Anyone care for a site-monetization analysis execise? I'm going to lay out my sites theme, current stats, content, design, and current monetization status and would welcome any comments, suggestions, discussion. I'm a noob but perhaps people will learn a few things from my example. ----------------------------- Theme: I run an online community for campers, alumni, parents, and staff of a well established military summer camp program in northern indiana called Culver Summer Camps. The site is at www.goculver.com . It's my first attempt at a web site and I've really enjoyed seeing it grow slowly since starting it in August. It started simply as a message board for campers to use to keep in touch during the winter and has grown into that and a bit more. The Camp is based out of a boarding school that does a nice job of reporting on boarding school stuff but has no online presence for their really nifty summer camps. That's my niche. Odd perhaps as its based around something that only happens for 6 weeks, but its like a site based around the Olympics....right? Thats one way of seeing it I guess. Site stats: We currently get about 220 unique visitors a day and 1800 a month according to awstats. Google Analytics puts us at around 130 uniques a day. I'm getting about 1800 adsense impressions a day currently off of 15000 hits a day (according to awstats). 60 percent of these are direct URLs, google sends me about 10 people a day, and then sites like this, wordpress.org and a few other message boards I'm on send me about 10 a day as well. People end up on the site from many search strings that involve the word "culver" as well as "tunak tunak tan" which I think is a lyric from a Jordanian song that is played at camp dances (lots of international campers). Someone posted the lyrics in the forum. As you can see, Google doesn't do a whole lot for us at the moment. During the summer weeks this year, I plan on spreading the word aggressively to parents and offering daily news and other resources specifically for them. With 1000 kids at camp. This could really bump up traffic a notch. One general goal right now is to make sure the site is optimized for this surge, which will also consist of alumni checking in for the news, and campers talking about camp stuff in the forums during their computer lab free hours. My site began as a plce where campers would hang out. That slowed down around late november and now we have about 10 campers and 10 alums that do most of the message board talking. Lots of people stop by to see what up though and then head on. Converting them into contributors would be good. I am considering adding a Shoutbox for this purpose. Content: - Message Boards, one for each high school camp unit (a few of them see sporadic use, most see next to none most months), and then general forums for camp discussion, alumni discussion, and off-topic discussion. All in all we have 478 members with about 20 posts a day on average (coming from the same 20 poeple or so usually). The forum index is our second most popular page after the front page itself. - A wiki for camp terminology, camp units, camp places, and info on the area around camp for parents and campers during their weekends "off". This sees sporadic traffic as well. -A front page blog that I update about 3-4 times a week with news from the camp directors about next summer, profiles of next summer's staff, funny stuff I find online, and a few longer bits every now and then. We run polls on the front page too. I'm nothing special at all as a blogger, but its competent material I think. My most popular posts get about 100 single page views a month. I have an RSS feed off of ebay that auto posts any ebay auctions with the words "Culver" and "SUmmer" onto the blog as posts. This adds 2-3 old summer camp memorabilia items to the blog, which people like. -a photo gallery where anyone can upload camp pics or see others. We have almost 500 pics uploaded from around 50 people. -a page of links to 4 youtube videos from last summer. This is really rare content for people associated with this camp and the quality is decent. Design: I basically stole the front page design concept from the Princeton University Homepage. I have no design training whatsoever and am still learning my way around HTML and CSS. I built this look from scratch after trying a few other designs out over the last year. I wanted something that wasn't all "photoshoppy" with images being used as design elements that would slow the page down. I've copied my text format largely from studying the CSS of the new New York Times website. My site's width may seem a bit strange as its fixed at around 940px. Once I got analytics up and running I saw that only 4% of my visitors are running 800x600 so I decided to go bigger. If the NYT can do it, so can I. I did not go the full 1076ish because I couldn't figure out what to do with the extra sidebar space. Perhaps I should just expand them. I just unveiled this new look a week ago and response has been positive. You can see what the site used to look like by glancing at the Culverpedia, which I have yet to port over to the new look. I run wordpress for the blog and most pages, mediawiki for the wiki, and IPB for the message board. I paid someone $20 to conflate my wiki and IPB membership so people log in on the messageboards and have full wiki access. I have not yet seen any similar feature for Wordpress and IPB so i have my comments turned off on the blog. When a post is comment appropriate, I manually create a thread for it in the forums and manually add in a link at the bottom of the post, or I manually ad a link in the post to the relevant already existing thread in the boards. I have spent a decent amount of time making sure my page titles are solid throughout the blog. Boards are a bit shakier but still not too bad. Monetization: ok, I have a Google Link bar at the top of the page just below the header image on all blog and general message board pages. On the front page I run a wide skyscraper down the left hand sidebar. I run a firefox referral bar after the first post on the front page and a 250x250 square with custom mounting after the second post. In single post view there is a 125x125 floated to the left and a 60x238 mini banner just above the "related post" box at the end. I run a Full-size leaderboard along the bottom of my static pages, like this one Over in my wiki I run a vertical link unit floated to the right in the main content on every page. No ads in the photogallery or memberlist besides the link unit at the top of every page. Thats about it for monetization. I do have an ad that I sold to a local business near the camp. This netted me $15 a month. I would like to sell more of these but am not sure what I can really get away with charging. Culver is a small town anyway and most business are skeptical, though I feel I'm offering access to a lot of summer tourists and their parents. From the adsense I'm making about $1 a day with around 1400 impressions each day (it fluctuates a good deal between 1300 and 1800). ------------------------------------------------------------------------ Main question: -How do I make more than $1 a day off of my traffic and offerings? And -how would you change a. ad placement b. ad format c. navigation d. design e. content f. SEO g. general marketing to accomplish this? I'm interested in suggestions of course, but more so in a frank discussion about how one should think about this sort of thing. I've tried to be open and thorough in my description so we can all have as much info as possible to work with here. Ideas? Any other info that would be helpful? http://www.goculver.com
a/b ad format Instead of the big square green advert, I would go for a 468 X 60 in place of it and the firefox; use white background, red Link text, rest of the text black. That way it will be blended into the text, yet the red will draw your attention to it.
When you say "A/b" ad format, what specifically are you referring to? Also, whats the thinking behind switching over to a basic text link ad instead of the custom mounted green thing I've got there now? I don't disagree or agree, just wondering what the thinking is about that.
a. ad placement b. ad format yeah I'd just have it basic and blended in with the link either standing out in red or blended in black. Best way is to just give it a try for a couple of 1000 impressions and see if clicks are up or down Maybe you'd get a better response if you asked a mod to move your post to placement/reviews.
It's interesting. My site has 1/10 of your impressions. Slightly more than 100 impressions a day and still I make the same amount from Adsense as you do. My suggestion is trying to blend your ads with the text, blue title, black text, gray URL. Hope this helps,
well said. I would say that our sites are very different though. Adsense might just not be a good fit for a site like mine in general that is not fully geared towards selling some tangible commercial item to the visitor. In your case your articles are pretty much indistinguishable from your ads. They're both just links that lead to onlinle-money-making products. I just might be barking up the wrong tree with adsense on my site. You don't see too many CPC ads on facebook.com either....
Sorry if that bothers you, bflora. I'm not trying to brag or something. Just want to share a thought.
i hear ya. Looking at sites like yours though reminds me that some site-concepts just aren't CPC friendly. Need to work more on advertising from places that sell to the kids etc...