I have had a regional website about Vermont history, etc. up & running for 11 years, as a hobby of sorts. It gets about 1200 to 1500 unique visitors per day so I added AdSense and a few affiliates to help bring in a few extra bucks. In all, it brings in about $200 per month. My main job is as a web designer but I'm trying to get out of that and more into generating an income from my own websites. The site is called Vermonter.com and God only knows what the demographics are (I assume just about anyone who would be interested in Vermont) so I'm not sure what I should be doing to help beef up the whooping $200 to a bit more. I recently took a bunch of affiliates off because most were not generating anything. Most of the income is from AdSense. I will soon be adding opt-in email for newsletters and I started doing press releases again. I guess the part I could use some advice with is would it be worthwhile to start doing AdWords for the site or perhaps banners, etc. on other, bigger websites. This is kind of a tough one as I'm not really selling any product. More along the lines of getting an income from ads. Maybe I should be adding some ebooks, etc.? Any help or suggestions would be greatly appreciated.
Well I just did a google search for Vermont History and there was only 1 adwords ad and it had nothing to do with that topic, so you would certainly have no problem getting first placement for related search phrases plus you would likely get the minimum cost per click of between 1cent - 5cents.