About 1.5 year ago, I create a site wilkscalculator.com, because I needed it for myself. It does some calculations related to powerlifting, that are also used by crossfitters, weightlifters and overall gym-rats. I am quite new to the whole make money advertising thing, so I am looking for some directions. I am thinking I should advertise protein supplements and similar products, since that would seem like something my audience would be interested in. This leads me to my two questions: - Do you agree that marketing related products is the way to go to monetize the site? - Where do I go to find out what products are available to advertise in this space? Facts: 3500 uniques a month, mostly from US, site 1.5 years old
Try AdSense. Maybe go for an appropriate affiliate program -- there are tons of great affiliate programs in your niche. Hope this answers your first question: yes, targeted and relevant ads and affiliate programs are typically much much more profitable. 2nd Question: Depends. Research the hell out of it. Figure out what the typical affiliate rates are. Find a good balance between highest paying and most sold.
Thanks for your answer. I actually already tried AdSense, and it earns me less than 10$ a month. I guess I should have included that in my post. Where do I go to find available, trustworthy affiliate programs? And see if they work for others etc?
Cool. Adsense does take some optimization. Different keywords are more competitive and will drive different revenue. Check out google's keyword tool and try optimizing your content towards higher paying keywords. I really have no experience with this niche's affiliate programs, so I'm not comfortable recommending anything. Dig deep. Find products in your niche that you are comfortable/excited to promote and reach out to them. Sorry --> the best advice I can give is to go out and find them yourself Happy Hunting!
Build a list. Have an opt-in on the site, offer a 5-10 page report on something related that they'd all be interested in. Then occasionally email them with offers related to your field.
Your best bet to find a variety of offers is to browse through Commission Junction. CJ.com also hosts BodyBuilding.com's Affiliate program - which I would think would be a great place to find affiliate products to promote to your audience. Commission Junction: http://www.cj.com/ BodyBuilding.com Affiliate Program: http://www.bodybuilding.com/store/affiliate.htm I also agree with Khadaji. The simplicity of your site makes it a prime candidate to be redesigned into a high-converting squeeze page that maintains your calculation software. If you're getting 3500 visitors per month, that's a little over 100 visitors a day. Let's do some simple math... 100 visitors/day x 10% Squeeze Page conversion rate = 10 signups per day 10 signups/day x 30 days = 300 subscribers per month (3600/year) Assuming an attrition rate of 3-5% per month, after 4 months you'll have about 1100 subscribers (and growing) that you're mailing to at least twice a week or more with affiliate offers and promotions. Open rates and conversion rates will vary, depending on the offer you build in order to get them to subscribe, but being able to repeatedly market to your site's visitors is a great way to monetize such a site in addition to adsense and other options. Good luck.
That's got to be one of the most conservative figures I've seen in a long time! I routinely see over 40% conversions on my landing pages. (That is, with ordinary traffic... use junk traffic, get junk results... how about 71 signups in two days... sounds good? It came from 13,000 visitors from an Adf.ly campaign... junk traffic... conversion rate of about .005%) Be sure to offer a 'report' that visitors would want... you don't even have to write it ... there's plenty of outsourced writers who would do it for a relatively low cost. Offering a nice freebie should get your numbers up to 30-45 signups a day with that much traffic.
You might also consider becoming an Amazon.com affiliate, providing you don't live in a state they no longer allow affiliates from. Or you could also get set up with a drop shipper. An excellent directory for drop shipping businesses is Worldwide Brands. I've been a member for several years. I personally think adsense is a waste of time and removed Google ads from the majority of my sites... it doesn't make any sense to get pennies for clicks when you could just as easily get dollars.
LOL, yeah. I tend to be really conservative on all my projections. If I can make projects profitable using conservative estimates, then my real numbers usually blow the projections out of the water. Also agree with this. Even using my conservative estimates, mailing his list 2-3 times a week should be good for a hundred bucks a week or so. Just depends on what kind of open rate he's able to achieve.
All the above ideas are quite helpful. I would also suggest coming up with premium services you can sell for a membership.
I think the best way to monetize your site is by building a list. Get the e-mail address of those who buy products from you and market to then later on new offers, special discounts, etc.
Here's my 2c, although I don't have any hard statistics to suggest what the probable outcomes might be. I'd do a little bit of everything; you've said that adwords wasn't up to your expectations, however combined with some affiliate marketing, get started on building and maintaining your email lists and perhaps an added draw-in of an ebook (with a sign-up to receive of course). To answer your questions directly; I do agree. If you're generating visits, they'll be targeted to your content. The trick here is to find out what products those people are looking to purchase on an impulse basis. AdWords has been great for some sites we've had, but its horses for courses. As others have said, if you tune your content, it can do really well. Look at similar sites, do your market research, pour over Google Analytics for a while. To answer this, you need to understand who your audience is. You've got 3.5k unique's a month - are they male, female? Are they between the ages of 18-25? 35-45? Do they typically come from well-to-do areas and can afford the products you're selling to them? By understanding your market and testing placements, products etc (the 5P's - or the 7P's depending on the lecturer you had you'll soon find out what works and what doesn't. Based on the site we used to run, which was in the health and fitness genre like yours, we were generating around $100 per 1,000 visitors through adwords alone. The affiliate marketing wasn't great for us as we just couldn't get hold of the links to the products we needed for our market and we just weren't quite large enough to command a slice through larger distributors. Going back to it, research is your key here - do you research well, understand your market, test the hell out of it and you'll quickly understand what is going to work for your site and what isn't - its all trial and error - there are no quick wins in this business. Except for perhaps AdWords, which does all of that for you to some degree. Hope that helps.
You can go for SEO and SMO, both are proven to be effective in driving traffic to your website, make sure to leave good comments and interesting contents.
I want to thank everybody for the valuable advice and input. I have gotten to 3500 uniques with no other effort than creating the site, but right now I am making so little from my visitors, it is laughable, so it is clear to me I need to start by focusing on, how I can increase my earning per visitor. If I double my traffic and earnings from the site, it would still not be close to worth my time. If I could make 50$/1000 uniques, which is half of what web3k mentioned for a similar site just fomr adwords, I would be delighted. I have signed up for cj.com, waiting to be approved, and am currently researching other affiliate options. I want to create multi-language versions segment my traffic (multi-language versions), which should make it easier to put targeted ads on there. As for the mailing list, I will think about what kind of content I could create to make it attractive to sign up. Getting to know my visitors better is also interesting... Google analytics tells me nothing (as I would expect). Do I have other options that simply creating surveys/polls?
I would always focus upon listbuilding! Think of it this way.. If your visitors come to your site, then never come back; what good are they? What if you can capture them by offering something in exchange for their email address? Do you think, you could get a boatload of subscribers by offering them their results in exchange for their email list? Maybe, just maybe, you could hold off on giving them their results, in exchange for their email address? IE "To get your calculation results enter your email address!" It doesn't even have to be that difficult, you can simply offer an enticing guide or something, but I'm confident that getting the results to their calculation would be better opt-in bait.. Then you can continually update them each time you post, each time you update, and each time you find an offer worthy of their devotion. Just something for you to consider.
Thanks for the suggestions, Candlekeep. I will continue thinking about how I can provide some value to subscribers - in a not too intrusive way. I do not want to hide the basic functionality behind sign-up walls.
You don't need to... write up a short 5-10 page report on something of interest to your visitors, and put a signup form at the top right... You'll get plenty of sign-ups that way - and it won't affect the functionality of your site at all!