How to advertise an Adsense site

[proboscis]

I noticed some of you have mentioned that you are increasing your visitors and income through advertising.

If I were selling a product or a service I would just go over to Adwords - but I'm not selling anything.

So far I've worked out that I'm making about a penny per visitor and I'm making just under 100 dollars per day right now. All my traffic is free search engine traffic, I have a lot of inlinks but little traffic comes from them.

So how do you advertise when you're an affiliate and you're only getting pennies per visitor or like me only getting 1 penny per visitor?

I also thought maybe I should just try to get more money from each visitor but my site is a directory so as far as I know there isn't alot I can do, unless I add a forum or something like that.

[Sweet Cognac]

Some people just put a button or something like "Advertise Here" to attract businesses to advertise on a website. Do you do that?

Or, are talking about advertising your directory on other peoples websites?

[proboscis]

I meant that I would like to advertise my site on other sites but I can't figure out how to do it because I don't make enough per visitor to pay for the advertising.

[Sweet Cognac]

I don't make enough per visitor to pay for the advertising.

I don't understand your thinking I guess. What does your "per visitor" have to do with your advertising?

You're making 100 bucks a day, and for 3000 a month you ought to be able to afford $50 a mo. to advertise somewhere, or at least buy some links.

[buckworks]

I don't understand your thinking I guess. What does your "per visitor" have to do with your advertising?

It has EVERYTHING to do with advertising.

You have to be careful that you get enough new profit from whatever advertising you do so the advertising at least pays for itself.

The cost you pay for new traffic (per visitor) should not exceed the amount you earn per visitor, on average. Miss that guideline too often and you'll go broke.

An ad for $50/month would need to send 5000 visitors per month to break even if he earns a penny per visitor on average, and that's not counting management time.

A penny per visitor is a narrow margin, so give some thought to how you can improve conversion and boost the value of the traffic that's finding you now.

[mertero]

It depends on the site, but sometimes visitors are worth more than their average.

For example, in my own site, sometimes visitors can contribue content, or become regular readers (it's a dynamic content site - with news and such). Sometime a visitor can contribute a lot to my site, even if the direct earnings he gives me is nothing.

So for me at least, I am willing to pay more than the average income per visitor in order to get some visitors. Especially as currently I'm more interested in more content and readers and links than the actual income.

Also, let's say you use AdWords for your ads. It might be that you can target the 'good' users using it. So if the average is 1cent per user, but if users that search for 'widget' get you actually 1$ per user, it might be worthwhile to target those.

To sum it - not all users are born equal :-)

[ndaru]

Have you try paid review sites? Basically, you pay popular bloggers to post a review about your site. You can't force them to write a good review, though (this is what makes popular bloggers accept this model).

@mertero: All users are equal, but some users are more equal than others. :)

[edited by: jatar_k at 12:29 pm (utc) on Mar. 14, 2007]
[edit reason] no urls thanks [/edit]

[vinhboy]

you earn 100 a day from pennies, you must have a lot of visitors a day.

my suggestion is for you to advertise the referral products.
google pack or firefox. you can earn up to $2 or $1 respectively.
so your $100 could potentially be $500-$1000.
on referrals you are allowed to point them out (recommend) to people.
check your "website" statistics if you have analytics, if you find you have alot of IE users on Windows, a firefox or google pack referral is definitely worth the money.

Also, you can set your adword "content" match to like 1 penny an impression, so it is pretty worth it to try it for at least a week or so.

[proboscis]

Thanks! I was completely stumped. My site is going on 9 years old and I feel like I've seen every site in my niche and asked them all for a link twice by now. My income and traffic has been steady for the last year or so but I've hit a wall, it's increasing but so slowly it may as well be standing still.

I will look into these suggestions right now, does anyone else advertise? How do you do it? Thank you :) :)

[mertero]

proboscis,

The easiest way is probably to use AdWords - you can setup your own budget and ads and start serving them in minutes.

If you know other sites in your niche, it's also possible to contact them with request for a banner or something.