Your not going to get far playing around with Adsense, by all means place it your pages then forget about it.....you may get a small check each month. The way to make the money you need is to charge a fee for lessons, kids will go for it if you keep it cheap. One way to do that will cost a bit of money to set up I guarantee it will pay off. Video the lessons, make them about 20/30 minutes long and charge via pay for view. Make a new video each week and archive them, if you have a forum you already have a captive audience. If you want to know how to do it PM me.
Well I have read the posts above and I agree with somethings and disagree with some others, BUT.. One thing is clear ... no matter what you do ... you need MORE traffic. Its hard to worry about making the 1600 when you dont have the exposure you need ...I suggest you really promote your site not with the magical 1600 dollar a month mark but aim for the 10 dollar a day mark in the beginning ... Make adjustments as you go. When you put the 1600 a month number on yourself you set yourself up to be defeated. Go through the motions of learning to promote it... put books on the site that you can buy resell rights for about music and sell them. On some of my sites I sell 5 -10 books a week .... 4 x 10 = 40 books a month at 19.95 is 800 per month put some kind of Guitar Classifieds on the site .. get creative BUT .. in the end ... you need to get exposure ... and you need to dominate your keywords search phrases Go get um tiger ... Mr Crow
While you may reach 1600 a month with that one site, your earnings may fall short. I am going to suggest a few methods that you can earn more money by promoting other niches etc. Shoemoney pretty much opened my eyes to the world of ppc with this post, and the post after that. I believe you should check it out as a possibility: http://www.shoemoney.com/2006/04/08/the-1000000-experiment-with-ppc-part-1/ There is also a thread on ppc labeled 'unofficial newbie challenge winter 2006' or something like that. Also a very good lead. Remember though, with ppc you may lose money in the start but if you stick with it you may gain tons of money. Then there is the possibility of branching out and creating niche sites. This will give you fairly sustained and measurable growth that you can measure. Hope that helps. Of course you could just try to promote your single website which may work, and will probably be more satisfying. I just think you may have a better chance at $1600 a month elsewere.
Chris, After looking into guitar keywords, I found that lots of people are searching for guitar tabs. It would take some work, but you could have your visitors submitting tabs? Also, (not sure if someone else mentioned this) you could create a section for people to review guitars, pedals, amps...etc.. Think of your website as a fishing net, and the bigger the net, the more fish you can scoop!
I would consider having two "levels" of online lessons; 1. Free 2. Subscription based pay for more thorough lessons. You might need to scale back your freebie lessons and add more value to your pay lessons. Then get more traffic, add more content, promote, get more traffic, promote, add more content.....repeat.
you guys are all great and very supportive. I did some basic seo to my site and added a counter as advised. The whole seo thing is somewhat dizzying to me... any thoughts on that? I do have a search box that searches olga(the online guitar archive) for tab. it does make people leave my site, but it also lets me throw in the tab keyword all over my webpage. I've been thinking of finding an amature video producer and making a bunch of video lessons. That seems like it would help word of mouth an backlinks. I don't know if I'm ready to charge yet... I'd kind of like to build more traffic and content first
On SEO - get rid of the Iframe on your homepage and put your content all on the same page/file On Adsense - Use the same color background for Adsense as you site background
You may find it is far easier to increase your CTR than it is to raise your overall traffic (at least in the short term). Double your CTR from 1 to 2 % or double your traffic -- which is easier? Here's a couple of tips that may help to increase your CTR (note these are coming from someone who wouldn't recognise a good guitar if he was being beaten to death with it). Left colum adlinks: 1) Blend the background. 2) Consider moving it from where it is -- where it is obviously an advert -- down into the midst of the navidation -- say between theory and charts. This is borderline tricky IMO as some users will not realise it is an advert and will be peeved when they click on it... bu that left had bar will be where the eyeballs are. Advert at bottom of page 1) Blend it, and I'd move it up to just under the "Help support the league of guitarists" text General; The bookmark this site/make us your home page text is in the absolute prime advertising spot -- if people like your site, they will bookmark it without you needing to tell them to do so. I'd consider adding a advert in there instead. Inside the site. Where you've got the big boxes at teh start of the text, consider moving them down to the second paragraph and wrapping the text around the advert -- you'll get a better clickthrough site, and that layout isn't so hard on the eyes... obviously you'll need to move some of the pics around the fit correctly. And again, blend the advert. Channels -- Make sure you're using chanels for all your listings -- they're one of the best tools for tracking performance
I followed a few pointers you guys gave me, and it increased my ammounts of clicks several times over. thank you all very much is google gonna ban me for improving so quickly?
Step-by-step guide you could sell us on clickbank? Good job, what were your biggest challenges? Did you have an already build website with good traffic or you started from scratch?
Here's a goodie - Join the Musician's Friend affiliate program. Just put a small banner on every page, and collect 6% off the sales... http://www.musiciansfriend.com/document?doc_id=79553&g=home Of course, this only improves with traffic, but you would have quite targeted visitors!
Like most have said already, you need more traffic. At your current rate of ~8000 page views per month (lets just say impressions=page views for this example) you need a CPM of $200. If you can make that, then forget guitar & get ready to be an internet guru. I was also blown away by the Shoemoney post on PPC. That guy is incredible, and most of the stuff he talks about is way beyond what a newbie would feel comfortable implementing. One thing might be able to help, though. He found the biggest return was using Adbrite, rather than Adwords/YPN/MSN. So if you need a boost in traffic they could be your cheapest PPC option.
Back in my height of using Google Adsense I was making $50-60 dollars a day with certain ads. However when those terms dropped off and the site traffic decreased this was no more.
Hi, I just made my first cent today (well about 10mins ago) im so excited, I discovered this site about 1week ago and would have never tryed adsense if it hadnt been for this forum I set up a blog about 3 days ago and this forum has really helped me figure out how to set up adsense Im learning so much just by reading all the posts on this fantastic forum, and with your help guys, I can turn this 1 measly cent into thousands of dollars a day (I can dream cant I?? lol)