Three Years w/ 1 Website - $8 per Day

Where do I go from here.?

[goneinthesun]

i think a lot of you can related to my situation. Here I am after 3 years working on a web site. Now i am making about 8 dollars per day on adsense. I do enjoy working on the site, but offen wonder if there is better things i can be doing with my time to make better money. Cause if I calculate how much this is earning me per hour doing this, I came up with around 3 dollar per hour.

It is very diffcult for me to think that things will improve anytime soon, at the same time it is sad cause i already put in 3 years on the site. I think if I don't work on it, it will just slowly die. but if I keep working on it, i will find myself making less than mininum wage.

Anyone with similar situation, please share your thoughts.

[frox]

difficoult to say...
do you mind sharing more data?

how many pages?
how many pageviews per month?

Do you think the problem lies in:
- too little traffic because the niche is not interesting
- too little traffic because the site is not known
- not little traffic, but the niche just does not pay

[martinibuster]

I guess it depends on what you aspire to, and whether this website is helping or not helping you achieve those aspirations.

What do you think?

[sonny]

what kind of site is it: articles, forum?

[Sunshine1]

You need to go for it much more.

If you are only making USD 8 that tells me you are relying on organic traffic - that just won't do it.

You are way to late in the game to build an empire on organic traffic. Blessed where the earlybirds.

Start buying ads.

Your first goal should be to buy ads for at least USD 10-100 a day and make back at least the USD 10-100. Then by tweaking and tweaking you should start seeing a positive return on those ads. Should not be that hard to make USD 108 on USD 100 in ads - wooops you have a 100% increase in your revenue. Then the ads traffic should improve your organic rankings, make more money organically that you can invest in more ads - more traffic. You get the picture.

You need to build critical mass in you operations.

[BushMackel]

Hey Sunshine, (or anyone else), when do you think you should start focusing on ads to bring users to your site?

[Sunshine1]

From day one, it should be an integral part of your attack plan.

[rocknbil]

I don't agree. For one, he/she is already not making enough, and now we suggest to spend money on an ad program that will quickly drive him/her into the red? And I don't see where hosting fees play into things here, are they calculated into that $8/day?

Paid ad programs are, IMO, only effective if you are selling a product or service. It doesn't appear that this site is such a case. What will wind up happening is any profit you make on adSense will easily get sucked up by the paid ad service. For a content-only site, it simply doesn't make sense.

Three years - this tells us something. You have been in the game long enough to get some serious traffic. Your site content is lacking something, you need to find out what that something is. Not enough content? Not rich enough content? Not enough pages? As mentioned, how much traffic do you get? How do you place in search engines for important keywords?

Also as mentioned in post #2, you have to decide if all of your target market is finding your site. If they are, maybe there's just not enough interest to support the site itself. But don't dump it - open up a new site on a new project to supplement your income. If they are not, consider a) what is it about your site that is not making it sticky enough, and 2) review what you have done to build your site traffic. Perhaps there is more you can do to bring more organic traffic.

Secondly how are your adSense ads placed? Have you followed the guidelines in adSense documentation to optimize their exposure?

Sometimes when you stare at something long enough, you overlook something that may be hurting you. Have someone you trust look it over.

[dailypress]

Persistence is key, but you should know whens the right time to give up. I am making about the same with a website which I started < 2 years ago.

But I will note that I was making much much less until one day a certain keyword became popular and Google started to refer 6K visitors/day for a short period of time. After that the numbers decreased dramatically but since people added my website to their blogs the traffic coming in was still acceptable.

My advice: Dont give up yet!

Enjoy the challenge more than the money!

[Sunshine1]

Rocknbil - I don't agree. :) You can make money from buying clicks to a content site (I do). It also might bring you that extra boost you need to reach critical mass on your site. Your content site might need to be developed into a more sustainable community for it to work.