When is the best time to monitize?

Hey everyone – I started a website a few weeks ago: Basic content blog on long tail product with high margins. My plan was to keep off monetizing it until I get a decent sized user base. The way I figure, people hate ads – they are much more likely to accept ads if you have build up a decent amount of content that provides value. If you put up adds before you can offer any value, I would except a poor response from users.

The question is – at what traffic level would one say is appropriate to start monetizing (adsense, affiliate offers, etc)?

Is it 100 uniques per day? 500? 1000? 10,000? I’m curious to know at what point others have said “enough is enough, I need to start cashing in”.

Thanks in advance for any advice.
Cheers

 

Although I've never reached it, I would do it at 1k uniques a day.

 

It depends on different types of advertising.

I would say 100 uniques a day is good for adsense but you need alot more for affiliates.

But there is another dimension to this issue if you are new to adsense because I personally think you should use the low traffic start up period to practice and learn about how to make the most of adsense.

If you wait until you have a lot of visitors then you will lose more money in the early stages due to the mistakes we all make as we learn new things.

 

Great point mistermix. Never thought of that... I'm around 100 uniques a day now, so maybe I'll throw up some adsense and starting getting familiar with it.

 

Another point to consider:

People do expect to see ads. A few well placed ads may give your site some credibility.

But this all depends on the site.

 

Are you using wordpress?

 

Wordpress it is.

 

I recommend adsense-deluxe plugin.

Also related posts plugin to help with search engine rankings.

There are a few other plugins I highly recommend, let me know if you want to know.

 

Thanks mistermix... much appreciated. Interested in what other plugins you suggest- feel free to PM me if you dont want to list here.

 

I just didn't want to come accross as patronising.

Heres the ones I use:

Add-Meta-Tags - lets you write a short description of each post to use as the 'meta description'.

Bunny's Technorati Tags - easily add technorati tags to each post. technorati is a good source of traffic from other bloggers. Also helps with search engine traffic.

Sitemap generator - creates an automatically updating sitemap. Good for getting search engine traffic, also good for users.

You will need to play around with the presentation of the output of these plugins to make sure they dont make each single post page look messy. Google will love your blog if you use these plugins.

You should also add a link to the next & previous post on each single post page. Just add this code to the single post code:

Let me know if anything is unclear.

 

Difficult to say, but I also prefer to build up my users and traffic before monetizing. Also much easier to be accepted in big directories without to much ads or affiliates

 

I would say 100 uniques a day. But I don't see a problem with starting to monetize asap. As long as you ads are not plastered everywhere and nicely integrated into the site. The whole point of Adsense is relevancy - so users should appreciate the ads being served if they are interested in your content.