I just aquired a established authority site and need some opinions

I was lucky enough to recently aquire a extremely established niche website.
The domain is www.stevegtennis.com. It is well over 10 years old and is simply
the most established tennis site for pro tourament results, rankings and archives.
It has been updated daily for over 10 years (besides the last couple weeks) and
archived and has lots of info you can not find anywhere else on the web.

The design, I know, is completlely outdated. Prob 10 years old. But everything is
free so I dont think the users care much. They care more about functionality and
everything being up to date.

It recieves close to 100,000 uniques/mo, 200,000 visits/mo, 2,000,000+ hits a month but is dropping off becuase it has not been updated in a few weeks so that will be my first order of business. This traffic is 100% targeted to its niche.

My questions are what do you think will be the best way to monitize this site. I have
an offer from an established tennis equipment supplier to pay $500 month for a top large banner on ever page on every page. Do you think this is the best I can monetise
this site with this ammount of traffic. Or do you think I could do better with adwords
or an affilate program?

Next, eventually I would like to update the design and possibly switch over to a CMS
platform of some sort to automate a few things and just make it easier to update. Any recommendations here?

Any opinions, recommendations or offers would be appreciated.

Thanks

 

You have a lot of traffic coming to the site for rankings and results. The best way to monetize that is with ads. You will need to get return visitors up and page views up. Turn it into a social site so visitors can discuss the results and rankings. It is not very inviting for discussion at the moment.

 

improving the layout would also help. Have a community and all would also improve its effectiveness.

 

try wordpress CMS and adding it into Google News to get more traffic, additional to that move your site into CDN to rank and load better

 

It does have a forum, with a about 3,000 registered users, the forum just has not been promoted much. The site actually does very well with return visitors. IMO opinion page views are also pretty good at around 1 million a month. I know the design needs alot of work. The design has not been updated in 10 years. I just aquired the site and I have lots of plans for redesigning the site and expanding it.

My question is, to those who might have experience with monetising a site with alot of traffic, is how much I can expect to earn in my niche with
the amount of traffic I am now getting if I properly find the right ads and placements. The traffic is all organic and very targeted towards the sport of tennis as well being very well known and established in the tennis community.

Also asking exactly what methods of monetization might be recommended. I have several ideas myself. Just want to see what some other marketers think. Thanks

 

Put Adsense
Sell Baner(s)
Try some affiliates programes targeted to tennis products/services ...

 

I would start by investing in a design and maybe outsourcing the web work....I am actually a tennis fan.. I maybe interested in buying the site...how much you asking?

 

I think the site is great. PR 5... that's nice but the design definitely should be changed, you can buy a professional looking WP theme, or hire someone. As for monetizing... I'd start with banners, with the traffic you have they should bring you some nice profit.

 

Listed this site for sale here on dp: http://forums.digitalpoint.com/showthread.php?t=2207668#post16380969