Hello All! I have read this forum for years, but can not recall every posting. Here is my situation. I have an fairly old (11+ years) member website that for many reasons I have neglected for the past 3 to 4 years. Needless to say, the membership has fallen off and most of the members do not even renew when they are billed. This in turn creates more frustration and work on my end because I then have to disable their accounts and remove them from billing. Despite the member drop off I am still serving up between 3K and 5K pages per day. This too is down from 20K+ pages per day 5 years ago, but still strong. The only advertising/income other than memberships I have had on this site comes from Adsense. I can count on a $200-$250 per month check each month, but it has started to drop off here and there which is why I am considering more avenues ($) to take advantage of the traffic I have. This use to be in a fairly non-competitive market, but not any longer. The competition is VERY strong which is making me look at this business a few different ways. Here is what I am thinking. 1) Ramping up my advertising budget and trying to rebuild my membership base. Currently about 400 paying $80 per year. 2) Making the site a completely "FREE" site to members in hopes of increasing traffic and adding more ways to monetize the site from advertising, etc. The idea is more members = more visitors. So I will increase my current page views. I would then add more advertising, etc. to capitalize on the traffic. 3) Adding a completely new service to my member site that my competitors do not have and doubling my member price. This is a service that I have developed in a completely different market that my current member list is interested in. I have tested it with some current members and they say they would buy it. So, do I make it free and try to build a large amount of traffic by giving away the service or do I go back to building my member base and keep charging for membership? Look forward to your thoughts and ideas. Thanks! Marc
you are sitting on a goldmine.. yes.. I would make a free and build a huge audience.. your adsense will go up and it will make up for the loss in membership fee.. it may just take off and get to next level what niche is it in?
It sounds like you already have a few really good ideas to try. Have you thought about making the membership free for a month or two and developing something new to offer as a new "members only" deal? That way you can get rid of the old billing system headache, increase your traffic AND (potentially) sell new memberships? If you don't mind sharing your niche with us--what is your niche? We might have more ideas if we had more specific information. Or you can PM for better ideas
To be clear, are these views or unique visits? Well, what did you do back then to bring it to that many? As to better help you, can you show your site?
Yes, to increase your traffic, just do what you did before to get that many members. Hope that helps.
These are unique visits. I think my pageviews for this month according to Adsense was somewhere in the 60K-80K range. Keep in mind that I don't have Adsense on all of my pages. The site is just too big and was built before the idea of ppc so it is not very user friendly to update. As you know, back in the days before adwords you had to optimize your site for the search engines. Since my site was large and pages were optimized with hundreds of specific keywords and phrases, I dominated many of the keywords and took up as many as 9 of the 10 searches when Google appeared. Of course those days are long gone. Although Google stills seems to love my site. It visits my site daily and deep crawls it more often than most. I really don't want to give out the site name or url. The competition is tough enough as it is. I am not a "web guru" that has discovered a secret and wants to sell it to you. I just have a solid business that has been successful for some time. And just like any good money maker, mums the word! It is always so funny when the ebook guys say "I will teach you how I make $4K a day in my bathrobe from a single webpage and no product". Really? If I were making $4K per day in my pj's I'm not telling anyone! Thanks for the feedback so far. As I have looked at this further, I think I can break my site up into 3 seperate sites/services. One membership, one new service and one free. Once again it would be a billing nightmare (which I hate), but the yearly revenue I think would be greater than ppc. I think throwing some money at the advertising side of things could double or triple my memberships. 1200 paying members $80 per year is $96K. I think it would take me quite some time to get my Adsense account up to $8K per month. Maybe you just can't teach an old dog new tricks, but this seems easier to me. Am I wrong here? Anyone making more than $8K per month from advertising? Thanks again!
sounds like you already know what you are doing so I only have one little suggestion. you could Outsource the billing aspect of it , then you won't have to deal with the frustrating part leaving you feeling happy and relaxed about working on it more. taking a small cut in profits to eliminate that frustrating billing from your life could be a very good investment.