How Long Should I Beat This Horse?

IceToEskimos

IceToEskimos

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Oct 18, 2011
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I'm having a very difficult time monetizing a site I built a while back.

AdSense is no-go, for several reasons, and I've been testing CPA offers for a few weeks with no encouraging results.

This is a site I built a long time ago, that just suddenly started ranking for a KW with 30k ELMS. It's currently getting around 600 UV/day, and it's not making me any kind of money.

I'm inclined to continue testing and tweaking until the end of time, because that's my nature, and I feel like if I have the traffic, I should be able to squeeze some money out of it, but I'm wondering if that's always the case.

I'm finding it hard to walk away from 20k UV/month, without feeling like I missed something.

Do you think that ALL traffic can be monetized, or does there come a point where you need to accept your losses and focus your attention on something that may be more worthwhile?
 


What vertical? Finance, health, insurance etc? I'm only asking because many niches are seasonal, despite what people think.
 
Why don't you try making a squeeze page for your homepage or some other email signup option, make an email list and then upsell them with CPA offers related to your site from there.
 
Flihead said:
Why don't you try making a squeeze page for your homepage or some other email signup option, make an email list and then upsell them with CPA offers related to your site from there.
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I've considered this, Shinobi suggested this a while ago, I'm not sure I'd have a lot of success with a double-opt in system.
 
im assuming you've tried a content locker?

I've been in this situation a few times, where my site is getting a ton of traffic and I could not get anything to convert. the main answer you need to pull from your analytics, is what incoming search queries are people ACTUALLY searching for to get to your site. i.e. you might be ranking for a huge term, but what are people actually coming to your site via?

in my case, it was an auto blog so my search volume was RETARDED -

"demi moore story"
"dog food canada"
"obama literacy foundation"
"restaruants NYC"
and shit like that....


in other words...TRASH TRAFFIC. it was literally unmoetizable. there definitely is such a thing as "bad traffic" and it can come from organic search.

the best thing you can do is find out the answer to the question I asked, and then possibly redevelop the theme/feel/direction of your page based on the interest of your visitors.

fuck man, 20k uv's is a lot to walk away from, but sometimes when you do it is a relief :)
 
shawnhag said:
im assuming you've tried a content locker?

I've been in this situation a few times, where my site is getting a ton of traffic and I could not get anything to convert. the main answer you need to pull from your analytics, is what incoming search queries are people ACTUALLY searching for to get to your site. i.e. you might be ranking for a huge term, but what are people actually coming to your site via?

in my case, it was an auto blog so my search volume was RETARDED -

"demi moore story"
"dog food canada"
"obama literacy foundation"
"restaruants NYC"
and shit like that....


in other words...TRASH TRAFFIC. it was literally unmoetizable. there definitely is such a thing as "bad traffic" and it can come from organic search.

the best thing you can do is find out the answer to the question I asked, and then possibly redevelop the theme/feel/direction of your page based on the interest of your visitors.

fuck man, 20k uv's is a lot to walk away from, but sometimes when you do it is a relief :)
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I'm using a locker now, and 90% of my traffic is coming for my main KW.

I built this site a long time ago, and I obviously overestimated the quality of the traffic, because it seems like I should be able to get some of them to go through the offer, but I'm at 600 clicks over the last two days and zero conversions with this group of offers. If I could pull a 5 cent EPC on anything, I'd call it a day and move on, but so far nothing is coming close to that.

This may be trash traffic.
 
If you're not willing to show it to someone who might be able to help, then give it up. Work on winners.

Sell this site on Flippa.
 
If you've lost heart, flip it and move on to something you like doing, you'll be a ton more productive if you enjoy doing it...
 
His traffic is incredibly hard to monetize, I am blown away really, tried some long-form copy, didn't fare to well, even short form was difficult. I know you can do it, it's just going to take a lot of testing... Not going to be an easy flip either, although I know he would be able to sell it to the right person. Don't give up on it, good luck bro!
 
guerilla said:
If you're not willing to show it to someone who might be able to help, then give it up. Work on winners.

Sell this site on Flippa.
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mattaw said:
If you've lost heart, flip it and move on to something you like doing, you'll be a ton more productive if you enjoy doing it...
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I've never sold a site before, and the earnings for this one are almost non-existent.

I know valuation is typically based on revenue, but the only selling point this site has is it's volume. Any suggestions on how I should list it?
 
I don't know about flipping small sites a ton, but I can tell you this for businesses, a lot of it is on potential, so if you can say this is where it is, with work, imagine what it could be....
 
mattaw said:
I don't know about flipping small sites a ton, but I can tell you this for businesses, a lot of it is on potential, so if you can say this is where it is, with work, imagine what it could be....
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Yeah, I'm going to have to play the "imagine what you could do with 20k unique visitors a month" angle...which seems a little underhanded because I'm not convinced anyone can do anything with this.

Ah well, I'm running a few more days of CPA tests on it, so maybe I'll find something that converts.
 
Maybe you can divert some of that traffic to monetized sites? Also could use for back linking purposes.
 
Sellers on Flippa will usually pay 6-12 months revenue unless you have something really special or different.

So I'm not sure you'll get that much for flipping the site. It could just be your 20k visits/month isn't that valuable. I used to have a free hosting site that consistently got 500,000-1,000,000 visits/day and hardly made any money off of it because it was next to impossible to monetize the traffic.
 
Is it related to physical products at all? Any way you get people to add shit to an Amazon cart and set a 90 day cookie?
 
I am sure you did this, but in the event you did not, did you check out what the other sites in this niche/market/keyword space are doing to monetize?
 
I'd try to funnel them into a list and sell them more shit later. If you can't directly monetize it then atleast try to milk them on the back end. People get liberal with their wallets around the holidays and buy stuff they'd never even give a second thought to normally.
 
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