic. It can be difficult to find new niche areas in my topic that hasn't already been done by someone better. There is no point in adding content, lets say news about this subject, where other such 'authority' have much more resources and do this so much better. That’s why when trying to expand I try to add content in areas not covered so much by other sites. I have tried to combat low traffic in the past with the addition of new content and simple games (relating to the content) I have created myself. This seems to attract some visitors who enjoy the 'playability' or stickiness factor of these, but for previous experience I know adding adsense to these pages is a waste of time. People are there to play these 'games' not to click on ads. While it does sometimes add traffic, it doesn't seem to boost over earnings.
I have learnt that simply putting up banners for merchants doesn’t work. I have thus tried to create content sections around products on the site. I have tried to add information about the items, my personal review, images of the product and other useful unique content. While this generates some income (more for some products than others) this is nothing to write home about. I guess the problem is most items that are being sold are only relativity cheap. I may be earning 10, 15 or even 20% on these items though if the item is say $15 (although the person may buy a couple) it doesn't make much. I tried creating a new section with quite a number of pages about a series of products which took some time to research and write with links to buy the item from Amazon (for example) but this makes nothing. Maybe this isn't pre-selling the products, maybe people just see this as just content. Do I need to adopt a more sales like tactic? You always see these very long pages pre-selling the latest e-book or whatever - this style just wouldn't fit in with the content of the site and I don’t really feel comfortable writing this kind of thing anyway.
I suppose I understand your post about quality. People looking for my topic come to my site, and since it covers many areas the traffic is diluted across its many pages. If you only had a few pages this traffic would be funnelled through the site and clicking on links to the merchants. While these pages may have content surely this becomes a very small site purely focused at selling one or a few products? I always thought that creating large 'authority' sites was the way to go?
EPV, I always value your learned advice, many thanks. I have always been 'put off' by pure affiliate marketing because I am no great salesperson. I'll provide information and then add a link to the product after the text saying 'Buy the red widget here', or 'Buy this green widget from this recommended site'. I wouldn’t like to rant and rave on how excellent a product is (especially if it wasn't) and then shove a big buy it now link. I always try to add it as added content.
The site isn't purely made up of photo pages, there are plenty of content pages although they do make up a quite a large percentage. The problem with the site is all the money is earnt usually in 3 sections, the photo pages being one of them. The other sections not making up 'the big three' only make $1 here, $2 there, 0.50 here. It all combines to make what I mentioned above. Now I read that some people suggest removing adsense from these popular pages (about 5-10k impressions daily) since the CTR is usually only about 0.2-0.5% usually. While this may increase earnings due to smart pricing, this takes away a big (albeit the term is used very loosely) money maker on the site.
I like your idea about creating other websites about certain topics on the site, but wouldn’t this suffer from duplicate content or detract information from the current website? At the moment you have a page about a widget, that contains information about it. This also acts an a base for looking at pictures of the widget. If I was to create a new website just about these widgets, I would surely be duplicating the content already existing even if I added more information. Surely this will also detract from the website since visitors will go to the new site rather than current one?
I had an idea to create a website based on a different interest I have based on films and entertainment. However there are so many website already covering this field, and besides adsense pay in this area is apparently very low. I would only be rehashing content probably available elsewhere, just in a different looking package. Got to try to think of what to do that’s the problem!
Just realised how long this post is! Sorry guys, although I do appreciate your feedback on the above.
Can you put a banner or link from your busy site to the slow one?
I have one site with 5,000 uniques per day and another in the litter box. Fortunately they are simmilar topics so I can exchange traffic. The litter box site still does 10% of the businees of the established site while I wait for the Googlecat to boot me out to the SERPS.
There is also Text-Link-Ads that does pretty well for me and is cheap.
[edited by: Khensu at 10:13 am (utc) on July 12, 2006]
As for duplicate content, that's a problem only if the content (not the topic) is duplicated. For example, my site is about European travel. Google wouldn't penalize or ignore pages on another site that I created about European travel, but it might penalize or ignore pages that were simply duplicates of the material on my old site. (Mind you, I have no intention of creating another European travel site and competing with myself!)
