The story behind taking an unused domain from $0 to $101.44 a Day Hello everyone, I have been a long time DP lurker and have built many sites over the past few years. Most end up pulling in about 200 visits a month and I continued to struggle for years. Recently I built a site during the first week of August. It is a niche site that is composed of about 20 pages of original content that I wrote and not much more. It is a complete white-hat site with legitimate SEO techniques applied and genuine interested readers. The site traffic started like so: Daily visits- 0 // 16 // 81 // 90 // 140 // 520 // 830 // 104 // 1300 and so on... [analytics showing my site from start to now] [an example single day snapshot of my analytics, showing great pageviews per visit as well as a solid time spent on site etc] [more single day analytics showing 6,602 absolute uniques and my traffic sources] Alexa 1 Week Average: 76,XXX (picture removed because of 4x IMG limit) [Alexa ranking within the top 100K websites for the week. Since the site isn't even 3 months old, I rank at about 150K for the 3 month average, but things have been consistent for weeks and I should raise to the top 100K as the 3month average after another month.] Profits: And now for the numbers people are most interested in.... Now after hitting about 2,000 uniques on the site and building somewhat of a community through usage of forums and live chat. I decided to monetize through selling a site service as well as google adsense. I added the site service on September 9th and the adsense towards the end of September. There are the averages I am now seeing: [Last 31 Day report] This report shows that I averaged $78.68 a Day for the last 31 days. Take note that these are organic numbers and I have done no "live promotion" during this time (spamming, etc). My Google Adsense has pulled in an average of about $159.38 a week, or $22.76 a Day. These numbers together total to a $101.44 a Day average. or $3,144.64 a Month or $37,735.68 a year I want to thank the DP community for all the knowledge they have shared and wish to lend any insight I can with others working towards a goal like this. I am currently re-investing a lot of the profits into some big site upgrades and hope to have some even better numbers soon. I do not claim to be an expert and I personally just believe I was blessed with Thanks guys.
Also, please do not PM me asking for the site address or domain. I have made the decision to keep that private, please respect that choice. Thank you!
Congratulations. Such great success in such a short period of time is really motivating. Would you be willing to at least share a broad description of your niche? "Health" or "recreational activities" for example .
Thank you sour for your relevant post.. cough fr0gman.. In general the site is a resource for a specific activity, it could be easily compared to something like "Foosball" And my site would be the Ultimate source for Foosball and have various info on it including the latest Foosball tips, and articles written by the best Foosball player in the world. It's no (next-gen) idea that is revolutionary it was just a lucky find on something with a lot of interested people and no "quality" site covering it. Hope that helps. fr0gman- I personally read many testimonials on these boards that inspired me to continue doing what I am doing, which helped get me where I am today. I don't see why me posting my own should be taken in a negative way.
I am not sure which revenue you are referring to specifically but basically I am using: ~Paypal simply to accept donations for the service I provide visitors. ~Adsense for obvious CPM//CPC revenue that is it I used to have Adbrite running on the site and tried to focus on some high paying CPM advertisements but it overall ended up pulling in about 5-9$ day because the ads were so random and visitors were not interested. Around a .03% click-through rate with adbrite...
wow nice, i gave up on adbrite, both as an advertiser and as a publisher ......can i pm you a link to my network? you can earn alot more. (asking permission because i dont want it to be considered spam if I do)
Very inspiring. My story is fairly similar, with a bit less profit then yours. It always feels great to see your first success. Congrats and have fun building on it.
LoL nice work .... I did a very similar project in terms of buying an established domain and then updating it regularly, although I have mine up and successful in under 2 weeks .... and stats are very similar - but i am around 30 000 alexa daily. But I am only earning $40-$50 per day. How did you get $80 per day with donations ? As you said monetized with Google and Donations - Google only $20 per day ?
scuzzyo- similar, I like that testimonial scuzzyo, those are some nice individual payouts. I have resources valuable enough on the site that I could mark them as a "premium" section and maybe have a similar system of people having to complete a survey or something but just want to make sure I stay legit. thsadmin- yes it may sound outrageous but the donations are pulling in the majority of the profits every single day. this is because by donating you are unlocking the "premium" features of the site which may make it easier to believe than just so many people feeling like sending me money for a great site everyday.
Right. I feel it is best to give someone a clear layout of what features you provide by "upgrading". Rather than enticing them into clicking something they need and putting a big stop sign in their face of what they HAVE to do in order to gain access. It has worked out great and my rate of returning visitors is amazing.
Now comes a point where I have pretty much no CMS managing the sites content and have been creating all of it from scratch within Dreamweaver. The site has grown so much that if I continue to stack new content on the navigation system it is becoming too cluttered and unclear. I have built the page within a wordpress template I had professional created and payed for. I am just worried on hurting the site that is working so well. As long as SEO doesnt get damaged I should have potential to add a lot more content and rank for a lot more searches. Anyone have any tips when transferring from CSS//XHTML to a WORDPRESS site? I know the saying goes "it it ain't broke, dont fix it". But I see a lot more potential for the site and need CMS to reach those goals. Thanks in advance!
Hard to say or suggest - as we don't know what the site is and without seeing it first. I use several mod's in wordpress to keep all the original URLs and not loose the original links .... but it can be tricky to keep all the content as is.
Is there a forum? Is the content only unique content generated by you? What did you do in terms of off-site SEO? Did you get a bunch of backlinks fast? Did you pay for services? Also, does the traffic mainly come from google? Social bookmarks? etc? What tools did you use to find the domain name/research the niche?