Hi, I've got a case study for you guys. I am a freelance web developer and I started a niche gaming website a little over a year ago as a side project. It's become quite popular, continues to grow and has potential for further expansion. However, I need to start earning something in order to justify my development time on any expansions & new features. My ultimate goal is to one day have enough passive income to work on my own projects full-time, most likely everyone's goal here. Anyway, I hope the following site will help me reach that goal. Website: g@mespr@ys.com <- replace @ with a's. Site Google Stats (Last 30 days): 29,529 Visits 20,621 Absolute Unique Visitors 340,356 Pageviews 11.53 Average Pageviews 00:04:59 Time on Site 36.81% Bounce Rate 66.96% New Visits Visitors: Niche audience of gamers with time on their hands to browse and share user-made graphics that they can spray on walls in multi-player games. Visitor growth is 52% since the previous 30 days due to release of a section for a second game on Jan. 28th. New section has received 134 submissions in less than a month. I expect the above stats to continue to increase for some time and possibly double once ranked #1 in Google for targeted terms. Currently #4-6. Tried Adsense I've tried Adsense but the contextual ads are terrible even when I used the competitive filter to force out the "Nasal Spray" and "Bug Spray" ads... no gamer is going to click those. I'd earn a $1 - $3 a day. 20,000+ unique niche visitors a month should be more valuable than that. I need advice. Current Direction : T-Shirt Store I became an affiliate with Deez Teez and added a T-shirt store to the site. That was 15 days ago. No sales but I quickly reverted focus to CJ rather than pushing traffic into the store. I don't like the title I gave the store "G's Teez", sounds stupid... but the shirts are... stupid. You'll see link in the main navigation. I plan to redo the name and branding to try and class it up a bit and then drive more traffic into it. Not my main focus though and I probably won't do anything more until I see some sales. My main focus is on CJ, since I think it is more promising. Current Direction : Commission Junction I ditched Adwords and started CJ about 1 week ago. This gives me complete control of the ads I display.. I love it. On average the visitors view 11 pages on my site, so I've built a little system to allow me to easily ad new ads to the site and they randomly display based on size into appropriate locations. I'm letting CJ gather stats on the current ads. At the end of the month, I plan to weed out the poor performers and continue to add more into the mix. I've seen an increase in clicks compared to what Google Adsense was reporting and I've made 1 sale. So it's working but still nowhere near the potential I feel this site has. I know, it's only been 1 week, I will give it time while I focus on client work again to pay the bills. I'm curious to hear what you guys think about what I've been doing, my current direction and what you think I should do / try.
I'd be expecting at a minimum with adsense to do $500/month at a CTR of around 6%. Adsense is probably the easiest to setup. If the ads are not relevant, have you spent time looking at the locations, and where adsense is getting it's "cues" on what to display ? Adsense help is pretty good to help you there. CJ can be good as well, and sounds like you are on track testing, testing, and more testing. Another option for you is to put the site up for sale, probably be some people very interested based on the number of uniques you are getting. Of course the price you will obtain is the issue.. Good luck! Cheers Tim
Thanks Tim. $500 a month minimum would be nice and I would probably still be tweaking Adwords if that were the case and simply sprinkling in new affiliates. It's encoraging to hear that though and at the same time has me wondering how I could be that bad with adsense. I will continue testing CJ and it will probably be combined with any tips / additional affiliate sources I receive here. I've received emails asking what I would sell the site for but I'm not interested since it doesn't help my goal of increasing passive income. Please read below to see what I did try with Google Adsense. Focused Bot on Specific Areas: I used <!– google_ad_section_start –> to help google focus on the titles but you'll notice that each spray is very different making it difficult for google to decide what the site is about. There is very little text on the site overall. It's a very graphic oriented site. I think because of that ads tended to default to the "spray" term since its repeated through out. To combat that I used the competitive filter. Competitive Filter: I used the Adwords competitive filter to weed out "bad" ads and I saw an increase in clicks but they were worth close to nothing, in fact one day there were 4 clicks in one block for a grand total 1 cent. I can't take that. I did eventually get the site to display gaming ads but the same ads would display page after page reload. My visitors view an average of 11 pages... it's ridiculous to have 11 impressions of the same ad to the same person. Overall , clicks averaged around 12 cents. Best days were around 30 clicks which is about 3% ctr when you use UV instead of impressions. Still half the 6% ctr and my 30 clicks would net me $4 not roughly $12 like you'd expect and I'd appreciate. Placement & Type: As far as placement goes, where you see my CJ links is where I put my google ads. There is a large ad block 300x250 that shows up randomly between 1 - 10 in the spray listing in attempt to reduce visitors getting used to it's location. I placed ads near the pagination and then on every individual spray page. I tried both text only & image only and image only outperformed text... I've currently removed all google ads although its just a matter of flipping a boolean value to put them into the mix with CJ. I was so fed up with them I didn't feel like giving them any impressions. SEO: All pages are generated with SEO in mind, title of page is title of the spray & <h1> + <h2> slightly different variations. The Metadata is generated with the title + variations of the common ways people search for sprays. The URL of every page is SEO optimized. All of this helped me beat a very well established competitor and I became #1 for all search terms regarding this topic. 52% of my traffic is from search engines. 31% from referring sites. I created a link exchange and contacted relevant sites. 17% from direct traffic. I fully expect the same tactics to position me as #1 for the expansion to the site by the end of next month if not sooner. Another Site: On my freelance portfolio website I've published web design & programming tutorials which receive around 17,000+ unique a month. I use text only Adwords on it and see better results, but still low ctr (1.5%) and low earnings, again around $1-3 a day. Another potential source of income that needs help. The first year I ran ads I saw $5-10 a day and no lower than 3% ctr... now 1 - 1.5%. Last tutorial I wrote was over a year ago. I experimented a while to try and boost it back to 3% with no luck. One thing that amazes me is when I make a drastic change to locations and colors and still see roughly the same results. I would love to get both sites to 6% ctr, right now, with 1% I'd have to have 6x the traffic to earn what I should be earning today.