Hi DPers. I purchased a site last week and it has already received 1,367 page impressions for adSense but only one click. I want a zero-maintenance revenue site. It has decent traffic. What are your recommendations for making more money with this site? http://www.coolparrots.com Maybe it would be better off not being a blog at all. Perhaps it should be an old-fashioned HTML text, tables and images site. Maybe it should be a forum. Maybe I should just add a forum link so that I have a forum and a blog. I am open to any and all suggestions. I am getting about 150 U/V a day. Thanks, Chad
Standard banner not helps much on click. Better change one of them to retangular. Besides, suggest use skycrapper at your side bar
Great blog with nice layout You can put 336*280 ads format under the title or 468*60 ads format under the content (above rating button)
Looks like a great site to monetize in ways other than adsense. There's gotta be some affiliate programs about parrots or parrot care you could recommend
Take the banner out of your header, those ads hardly ever get clicked. And get a bigger ad, 300x250 maybe. If ad 1 doesnt work, time to try ad 2 until you find something that earns u money
First of all the notion of a low maintenance site that you don't have to do anything to except collect money is a myth. It takes months, sometimes years of hard work to get a site on "auto pilot". The first thing I will tell you is the site has a great domain, and I really like the niche, but it's an MFA, and it looks like one and that turns readers off.... they won't click the ads when it is evident that you set this up just for the ads...IOW, people don't like being sold to, or funneled into an ad farm. If you want to get this site to low maintenance, you are going to have to serious about the design, and the content, or develop a traffic campaign and get serious about generating tons of traffic. The way I look at it is it's half way done. Great domain, not much else...just regurgitating You Tube videos and calling it content is not good enough anymore, you have to go the extra 5 miles and get a great colorful template. You are going to need some real content about parrots to (in text) to generate search engine traffic....posting videos will not get you to the top of the serps, unless they are yours. All you are doing here is letting people know that You Tube has Parrot videos and not giving them anything else, so they may as well just click through to You Tube, and watch all the videos from the source. You Tube can provide some great additional content, but it is not meant to BE the content..they have a site like that...it's called You Tube !...the reason why ? Because You Tube pulls videos constantly leaving you with black space and looking very unprofessional. Also you can't draw serps with someone elses content....it is no different that just autoblogging RSS feeds from Yahoo news. Duplicate content. I agree with the adsense comments (You have too many of them, you look like you are begging people to click)...there are other programs that would fit here as well. Pet supplies, online pet stores and pet meds come to mind. Parrots are a colorful, expressive creature and this site is not, as you can tell by the amount of people that stopped by and left without looking around or clicking anything. I could have made this in an hour. Unfortunately you can't do this without either spending time , or money on it, sorry but that is just the reality of any business. If there is a saving grace, what ever you paid for it, you get a cool domain, now you need to make a cool website if you plan on making any money with it. JMO Just thought I would ad, I know the common school of thought on adsense marketing is not to make the site too informative, or they will never click the ads, but you can see that, that isn't working for you, and adsense is not a money maker on a low traffic site.
hmansfield, Thanks for the advice. I did not know what to do with the site. I just bought it because of the traffic and knew that it could be a great site but I was just not sure how to make it a great site. Chad
It is definitely worth developing further.I don't know what you paid for it, but you can make money with this site/domain. My first suggestion would be to get familiar with Word Press (I believe that's what it is running) and search around the free template sites to see if anything jumps out at you. If not, you may need to go premium, but I think you should be able to find nice free one. You can get articles and tutorials to add to your content written for you pretty cheap, piece by piece, no need to jump right out and spend a bunch of money. What ever traffic it has right now, can be multiplied by more targeted visitors, and repeat business...you are going to have to bum market a little to help along what you over you have going now. You have a good base with the domain, and the fact that it has some traffic, but as you see, it needs more to perform the way you want it to.
Because you are using videos in your site visitors dont pay attention to the ads, so my suggestion is to use video units . Good luck
How about using image ads? Whenever I'm on a website an image ad grabs my attention more than text links.
I agree with hmansfield. I have seen so many site owners slap up a site and think they can walk away and have it on auto pilot. I have been a web developer for many years and know that it just doesn’t work that way. No one will let you get away with it. I will tell you this. There is not a person on this earth that makes money doing absolutely nothing. Your site looks good but you still have to put a lot of work into improving information. Most of the traffic you are getting is from a very simple and good domain name. But your bounce rate should tell you soothing. Go easy on the ads. Once you get some staying power (that is visitors hanging around checking out other parts of your site) then you cans start putting in the ads. There is nothing wrong with doing things one at a time. Also, if you are the mindset that you want to slap up a website and walk away, then do just that. Don’t look at your stats on a daily basis. Walk away for a month and then analyze the situation. You may be surprised you got more click throughs than you had ever expected. Good luck to you.
i think you can create a hybrid - part website and part blog - that way you can have best of both worlds
I hear what everyone is saying: This site has great potential and a great name and it needs to be invested in so that the full potential is achieved. I agree. I am willing to put in the work since you all believe that the work in this site will pay off. Ok. I will keep the site up in its present state as I plan a complete rework. OK. Please help me with this project. Please help me with this visualization: -All we have is the domain name. There is no site. We have a great name. We want to make a site that we can be very proud of and we are willing to put in the work to make it great. We are willing to maintain the site with updates and new content on a regular basis. We also want to make a few hundred dollars a month with this site after about six months of dedicated development.- OK. Please tell me what the finished project looks like in your mind.
in my honest opinion i think blogs are becoming over used and start to look taccy and unproffesional if not made to look unique. If i were you i would go for a html/php site with some sort of membership system (although it may be easier to try and get a different template for your blog) you already have a decent domain and some unquie content, with the right look and some seo your site will be earning the money you want it to... very good job so far tho
I'm thinking you may be right about the html site vs a blog. A full html site would seem so much more professional. A membership site could work too as long as I can figure out a good value proposition for the fee.