30K visitors a months - Only 1$ revenue? Help, please!

I started a gaming news/articles site in the beginning of September. I knew some very intelligent and talented people and offered them to join as staff members. They accepted and I have six staff members working with me. We update every day with quality articles, daily news, and run a little forum. Within one month we managed to raise our traffic to five hundred visitors a day, and now we are holding closer to 1000 a day. I've been tweaking and retweaking with the google ads every two weeks or so because I can't seem to find any arrangement or placement to make any decent revenue. Last month we had 30K visitors and only 1$ of revenue. How can that be? What am I doing wrong?

In the meantime I removed most of the google ads and replaced them with Gamestop and Amazon ads hoping to make some affiliate sales. I've done that for two weeks so far with only three clicks total and no luck in sales.

Can you direct me where and how you would place ads in my site? Maybe you can think of a clever placement or just a bit of insight into how to make a bit more money.

http://nintendoenthusiast.com

 

Well, you must to attract visitors to click on adsense ads. It is difficult to acchieve because you have a lot of pictures and videos on your site that distract vistiors from ads. Did you tried with 336x280 image ads?

 

If you had thought about that beforehand, done some research, you would have never started a gaming news/articles site in the first place.. Still time to do something else with your time..

 

Haha, I find that funny. No, the reason I started the website was not for making money. I had written gaming articles on IGN for the past ten years as a hobby in my spare time and I finally decided to take full creative control over the process and do it myself on my own website. I enjoy the design process, the management of the staff, and writing the articles. The way I make the real money is from actually developing games and receiving sponsorships and Mochi Ads. The website is just a hobby. Still, with the success we're finding, I wouldn't mind making some extra money from it. It should at least pay for the hosting.

 

Adsense is not the be all and end all- there are many more possibilities of generating revenue with a website.
1k visitors a day?
Try clickbank, they have a marketplace full of gaming related products that im SURE you will earn more than 1$/month with your targeted gaming traffic

 

I think you need to have a clear aim in what you are trying to achieve. This will then help you best with call to actions and helping the site convert. Check you analytics, where are people coming from and what are they searching for? what is the typical click habit of those users? Maybe add in some heatmaps. I dont know this niche but looking at the site the ad placement is not optimal - amazon ad is almost under the fold (maybe it is on other resolutions?). If the aim is to make money then why not swap the log in box with the ads box?

 

@ECNS: I guess because the site is a gaming site aimed at articles and building a community so the way I'm building it is differently than if I was building it from the ground up with ad revenue in mind. Meaning, I'm not going to write articles that are aimed at reaching certain keywords, rather I'll write in an intelligent style about topics that gamers want to read about. That's why they've always read my articles on IGN in the past. If a topic happens to be more popular, trendy, or controversial then I get more hits. But, I'm not aiming for that because it will turn my site in a cheap gaming news site rather than a quality site which we are aiming for as an alternative to many "popular" sites.

Also, because we are aiming to build a community, I opted to place the login and registration at the top rather than the ad at the top. That way readers are first hit with the option of subscribing and becoming a permanent member of the site rather than becoming a hit-and-run adsense click.

@SpecncerMuller: Thanks for the tip, I'll check them out.

 

I said that because you're posting in adsense forum and with a gaming site. It is well known already that adsense converts poorly on gaming sites, because of the type of audience I guess. Too techy for clicking adsense.
If you add a bad ad placement, then your CTR will be very very low.
With adsense only clicks count, and your plan is not to have people click on ads, otherwise you wouldn't do a gaming site and you wouldn't place the ads out of the way.
So affiliates programs such as clickbank, amazon, cj.com and others related to gaming could be your best way of earning, because those require an action (often a sale) in order to get a commission. While one click on adsense gets you pennies, one sale commission will get you several dollars. And the affiliates ads can be out of the way because it doesn't matter that the visitor click on them, it's if the visitor clicks on it and then buy, so those who will find the link to click, are more likely to buy the product. You can even have all the affiliations at the bottom of the site as an area for buyers, if they want they'll find it.

What you can do from now on with adsense is to limit yourself with 234x60 ad units. Those are small, contains only one ad link, always text. So you can write some code so that they will appear only in the content of your articles. If while reading visitors click on them, fine. But don't count on that too much. But I think it is a good compromise between having adsense "in your face" and having them in remote, "out of the way", non efficient locations.

 

Thanks James, that's actually very helpful. It's true that I have to make the most mileage out of the few clicks I get. I was browsing through ClickBank for e-products and I had a out-of-the-box idea. Being familiar with a couple hundred members of the IGN Boards community who now populate my site every day, I would say most of them are rather awkward socially and tend to express themselves more through message boards than in real life. Yet, they are always craving real contacts and real relationships, often complaining about their failed dating life, etc. So, maybe they would be interested in some Self-Esteem/Social Skills Self-Help courses. I think it would catch their attention a lot more than the Amazon video game ads which they are blind to because it poses nothing new or unique to them.

Also, are there any decent ad programs that pay for impressions? I mean, 1000 views a day isn't worth much. But maybe there's something out there I don't know about.

 

Any CPM which pay some interesting money will involve pop ups, pop unders, slide in ads. The kind of things you don't want on your site, if you wanted that you would put adsense "in their face". The standard banners, most will require to be located above the page fold and the earnings are not interesting in my opinion. For low traffic better leave this option alone for the time being.
As for clickbank and other affiliate products, yes, playing on another common aspect of players (you'll use your inside knowledge for that) is a good idea. Also most players are young and guys, so the ebooks about how to fight shyness and talk to girls are good..
Some ebooks are about making money online (hehe) but instead of using their standard graphic material which talks to mom at home or to webmasters, you could customize it by stating something like "wish you had more time to play games? Here's a way to earn passive income from home, even a full salary, so you won't have to commute everyday and die from boredom at work"

 

Yes, that was one of the ideas that stuck out at me. Most of those guys are looking to make a few quick bucks. One of them told me about a freelance writing low-paying online job, another said he couldn't put bread on the table. So, it's definitely an option. I guess CPMs only work for the games I make because those get hundred of thousands of play-throughs when they are free. But for the site I'll probably have to stick to affiliate e-products or pre-sales for hot video games before they release.

Thanks for all the advice. Oh, and I'll also probably stick to in-content text links from google.

 

You probably know your way about doing it programmatically, but perhaps this css trick will get you try it faster, in this post I describe the code for a certain case, but it can be modified when you get the trick which is a tiny width transparent div which pushes the other div holding the ad a few lines below the start of the article..
http://blog-money-wiki.com/blog/200...le-trick-to-insert-an-image-within-a-text.php

You can also use it to display three 234x60 ad units in the article, left or right, so in this case it will be:
transparent div a few dozen pixels high
adsense div
transparent div whatever height you want
adsense div
transparent div again whatever height you want
adsense div

If all your articles have a minimum number of words, then you can safely use the same setting. But otherwise you could set a few cases, for articles below 500 words, and those above for instance.. And then produce the transparent divs height programmatically.

 

Thanks. Yeah, I just recently began tinkering with CSS using that lovely training device- Firebug.

 

See? I already put the trick into action.

 

I don't know if it's because the cache needs to be updated, but all I see is a 468x60 ad, centered, in the article.
Not quite the css trick of floating ads, and the size also, not 234x60.

But yes, you can see how that works for a while and next week change it to exactly what I suggested, to see what works best on your audience.
If one day you try my suggestion, then make sure you put the border of the ads same as background, white for better ctr. The fact that the text will float around them is enough to create some sort of separation between the ad and the text already, no need for a grey border.

 

i think clicks are very rare to get more click blending ads or use text ad because most of your content are image,flash,video so better will be that.

 

Just use the "Analyse on page" feature in Google Analytics to see where people click and place the ads close to those places.

 

If the CPC is less, your this low revenue is not a wonder. If you get much traffic try BuySellAds and sell your advertising space for Advertisers.

 

The left side of my blogs give me a good CTR... But, each site have your unique "way" to make money...

 

Why dont you try infolinks. It can generate a decent income for you