I have been very impressed with the great advice given to people here at Digital Point through this forum, and find myself (and my family) needing to ask for some significant advice and, if possible, guidance to meet a financial goal with a ten month timeline (must be in place by May of next year). Background about my goal: Basically what it comes down to is that when my wife's contract expires in eight months we want her to stay home with the kids. Already we are paying over $16,000 per year for day care for our four children. We have concluded that in order for her to stay home we need to find a way to bring in $15,000 per year to make up the difference we will see once she stops working. Background about my current web sites: I own three web sites, one of which is making roughly $5 per day in adsense only. I write one new article for this site each week and have been doing so for over a year. The site also has a successful email newsletter targetted at music educators. It was never my intention for it to be an Adsense monetized site, but has evolved into that over the last two years. Another site has a PR3 and has been around for over two years, but is basically dormant and not being capitalized on. The third is a newly registered domain that I have just started to work on. The primary site brings in around 400 unique visitors each day but fluctuates seasonally. The other sites are not bringing in more than a handful. Advice or help that I am asking for: I need help in improving or converting my web site(s) from focusing on adsense to something that will actually bring in some decent money. I just don't know where to go to meet our family's goal. I don't know whether to start an entirely new site with a better plan or whether to fix/improve what I already have. If you think you have some good advice to show my how to meet the $15,000 goal in a one year time frame, I would love to hear from you either through PM's or through replies to this post. Is the $15,000/year goal a reasonable one or am I kidding myself with these niches? Sincerely, MaestroC
You said you are writing one article per week for year so it 50 in average. But I see 6780 pages indexed in google, picked a few...all with adsense. How you can express this ?) Did you setup chanels to see which ad gives what ? I suppose it should be a lot more than $5 a day. Where and how do you advertise it ? Also did you try affiliates with this niche ? Also if you are so great content writer (based on your website) you can try to write articles in music niche, ask Jenn on copywriting forum she will help you with jobs probably, she have great list of resources. Even if you want to write with DP prices it's quite possible to make $40 a day. What your other hobbies other than music ? However still surprised, sites like that should give more than $5 a day. That is usually for crap myspace, arcade, proxy, etc.
There are indeed thousands of pages on the site. Let me explain... I started this site as a kind of news site related to my field of music education. I regularly pull in RSS feed intros with links to the original stories and then pass the ones of interest to music educators on to the people on my mailing list. Each news story intro has its own individual web page but they are archived after one month (I have considered deleting them entirely but have not done so yet). I have indeed set up channels in adsense, and they tell me that the vast majority of adsense revenue is not coming from these news briefs, but instead from the two dozen or so free public domain music files that I have created as a part of my day job and post to my site as a free service. I ran some adwords ads for a month or two but the return on those investments were not worth continuing. The adsense ads run at the top of each page, below the header and article title, but above the article content. I did try affiliates, but never converted so I gave up on them. I have two theories on why they did not work: My target audience generally does not shop online- Music educators usually have to buy by purchase order and through school bidding proceedures. We don't buy a lot of stuff for our own personal use. I simply did not fully understand the affiliate process. I would routinely post affiliate links to Amazon items, but they never converted to sales. This was done very early in my web master career though, so I may not have been as well versed in SEO strategies way back then. I do write for another web site (musicappreciation.suite101.com), and have done so for over a year as well. Likewise, my revenue from these articles have not paid off as much as I would like. I often fear that my niche, although my passion, may simply not translate well to making income. I will check the copywriting forum for some additional ideas though. I have begun to write freelance articles on some other topics for Suite101, and intend to do some more keyword research toward branching out into other fields. What kind of traffic does a keyword or phrase need to have in your opinion to make it worth going after (assuming that it has a good KEI)?
Well i'll not worry too much about the target because from my point of view it's quite achieveable. My advice would be that instead of starting up totally new it would be better to turn those 400 uniques / day into somewhat like 4000 but revamping the entire site with a new concept and a planned strategy. Since you have finally decided to hit the goals and earn from internet the first think you will need is a plan, and set short term targets and try to hit them first rather then long term goal of yours. But once your short-term goals are ahieved you will automatically see that 15,000/year is nothing as compared to the potential of your work. You need to focus a bit more on the development of the website.
I am enthusiastic to hear different people saying that they believe I could achieve this goal with the existing site, and I have known for quite some time that I needed to overhaul the entire thing as it has turned into more of a jack of all trades and master of none. I have occasionally found myself just writing to get an article done rather than really thinking about the content and keywording of it... My bad... Anyone know of any suggestions or resources on how to decide what direction to go with the site and where to trim the fat? Also, you mentioned that the goal is achievable, do you mean through adsense only or through a combination of revenue generators? My sincere thanks, MaestroC
Hmm, yes about affiliate there should be more direct text to buying and comparing products and so on in such way. For now you have just info that's why you don't convert. As for traffic, I would say no less 1000 a day from all related keywords if you can make it whole in top 10 or even top 5. But it's also greatly depends on niche. Music that way probably don't pay well. Anyway just please don't start another bad site like I listed previously, it will not earn more than current
I am very grateful for your responses. They are making me think in directions I had not considered. I was wondering though if you could be a little more clear for me on some of your statements. I don't quite understand... and also: I think I know what you are saying, but I want to make sure...
I've worked with AdSense and results are pretty good, and comission sites are not much good for me, but atleast with adsense you can have a steady stream of revenue rather than going for a boogy woogy ride. The basic facts you need to list out first .. how much time you can allocate per. day and out of that time how you should divide between website enhancement and marketing, you have to balance between the two in order to run effectively.
It's news and information now. So just articles, not like sales text. Go to look for any site and see what info they have which help them sell. About traffic use DP tools and make that research. Type niche keyword, then see how much all keyword can get you daily and build sites then