I've been lurking here for a while and decided it's best to outright ask since I seem to have overcome a lot of the early barriers of getting a site running, in part due to the help of this forum. I have a several years of experience in building sites, but very little with actually monetizing one. I started a site with a friend in early December, and the site has been very successful. As of this writing, we have 170k+ visits in January alone due to several Digg front page articles, and 478 feed subscribers. We only expect these numbers to only go up. We have both Adsense and Adbrite running, both of which are yielding very poorly. I know some of this is due to our current site layout, which didn't take into consideration the ad placement very seriously. We have a redesign planned soon. We have a fairly niche market, and we want to keep the content quality high, and not dump Adsense ads all over the place to "cheapen" the site. I think we'd rather lose a little in ad revenue if that meant less quantity or less obtrusive ad placement. What do you think we should be able to be making with this kind of traffic? Is Adsense the best way to go, or should we be targeting CPM advertisers? Our market doesn't allow too much for affiliate sites, so that won't be able to make lots of money. Right now we are making only a few dollars a day, which is abysmal. I appreciate any help.
1. Are there any products and/or services in your niche that you can sell directly? Even if it means creating or sourcing that service or product yourself. 2. How is your PR looking? You could sell links, which are barely noticable visually to your traffic (eg they can just be in the footer).
1. Not really. Since this is a side project right now, and all people involved have day jobs, the time and effort involved into R&D'ing anything marketable just isn't cost effective. 2. We've thought about this, but don't want to give off that "monetized blog" feel. How do large news/blog sites make money? They don't have link pages or Adsense all over the place. Do they just get enough traffic to support themselves through CPM? What kind of traffic do we need to get to be able to do that?