Any Potential to My Site?

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BeefyChong

BeefyChong

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I've been running this website for quite a while and only managed to generate revenues from AdSense at this point : Home Recording, MIDI, Soundfonts, Karaoke, VST, Samples @ HomeMusician.Net

Now I'd like to take it to another level but it seems I'm having an overdose of information and can't take a decision as to where to go. Maybe I could turn it into a membership site or using it for affiliate marketing. The problem is the payout seems really in the musical instrument industry.

Or should I simply let go and venture in other areas?

Right now, the site has about 700-900 uniques a day.

Any ideas are welcomed!
 


If you really want to try to make it big, get rid of almost all Adsense (it clutters the page), make sure you have VERY useful content and then set up a CHEAP membership program (maybe $5/mo or $55/year) and then get into an affiliate program and get OTHER people to pump the traffic/customers to you. If you truly have unique, useful content that musicians will appreciate then $5/mo is cheap. You'd just have to make sure you updated your site with fresh content on a daily/weekly basis or else you'd lose your userbase. On the other hand, you could put a lot of effort into building a large userbase quickly and then sell off the site on Sitepoint like someone else talked about in a thread here on WF recently.
 
I'd recommend cutting back on the Adsense and using the filter to cut out the MFA ads that are going to Clickbank music related ebook landing pages.

Try replacing some Adsense with Auction Ads and use keywords targeted toward the topic of the page. Also use the price filter where applicable to show the higher end music gear.

On the affliate offers, yes, the percentages are low but the selling price is often high. 5% of a $1000+ sale isn't that bad. I've been using SameDayMusic on ShareASale but there are others around. Also try a few ringtone and even loan or credit card banners, these sometimes work, often better than Adsense as well.

As for making it a paid site, I'd recommend against that since you would be competing against a number of well-established free sites. The only sites I've seen that worked well in this model are forum based ones that had good traffic and something very unique to offer.
 
I'd avoid the membership aspect all together. There are membership music sites with 10x the content (no offense).

It's still a great site, and I agree with the auctionads. I'd probably also hookup with some publishers on CJ, I haven't looked into music affiliates but I know that big names like musiciansfriend and zzsounds run programs.
 
PublisherZilla said:
Yes. Content is key. I suggest a nice cpc comparison shopping program, if you could find such a thing... oh wait.
Click to expand...

How many music related shopping choices do you offer? I've seen this on tech sites and it seems to work good there but music sales online is a smaller market.
 
Wheres the majority of your traffic from? Organic? PPC? or just being badass and traded around people in that scene?
 
BeefyChong said:
There are not that many music affiliate programs. I can't get musiciansfriend.com as I'm from Quebec.
Click to expand...

I think he was nudging you to check out shopzilla's publisher program. They have price comparison for a lot of CDs and musical equipment. You could integrate the price comparison directly into your pages and make a good deal if your traffic is good. They pay per click so it's pretty easy to make money with it. Check out Shopzilla - Comparison shopping online to get a general idea of what you'd be working with.

Other options are pricerunner.com's and shopping.com's publisher programs.

Oh, and nice website.
 
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