Hi, I run an award winning dog fitness websites that gets between 30 and 70 visitors per day. It's being run as a hobby of mine in my spare time, but I'd like to start making some residual income from it. I have a few ads and an Amazon affiliate store set up, but really I'm getting a few cents per month max from Google Adsense and that's about it. I feel like I need to get some direction in earning residual income from my site and currently I don't have a plan or focus on one stream, it's just all scattered, some ads and affiliate links stuck in there as an afterthought, and as a result I'm getting nowhere. I was wondering if anyone might have any ideas or can point me in the right direction - where do I start? The website can be found here: http://bit.ly/bYCl3T (cloaked URL, sorry). Thanks in advance for any advice/feedback
It really depends if you are talking about making $25 a month or a lot more. It's going to be impossible to make any significant money with your current traffic - even more so if those are mostly regular visitors who will become ad blind. Your best best would be working on marketing your site and increasing traffic. I personally wouldn't even run ads on the site until your traffic is more established.
Have more focus and clarity. This is most important when you are starting out. In the beginning, decide on one primary source of income (Affiliate products for example) and focus on maximizing yield from it. Once your primary source is giving satisfactory income, you can slowly add other methods as appropriate. In the beginning, you shouldn't try too much and try to make money from a gazillion sources. Market the site more as well. Also keep in mind that great content and helpful advice is often the best marketing.
Thanks, mjewel. I'm thinking more than $25 a month, but I'm also very open to running multiple sites that all add up to a decent income, however when I get to this point I'd like to be making enough from the one site to start investing in copywriters etc as I don't want to have to micro manage the whole thing myself (I'm fine doing that with this site as it's my hobby, but if I build a number of different sites I don't want to spend all my time writing content for each site). I'll focus on getting more traffic - what should I keep in mind as my first traffic "goal"? A decent amount of visitors I can strive for as a first goal to start making some income? Most visitors are new, but there's a decent number of recurring as well.
Thanks for the advice, lightless. I guess I'm just not sure what stream of income to really focus on. I also run a small business and work as a contractor, so can't dedicate all my time to marketing the site, I wonder if there are some basic things I can do to start off? I'm an SEO consultant so rankings and organic traffic aren't a problem once I get down to it and focus on this being more than just a hobby site. Anything else I should try?
Analyze your traffic and find out why people are coming to your site, and then try to think what type of traffic would be valuable to an advertiser. For instance, if you are getting traffic for "husky photo" you are going to have a lot lower conversion that people who find your site for "best flea treatment". The dog photo visitor probably isn't looking to buy something, while the flea visitor is a lot more likely to click an ad or affiliate link offering flea treatments. Advertisers know this and are going to bid a minimal amount for photo traffic vs. a visitor who is looking for a high priced product they sell. Picking your keywords is critical. You want keywords that pay well, but that aren't so saturated you will never rank for them. As far as content goes, you will probably be your best author. If you do hire a writer, forget about the ultra cheap articles for $5 a page. You want well written informative content, and that takes time and a native English speaker.
Most traffic driving keywords were definitely dog fitness equipment related. Things ilke 'dog exercise equipment', 'hands free dog leash', 'dog fitness equipment', and tons of other similar terms. I guess from here I can direct this traffic to an affiliate page? I might make a separate section for different types of dog exercise equipment with useful information and related posts as well as affiliate links to target each term better and drive traffic to a sales-optimised page as opposed to just a blog post. Does this sound like a decent idea or should I be trying something else? If this is what I should be doing...I guess it's a matter of deciding whether I should go with an affiliate store like the Amazon one I have now or an external affiliate link. I used to have a BANS license somewhere...there are just so many choices as to what channel to use
You have a very cool and interesting website. Maybe you should contact local pet store or vet around your area to find out more of what you can do
I would create a quality page about the type of fitness equipment - and people like recommendations, advice on what would work best. I would try putting photos of actual product on the page with a button that has your affiliate link on it... i.e. you say "product x" is a great product and on that page you have a picture with that product with a link. You don't want it to look like a bunch of product links, but content combined with links. You don't want general amazon buttons.
One thing I was thinking is people might get suspicious if I lead them to an external site, which is why I set up the Amazon affiliate store (in an iframe grrr, annoying), to make it more integrated with the styling of my site. They can go through the whole process through that frame on the site and not have to leave my website. Do you find that this is the case? Or should I not hesitate to use external affiliates? Either way I'm only going to want to promote products that I think are actually good quality, I don't want to sell random crap to my visitors. I'm just thinking in terms of the visitor's general outlook
Thank you I'll definitely give your idea a try when I get more traffic to the site as an incentive for people to pay for advertising.
you need to focus on targeted traffic people who search for your info, to do that you will need to do some seo, link building, social media traffic etc.. I wish you good luck