I am trying to put together a "system" for increasing AdSense revenue. Please help me fill in the blanks (questions at the end). Buy new domain name Set up new hosting account on shared "reseller" hosting package Set up website(s) on new domain Have content writers publish existing or write new content for new website Link to new website from existing websites Once traffic increases to the point where I will go over 80% of bandwidth on my account for the month if I maintain the same average bandwidth usage, then move the top 5 traffic sites from shared "reseller" hosting package to dedicated server Once high traffic accounts are moved to dedicated, start over putting new accounts on "reseller" hosting package If accounts on dedicated are not doing at least 2X hosting expense (see questions below) AND extrapolated bandwidth for month on dedicated server is less than 80% of max add new sites Questions and request for feedback: #1. Would you consider it acceptable to earn TWO TIMES hosting costs on a site per month? If not, what is your target profit per site? #2. How long does it take for a new site to start earning $3 per day? ($3 is based on TWO TIMES hosting cost per month on dedicated server). #3. Do you think you need dedicated IP addresses for each new site? #4. Do you feel the domain name TLD (.com, .net, .info and so on) matters? #5. I think that the domain name itself does matter, but I am proving it to myself right now with some tests? Any thoughts on that? #6. Any input on my system above? I am just starting to implement it. #7 Would you include submitting to search engines anywhere? If so, it could open up an entire separate conversation. #8 How long should it take for traffic to build up on the sites? #9 Do you feel a domain name should be "seasoned"? Names that have been registered for longer periods of time do better than new registrations? I am looking forward to hearing feedback from everyone and in return, I will share with you some of my numbers as I get better ones (or if you want we can try to put together some numbers from what I have been doing). Thanks. James
No, I'd be aiming at least a 1000 times hosting costs, hosting costs are minute in comparison to earning and potential advertising costs Depends on the site, a few days with work No Yes Domain names can matter, depends on the siet and where you expect to get traffic from No it's taking me lnog enough to answer these questions No, I let them find me Depends on how you promote, if you buy traffic (AdWords) you can build traffic very quickly otherwise it could take anything from a month to a year+ Older sites generally have a head start but it is rumoured length of domain registration is also taken into account
I'd really put aside the small scale thinking. As others have suggested don't think in terms of recovering hosting costs. A few larger sites earning $100 a day each is a lot better than thousands of sites earning a few cents, at least from the point of view of stability and long term plans.
No set number, a site earns what it earns. I don't target profit, I just work on the fact that profit WILL happen I've had new sites start earning $3 per day within 2 weeks (some take 2 months, some never manage that). But I can fit 100 sites on a dedicated server - so what does it matter. NO. The idea that you need lots of IP addresses is pure BS. To a certain extent yes. You will rarely if ever get type ins for anything other than .com, .net or you local (ie .co.uk for me). Sometimes it does. If your keyword is in the domain it can help.
This seems counter-intuitive to me. I would think having a lot of sites would make things more stable. If you have just a few sites earning lots of money and one of them suddenly takes a hit in traffic or the advertisers stop bidding on the keywords for the site, you take a big hit in earnings. Then again, thousands of sites sounds like too many. I would think something like dozens of sites in a variety of topic areas would be ideal.
A large number of sites spreads your efforts. You spend less time SEO-ing each one, less time building each one up, less time understanding your stats and improving on them. If you have a thousand sites each one holds very little value to you... and that may show through on the site itself and in the quality the user perceives.
Are you suggesting this is too low for a minimum acceptable to stop adding accounts to the dedicated server? That is my current threshold to stop adding accounts to the dedicated servers to keep server load down. Would you raise that? Sincerely, James
Hmmmm... that has not been my model. Can you explain how it is more stable to have a 3 sites earning $100 per day each versus 300 sites earning $1 per day? It would seem to me that it is more stable to have income spread out over more sites. Thanks. James
Yes, what you describe is much closer to my model. One of the things we do is to create "directory" websites for niche areas. For example a national directory of German Shepherd Breeders like: http://GermanShepherdBreederDirectory.com But, then we do this for every niche we can. Sincerely, James
I do not find that I can do that. My server load gets way too high when I do that. One account gets too much traffic to put more than a handful of sites (it varies from server to server based on the actual traffic to sites). For example though, here is a webalizer report on a new site we put up earlier this month. We could not gets 100 of these sites on one dedicated. See the stats page below: Sincerely, James
No. I am not not currently writing a "get rich with adsense" books nor am I researching right now to do that. Sincerely, James
So let me get this straight. Your getting 900,000 pageviews a month and your worried about making 2x hosting cost? I suppose you have many sites and your looking for a rule of thumb to drop the unproductive ones? Shouldn't your eCPM by channel tell you that. Two thoughts. First your sites are not optimized enough if your worried about loading out the server. That amount of traffic still shouldn't stress a $100 a month P4. Biggest culprite for sapping performance is typically badly designed db's and incorrect usage of cache and if_not_modifed_since. Second, at a 1% CTR thats 9,000 clicks. Dropping 35% for robot pageviews and your still at ~5800 clicks. Unless your paying for traffic I'd say your done. Take a year off and spend more time with the kids. All I need to do is get 20-30 clicks a day on one of my sites and I'm gonna sleep for a month and quite smoking
First, the 900K are almost ALL spidering of sites (not actual traffic). Second, the 2X hosting is to tell me when to stop adding sites to a server. I am trying to establish rules to build the business. That might be true of a typical site. We are running very large sites and the spiders are what really load the server. If you look closer at the image, you will see that I think the estimate of 35% for robot pageviews is very low. Average "actual" page views (not robots) per day is probably in the 300 to 500 page range. This is a NEW site and the spidering accounts for well over 99% of the bandwidth and traffic. Sincerely, James
OK, 500 page views X 30 days = 15,000 page views. You're showing 900,000 page views. From your stats, over 50% of your taffic is IE. Let's say that that's all the user traffic you see. That's still 450,000 page views. let's say the optimization is poor (or the visitors don't click ads) so CTR is only 1%. That's still 4500 clicks per month. If you're seeing only $2 or $3 then something is seriously wrong. You CPC would need to be 2c to only average $2 per day. 1,000,000 page views a month shouldn't load a half decent server. I have sites bring in 600,000 page views average per month (or so the stats say) and that's quite happily handled by a celeron with 512MB ram - a decent server will handle much much more. And yes, before anyone points it out. I know page views don't actually reflect the number of pages loaded by a visitor - if only it did . But with closing in on a minimum of 500,000 reported page views by visitors you should be earning way more than $2 or 3 per day. My site shows 600K page loads, this corresponds to about 3K ad impressions (software has too many url includes). You can work out from there what the possible earnings are. If that few page views are loading your server, either upgrade your server or optimise your code better.
Like I said, that 900,000 number (whoever said that first) is almost all robots. It is like 300 to 500. Somewhere between 9,000 to 15,000 page views per month. Not sure, why you did the math that way. The way I do it, it is: 9,000 to 15,000 page views per month times 1% CTR (your number... not what I actually get though) is 90 to 150 clicks per month. That is far from the 4,500 that you are suggesting. If my math is right, that's 3 to 5 clicks per day. This is one account. If you look at my system above, we move 5 of these type accounts to a P4 3.0 GHz with 512MB DDR RAM. If the revenue is not enough to cover 2 times hosting expenses then we add more accounts. The servers that I have load issues on are ones that I have hundreds of these accounts on them! I am trying to get a system for reducing load. I am not saying "page views" as defined by server logs for the 300 to 500 page views per day. I am saying that that is what I estimated many times a page with ads is displayed to a person. Yes... it is database driven site with includes and calculations and other CPU intensive stuff. If only it was static pages, it would not be as much of a load issue. Sincerely, James
Sorry, I completely miss read your stats. I saw IE stats where they were from slurp - damned if I know why. From 300-500 page views, $3 or so per day isn't too bad. I've never built the sort of site where spider traffic so far outstrips user traffic. If the site is all database driven, I'd seriously look at upgrading the memory - more memory works wonders with databases . But as a general rule, I expect to break even on a server with one site. Obviously depending on load, I'd expect to run quite a few sites on a server (certainly more than 10). So 9 of those sites would be for 'real profit'.
hm... I do not believe that search engines are indexing your site so much and that you gain no visitors. 99% for search engines - it's too much. You should have really much unique content to make search engines index you so hard. And that content should bring you lots of visitors. I completely agree with 35% for search engines. The practice shows that mostly it's really so. There is either something wrong in your calculations or in the whole business idea of the resource. Because 1MIO page views per month and not enough money for hosting - that's unreal. The same unreal as having less then 1%CTR. I started using adsense less then 2 months ago and from the first days CTR was always more then 1%
jamesorr I'd like to know how you managed such phenominal growth in such a short time. I've managed in the last 2 weeks to double my traffic to about 150 uniques per day. How can I get some more traffic like that? Buy it?