Hi all, I am a newbie here and I'd love to get some feedback from some of the more experienced online marketing pro's here. I am looking to market a community website for tax professionals (fyi, it's a mainly European venture). We have some valuable and unique content on the site, currently attracting about a 100 unique visitors per day. After the launch we are counting on some 1000 unique visitors per day. As for our marketing, we plan on a modest ppc campaign, some SEO, PR on blogs and in newspapers, forum signatures, a direct mail campaign and old-fashioned lo-tech posters). What I'd like to know is what revenues to expect?? I reckon CPM in the tax industry is $15 up to $30. Are there any good formulas or calculators out there to estimate future revenues? Also I am not sure how we should best handle our ads. We now use Adsense but are looking to switch to YPN. We were also considering selling ads in-house or with the help of a service like Adify. All tips and suggestions are most welcome... By the way the website is http://www.taxvista.com after launching it should look a little sth like this: http://new.taxvista.com
There are so many variables out there that can effect how much you make, that it's not even worth trying to forecast. Just get it up and running and see how it does.
Hi seel. A few points. Firstly, the new site shows a few errors on the home page: Next, I'd like to say, when you ask, 'What I'd like to know is what revenues to expect??' do you mean what will be your earnings from adsense? If you are currently getting 100 users per day and you expect to get around 1000 after the new site is launched and marketed, then I'd say you should expect your current revenue to increase 10 times also. If you iomprove the ad placement and add more link/text units, then you can expect to increase your income further. I'm not sure, but do you have any other sources that earn from your site, other than adsense?
Thanks so much for your input. The new.taxvista.com url is just a mockup of the new layout, we're still working on the latest version, hence the errors. The reason we need a budget forecast is that we have to lay down a financial plan for legal and financing purposes. As you understand, this has to look as professional as possible. After launchng we will not limit ourselves to Google but we will test different ad networks as well as types and locations of our advertisments. I've been looking all over the Internet for a budget forecast spreadsheet, with so far zero results. I've tried making one myself but I'm having trouble understanding the relation between all the variables. How do I calculate the total number of impressions? Is this simply # of pageviews * # of ads on a page? Don't I have to include unique visitors in the formula somehow? Thanks again for all your help.