Hi guys I'm a webmaster trying to make my living of the Internet - one day, maybe - just like the majority of you. The "problem" I have is that I'm much better at building sites where you *do* stuff (I'm basically a PHP/Perl programmer) than sites where you *read* content - like blogs or other. The best example of this is a stock trading game I wrote, http://www.tradeover.net - and I have now a project about a celebrities site (another game - I love creating places where people have fun and play...). Now, to the point: I have the feeling (got mainly from http://sensex.tradeover.net , the only place where I have AdSense which has a stinking 0.77% CTR ) that these kind of sites perform much worse (in terms of CTR) than the 'content rich' ones (people *do* things and are more ad-blind). So the question is : how the heck to I monetize better these sites - and my skills altogether??? Thank you for reading so far - and sorry for this long post...
Hey picouli, I would think the main thing to do is ask your userbase. Find out more about them, what they like about the game, what they would like improved, etc. In the process, you can probably also learn a lot about what sorts of products they'd be interested in, or if they'd pay to support the site. Another option could be to use a site like eLance to find a writer that could help you build out your content, and in turn build more adsense links for you. Good luck, neat games! Dave Cole Executive Editor | AffiliatePrograms.com
Thanks for your reply - you' ve got an interesting site in your sig, I think I might find a few answers to my original question there...
Why don't you write tutorials about the stock market with integrated adsense in it. Just create some page where your 'players' can learn how to trade stocks (information pages where they only have to read)
Any chance you could build a 'premier' version of the game with enhanced features that the customer would need to pay for? Basically, hook them on the game for free, and then offer enhanced features, special forums, upgraded graphics, etc at a charge? Good luck, Dave Cole Executive Editor | AffiliatePrograms.com
Actually my original idea was to maintain the site (not myself, at least a the beginning...) with donations - but it doesn't quite seem to work, as I've received 1$ in the last year... Maybe I'm doing something wrong?!? Or probably the problem is that I have only 2,500 users... Bah, thank you for your help, anyway!