is my money better spent elsewhere?

I've been using Adwords for about 3 months now, I spend a max. of $100/mo. It gets me about 30 additional visits per day. Is my money & effort better spent elsewhere? My site's only 4 months old with PR0 and barely any backlinks.

While I do like Adwords and getting the additional hits, I can't help but feel that it's really not worth the money, since my only source of income at present is Adsense, which makes anywhere from a penny to 60 cents per day. For me, Adwords was more of a "getting the word out there" campaign.

 

Well it depends on whether the visits are worth it, for example how many of them are buying your products/services. Or is you adsense revenue from adwords customers higher than expenses, which i doubt it. Read the report in my signature, it will help you lower your costs and increase click trus

 

Thanks, I'll take a look at those.

There really is no conversion factor with my site - there's nothing to buy, and no real benefit to having more users register with the site. It's more of a "hoping they'll like ads and click them" kind of deal. I want to get into affiliate stuff, but I honestly dont know anything about it yet, nor what service to use.

Currently the site is making a loss. A very big one, considering that I have a dedicated server (it's a video site, and a $20/mo service won't cut it with the bandwidth & space I need).

 

honestly, i would never pay for adwords customers just to collect ad revenue as that will never weigh up, unless you got lucky and the visitors were coming back regularly

 

exactly...it's mostly a matter of hoping for more users, especially those who return on a daily basis. I've boosted that a lot with Adwords. The only problem is that everything altogether is really starting to add up and cost a fortune.

 

I would put your money into banner advertising on specific relevent sites, you will save a lot more money and maybe get more visitors

 

Remember that: Revenues - (cost+expenses) = Profit.
With arbitrage (which is what your're trying to do), it's not uncommon for costs to outweigh the revenues.

 

What % of your visitors are new and what % returning? Has the trend gone up over time - are you building a loyal following?

That may give you insight into if it's worth paying for adwords visitors.

 

Short answer: YES.

 

depends how u want to profit. if u want returning vistors than yes maybe because adword targets a niche very well

 

If you want your site to start growing over time (long term), then I would split your budget between PPC (AdWords, YPN, AdCenter) and building backlinks. The PPC will drive you short term traffic, while building backlinks will grow your long term organic traffic.

I would only buy permanent backlinks or you are going to be in the same boat as with PPC. Some great ways to get backlinks are to: sponser templates (wordpress, joomla, etc...), directory links (not valued as much anymore), website reviews (pay someone to review your site) and many others.

 

I would use the adwords data you have to see what your best keywords are. What keywords in your adwords campaign are getting the best traffic. Which ones are converting that traffic.

Then use that information to go after those keywords in the organic search. Little bit of work to do in the organic search, but it can be done.

 

Thanks everyone.

nichevalue: that's the route I definitely want to take. My Webmaster account says I have 212 backlinks, but every single one of them are from social bookmarking sites (that I've added myself). I'm having an extremely hard time with backlinks because my site focus is so narrow that there simply arent any other sites like it, and hardly anything else in its category. I emailed some webmasters and requested reciprocal links, but they declined me (I'm PR 0 and still kind of new).

designers: thanks to Analytics I've narrowed down the best keywords for my site, and target them all on Adwords. I've removed a good 80% of the other ones, since I can't go over $100/mo and most of them are inactive anyway.

Backlinks are still the way I want to go, I just don't know how

 

Take a look at the link sales forum for places to get backlinks. Remember that you want permanent backlinks, so look for site review offers, blog posts, theme/template sponserships, etc...

Another thing you could do to get backlinks is to post a "[WTB]" post in the "link sales" forum stating the types of backlinks you want and the target niche.

 

I have spend a lot of money on all major PPC companies and the only one that brought me a decent ROI was Adwords.