hey, i need some advice on e-marketing. i am going to be putting up an e-learning community website for 3d graphics tutorials. I am aiming for this website to be very big, a large database of many tutorials and videos, many free resources, a discussion forum that i will try to make successfull and very active, etc.. So, im wondering what to expect as far as adsense CTR and CPC is concerned for this type of website (putting ads above the fold, on left and top). and arround how many page impressions per day i should require to make a substancial ammount of profit with adsense ($50.00 / day). are there any other means of making profit from traffic besides adsense? what are the best ways to get quality traffic to a page?, i am working with a $5,000.00 budjet to start the site. Thanks in advance guys, i hope you can help me out here.
First of all, create your web-site with unique content and after that you will be able to think how to promote it.
$5000 budget is more.My advice is first build the website with quality contents - here some nice tutorials for 3d graphics that are unique and not be copied from elsewhere.Then promote your site to all search engines,social bookmarking,blogs,directories and word of mouth. Then sign up for adwords and market your site. For commercials you can get adsense and sign up with affiliate networks.But i know keywords for your topic will give less CTR.This kind of website should concentrate on contents and not on ads. BTW you are in right place.DP will teach you from scratch.
Before you start a graphics tutorials site, think hard about what you can offer that's different from the competition. There are lots of graphic tutorial sites out there, so you may have a hard time getting noticed. Also, explore all revenue options before starting the site. Personally, I don't think AdSense will be the best way of monetizing the site - perhaps some paid design services by you, or affiliating with design software, or packaging the tutorials (and some bonus material) into an eBook. Don't rely on AdSense.. major sites like YouTube did and they're looking at multi million dollar losses.
Already mentioned but i want to stress again the importance of quality content. Your site has to be unique or it will be just another fish in the sea. I no longer suggest using adwords in for site promotion as it can wipe out your budget without any good long term results. Remember that once your adwords campaigns stop, so do your visitors. Very few sites manage to cover their adwords campaigns with the earnings form their sites, mainly due to increase in cost per click that plauges adwords. I suggest working on SEO and putting your $5000 into buying quality links. for some short term exposure consider some banner exchange programs or pay for advertising on websites that have the same target audience as your site. Please keep in mind that even if you put $5000 into marketing you might not even get that money back. Think long term sources of traffic. Depending how much time you have, you can also get involved in online communities such as forums based on your websites topic, and promote your site in your sig.
Yes, first prepare the content Classify it by some criterias, for example, "General questions", "3D Max", "Maya". Also make classification by professional level - like tutorials for begginers, tutorials for professionals, etc. Also make membership system, where people could comment and rate articles, post own articles and own compositions, objects. So create not only 3D learning portal, but also 3D resource portal. Make different challenges, best compositios, jobs, etc.
thanks for the replies everyone. yes, i am already working on the design of the site, and i tend to update it every 2 days with quality content, and maintain the site very well. i am also quite active in the CGSociety forums (large 3d graphics forum with over 40,000,000 visitors per month). maybe since you guys are saying adsense may not be the best way to go with making profit from the site, I also have all the software and equipement to make high quality video tutorials with good compression for streaming. maybe that would be more apealing for users to buy for a much lower price than most of the competitors (cgacademy, digitaltutors, lynda, 3d-palace). also lots of the 3d/cg news and community sites have many banner ads from big gfx software companies like autodesk, luxology, corel, adobe, pixologic, etc.. here is an example. http://www.3dtotal.com/advertising/ Notice the banners on the top, side and bottom, those ads are in rotation also, so there is probably a lot of ads that pay for this adertising on the site. you can also see the rates they charge for advertising on that page. plus they have a newsletter that they can advertise on. (Note: i am not really cut out for making a cg news/resources site, that is to much work for me alone. i am using 3dtotal as an example of how they advertise.) The only things i am concerned about, is if i make a site with paid video tutorials, would people buy them? and is it possible to get a descent ammount of traffic like the other competitors? (~200,000 page views). if so, then would i be able to get companies to pay for advertising on the site? sorry if i am asking alot of questions, im just not sure if this is the best way for me to go about making some money with a website. its just something that i know fairly well, enough to make some great instructional material, so i thought that it would be a good thing to do for a website. Please let me know what you guys think, you have been of great help so far. Thanks in advance.
OK well I'm not sure what sort of EPC that industry would have but I'm just going to go ahead and assume that you won't get much better than $0.15 per click and that your site probably won't be pulling much more than a CTR of 10% - again it's a total assumption you might only get 2% or you might get 20% it varies on the design and integration you opt for. So with that mind (and these figures are generous) you are probably looking at needing around 3500 impressions a day to achieve your $50/day dream. In all likelihood you will need more - I run some sites and get around 20,000 impressions a day and only pull around the $70/day mark. Anyway if you got $5000 to spend there is a lot you can do with that to set yourself up well. Firstly as has been mentioned numerous times already you need some quality content, and not just quality content you need some SEO content - it's probably best that you write it if you know your industry and know the basics of onpage SEO, but it might also be worth your while to outsource an article writer to write some articles on some of the more popular terms in your industry, good solid articles might cost you $10 each, but they can go a long way to generating traffic for your site. Then just keep creating good quality content... Then I'd also be investing a bit of money into building some good quality links to yur site finding a couple of good high PR high trustrank sites in your industry is always good. It's probably worth spending a bit on getting some good wuality directory listings as well, this could cost youa couple og hundred dollars. Then if you wanted to get things rolling a bit faster AdWords might be an options or other program like it, but I'm not generally a fan of PPC - they are too short term for my liking. That's what I'd be focussing on if I were you. No one can really tell if people would buy your videos or not, your in teh best position to judge. Do you know of anyone else who is already selling video tutorials, because you'd need some data from someone that is already selling video to get a reasonable estimate. That said I don't think AdSense is a poor option for any site, if you can post good lengthy content (300 - 400 words) on any topic then integrate AdSense you can almost always get 10% if not 20%, and I mean if you then get people moving through your site it doesn't really matter what yu EPC is you will be making some good money from AdSense.
Wow, thats much more than i was thinking, i though most people on average get arround 4% CTR, and maybe $0.06 per click. I am aiming for arround 10,000 impressions a day. so if something between my expectations and those figures would be great. I just need to know what type of website would be better for making money: - E-Learning Tutorial Website - Community Website (Gallery, Discussion, News etc..) thanks again for all the help guys.
Well realistically you should probably expect a EPC around $.05 - $.10 and well like I said CTR depends on your integration. Sites can vary from 0.5% to 30% depending on integration and a couple of other factors, but that is all dependant on aggressive you are willing to be, but I think aiming at 5% isn't unreasonable with a tutorial guide site. As for which website is best, I'd definitely be going the tutorial website - community sites like forums have notoriously low CTR and the ads are also generally very low EPC as well because the pages aren't optimised for specific keywords.
Spend more time on your content. But I do think this is a big website, you'd better separate it into 3 different websites, for example, 1 for tutorials, 1 for forums, 1 for resources. After building your site, submitting to google is the first thing, and then prepare to submit to DMOZ which is free, and then submit to yahoo with a charge of $299. After that submit to major search engines and directories. Since you have budget, you can make some email advertisement, google ad. etc.
alright, so i have some ideas of what the site can be like: - Video Tutorials with Audio (Bandwidth may be a problem here) - PDF Document Tutorials - Links to tutorials created by others (Will have a huge variety in this case) - Paid DVD tutorials (will take a long time to setup, etc..) So, from the above what do u guys think would be the most appealing to users. and is this something that will do good adsense and be able to make profit, or would it be better to make a site thats geared towards making profit with adsense. thanks guys.
Do not pay to submit your site. In fact your site will be listed faster if you dont submit it! Have link exchanges with other sites. When search engine bots crawl the site that has linked to you, the bot will follow through the link to your site, recognize your site is not indexed and bam ur listed in the search engine. This porcess takes around a week where submiting websites to search engines can take a month.
5000$ damn you are a baller lol i'm working with like a 300 dollar budget and trying to start 2 sites.
you can get many visitor even by not wasting alot of money on making the website. You can attract visitors by giving prizes
In general clicks from Adsense depends on a simple formula of traffic/impressions to clicks This will depend from site to site - but dont listen too much to people who tell you about making stacks of money from Adsense alone Many sites - even big sites - may only take about 10% of the revenue from Adsense. So it really isnt the "cash cow" some people claim Certainly you can make money with the Adsense program, and the more traffic you get, the more clicks you will get You might also want to experiment with where you put the ads on your pages, and see which colors, styles, positions etc work best for you My own view is that you are always best if you have a real product to sell You then dont need a huge amout of traffic to generate a good income For example I run a subscription service, as well as having Adsense, and although I do get clicks on Adsense every day, most of my income comes from people making their subscription payments. when you have two or three hundred people paying you $20 a month, the adsense thing is just an aside Theres always a play off between traffic and sales - otherwise known as conversion. A site that needs lots of traffic to make money might not be profitable, because dedicated hosting can be very expensive
Btw, I think, adSense will not be the only revenue generator. You can setup ecommerce module, and sell commercial models and textures. I know, some models cost near $10000. People, make money not only with content, but with products also