Monetization Question

D

DaveLL

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Sep 22, 2010
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Hey guys, been lurking for a while, haven't posted very often.

I have a blog on which I regularly (3 times a week) post interesting articles about ancient history.

Last month it did 12300 uniques and 18500 visits, it's on track to meet or exceed that slightly this week. Has lots of age (been around for 4 or 5 years).

It's not currently making any money, but I was wondering is this the time to focus on monetization or do I need to keep focusing on growth of the traffic? I'm going to up the posts to 5 times a week starting may.

Just wondering what those who are far more experienced than myself think...

Thanks,
Dave
 


What have you tried? What is your competition doing? What terms drive the majority of your traffic?

Think about your visitor... what's the demographic, and what would they potentially be willing to do? (They have to "do" something in order for you to get paid. Click and ad. Buy a whatever. Sign up for a zip submit....)
 
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I had Google Adsense on a while back, took it down for a bit as it wasn't earning much, but I'm going to try it again now that traffic has almost doubled and see what happens.

I've tried to sell some banner advertising, without much luck.

I'm currently trying to sign up for affiliate programs of vendors who sell artifact / ancient history replicas to give that a try. Just waiting to get approved by some.

I'm not sure what the demographic would be, I'd guess people who are interested in ancient history as well as school aged youth / children who are looking for homework help.

The terms that drive traffic are all ancient history related, and I'm not sure I have any competitors. There are no major _money_ terms, just tons and tons of terms that bring in 10 - 200 visits a month. I've checked some of those terms, and it's usually just about.com or sites that aren't monetized at all.

P.S. Thanks for replying! :)
 
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Tried that when we first started, converted very poorly, but perhaps it's worth revisiting now that the site is getting lots of traffic.

Any recommendations on plugins for Wordpress that make it easy to drop in amazon links?

Thanks,
Dave
 
Hi,

That's sounds like an interesting site you got there, it's certainly got plenty of traffic, I wonder if you are getting a lot of archaeology students, and wierdy beards?

My suggestion is a bit off the wall, but how about travel offers to countries of great archaeological interest like, Egypt, Rome,Greece,South America etc.

Or even locating and offering ancient items for sale (subject to the various laws on this sort of thing).

Just my $0.02 maybe it will help. :)
 
thanks for the suggestion Tim, any idea where I'd find Travel offers specific two those countries? I tried a generic travel offer without much success.

Working on some affiliate accounts with vendors of ancient item replicas at the moment, just waiting for approval.
 
I'd say your main problem is that people searching for your keywords are solely looking for information not purchasing anything.
 
DaveLL said:
thanks for the suggestion Tim, any idea where I'd find Travel offers specific two those countries? I tried a generic travel offer without much success.

Working on some affiliate accounts with vendors of ancient item replicas at the moment, just waiting for approval.
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No sorry Dave, this is beyond my scope, all I know is the travel business is highly competitive so there must be a vendor somewhere around that specializes in this sort of thing I would have thought.

Yes I did read about the replicas on your post, but I was thinking of genuine artifacts, but once again I have no idea if it's viable/possible.

I guess a bit of further research is needed.
 
jeffrey said:
I'd say your main problem is that people searching for your keywords are solely looking for information not purchasing anything.
Click to expand...


Pretty much this, have you invested any time in seeing what age group is coming to your website? If its college IP's and students seeking information maybe sign up as a affiliate and sell essay papers, offer school related material.

Other than that bro sounds like you just need to just try a couple different affiliate offers each month, and the best result keep going.
 
a friend works for cable tv's highest grossing (per viewer) cable channel. anybody guess what it is?

the tennis channel.

and they ain't selling tennis stuff. they're selling German cars and Australian vacations. they get that the brunt of their viewer are wealthy professionals.

figure out who your viewers are -- kids doing homework or curious adults looking to further their knowledge. two different demos. and plenty of products to test on each.
 
I'd say books and DVDs as well.

Depending on your demographic, don't go for the high academical stuff, think "infotainment" and sell that.

::emp::
 
I would go for Books relating to a certain post. Or try and push the amazon kindle for ebooks etc.

You definately need to identify your demographic and then tailor the adds to suit. If its school kids then perhaps stuff like gaming links to games relevant to the history.
 
Thanks for all the ideas so far everyone.

How do I go about identifying the demographics more accurately? Right now, I'm really just guessing, so no real accuracy...
 
Roughly how many of those 12300 visitors are regulars, would you say?

Ask them in a blog post. Say you're starting up a shop on the site, and what would they like to see. Then, when you've got some data, organise some dropship agreements with other online stores.
 
DaveLL said:
How do I go about identifying the demographics more accurately? Right now, I'm really just guessing, so no real accuracy...
Click to expand...

I would suggest creating a facebook page for your website. Once you achieved a fair amount of likes the page will tell you the demographic of the people who have liked the page and therefore liked your site. In the page use facebook insights and that will tell you the gender, and country of that user.

Failing that, you could just ask them. Create a feedback page and do a bit of research on how to create an effective questionnaire.
 
Thanks for the ideas so far guys, this has been really helpful!

Right now my regular visitors is relatively poor (only 10% or so, but it has been improving, the site had tons of content added to it when I started it and had been more or less dead for a few years, but I started posting articles regularly again about 4 months ago and it's been really improving...the traffic was only 3% return visits when I started posting content again.

I really like the Facebook Page idea, that's awesome and it will help me increase the return visits I think.
 
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