I've been running The Paid Online Survey Center for a little over a year, and I have yet to make more than $100 a month. I'm in law school, so I really could use the disposable income, but I also don't have much time to market the website. I'm working in a law office now, and I have some free time to post in GPT forums with my website URL in my signature as well as submit my website info to directories. Still, my website PR is only 3 and I haven't gotten too many link partners with equal or higher PRs. Any advice on boosting my income? Check out my site and let me know what could be missing from my business plan.
Sounds like you don't have much time to fully dedicate yourself to your site. Ever considered a partnership? Maybe someone can help you improve your site's earnings and you can share profits..
I hate to be harsh, but you're really lucky to be getting $100 a month with that site. It is really incomplete. The design doesn't look very professional. I don't think the gray against green banners work for you. I'm not sure if investing in a coder to make the website pretty would be worth it though. The main thing you need is content. You only have seven companies listed? Do more research. You don't even have lightspeed survey on there? They are a huge company. You should also separate the paid offer sites from the true survey sites. I personally would suggest paying for some longer reviews of the sites and possibly a partnership to provide a bunch more quality content. That should help your site really take off. Just my two cents though. Paid surveys are a tough market, and I don't know how much you want to devote to it.
I agree with the previous poster. Before marketing a website, I always make sure it looks its best. I'm surprised you pull in so much money with this site. I would get a partnership, or sell it. If you want a stable income with little effort, try buying an established forum.
There are a lot of similiar sites around. It seems to me if you don't have the time to work with it be happy with the $100.00 or take on a partner.
That can't have taken you too long to do. Why not put up more sites in other niches? A little bit from 10 or 20 different sites can add up fast.
Without geting a lot of work what do you expect Anyway you decided you become a lawyer stick with it anyway lawyers get payed good (wait for my divorce )
As far as aesthetics, my website looks better than most similar websites, even ones with higher PRs. Have you seen some of the work-at-home-mom websites? They look even more "unprofessional" yet pull in tons of visitors. The design stays... That having been said, I think that it really comes down to content. Although you all conveniently neglected to mention the survey scams section, which most GPT websites don't have, I agree that I need more, quality content. As such, I plan on soliciting authors in forums. I will also consider adding a few more survey panels to increase the number of income streams. My reasons against doing so are that I have tried many of them, and (big company or not) most of them suck. That's why they're not up there; I explained that on the Paid Surveys page. Anyway, thanks for the help...
I'm curious...are you at least in the profit margin? That is, is your site pulling in enough money to pay for itself? Anyway here's my bit of advice: I ran your site through checkpagerank.net, and the combined link count from Google, Yahoo, and other search engines adds up to about 1100. After over a year of being on the internet, I must say this is not a good link count. How much of your efforts are focused on link building? I personally spend a great deal of time doing article marketing, and this in turn built a respectable amount of links. Also have you considered starting a mailing list with a newsletter? One of the big things I noticed when I entered your site was that there was no opt-in form for a newsletter...
First of all, you are in a very competitive niche. Second, you DO NEED a better design. Don't compare your website with others. Chances are that the work-at-home-mom websites you are talking about are either authority websites or are website that don't make any money. There's a lot of top notch website that have a bad design. But they are very old, have a lot of back links and make a lot of money. You're not in the same position as they are.
I was in the green since after the first month and since after the first renewal. My website does not cost more than $100 per month to run... I am going to focus on link building some more. You're definitely on point there. I used to have a newsletter, but I never had any news; I'm no longer that pretentious, so I took down that feature. Finally, I should compare my website to others because people spend most of their time on other people's websites (Jacob Nielsen's law). That having been said, there are many, aesthetically unpleasant websites that make money and have become authorities. Unless they used to be beautiful and became ugly when they got famous, then the poor design must have had little harmful effect. Usability is more important, and nobody has ever complained about getting lost on my website. But, because you all seem to know what you're talking about, I'm open to design suggestions, so if you bag on the design, be specific or be quiet.
The design is really secondary to the fact that you are in an extremely competitive niche. And even though you mention survey scams, your site is still one in a sea of many that talks about survey scams. The main question you should be asking yourself is how can you make your survey site rise above all the others. What content can you provide that isn't featured elsewhere? Think outside of the box. What is your "WOW!" factor? Your purple cow? BTW, the work-at-home mom sites sites succeed despite ugly design because many of them have followings from forums, etc that they participate in. WAHM's have a unique comraderie amongst each other that's not found among male/female populated boards. WAHM's are far more nurturing of one another, and they do support each other's businesses. Not always, of course. But there is a completely different vibe. And I speak from experience. I am a work-at-home mom. Good luck!
Very good advice. Thanks for the heads up about the WAHM websites and how they thrive. I suppose I should stand out more as far as offering visitors something to look at. I'll have to think it over...
You can't compare your site to WAHM sites. Those sites are very often community-driven, which is why they can pull in big traffic. That market cares very little about the latest design trends. They care about the content and the ability to network with other people in their situation, because they can often feel isolated and like to talk to others dealing with the same challenges of working at home while they're raising their kids. You need to know your own market. In your case, you're going to need to reach a more tech-savvy audience, and probably a younger one (teens and college students would be a good target). They, on the other hand, do care about design. You're also working in a niche known for being riddled with scammers. A site that doesn't look professional screams "scam" to a lot of people, especially on these work-from-home type of sites. The design changes don't have to be drastic. But at least add a logo if nothing else, and do something to make your text "pop" a bit (the gray on green really does look awful... even changing the gray to white might help, and wouldn't take long to do). You can get a logo from a lot of DP members. I've used 8everything here before for a few, and her rates are very reasonable, and would be well worth it in your case. Jenn
There are thousands of survey sites out there that you have to compete on.Some of them have established well on the net and are too strong to fight.Moreover,people have lose faith in survey sites because 90% of them are rubbish.If you can prove that your site is really paying,you need to make it established very well.Get some of the survey takers to comment on your site.This will icnrease your survey sites credibility which means more money you could make
I've changed the styles so that the paragraph font size is bigger and the headers are dark green on white. I've also replaced the two images on the home page; I've always wanted to change those anyway. I'm going to work on link-building once I've finished making a few more design changes. I used to have a forum, but it was dead. It's a vicious circle: dead forums discourage people from posting, which keep the forum dead. Once I get more traffic, I'll put up a forum again. Same goes for the newsletter.
It already looks better to me as far as purely design critique goes. I'd say you're moving in the right direction.