In the spirit of sharing information and experience, I thought I'd share some of my past experiences with a high myspace traffic site I own.
At first I thought that it'd be as simple as throwing up some affiliate links and watch the money pour in. Of course, it hasn't been as simple as that - and I've tried a couple other techniques such as intra content links (with images etc), those seemed to be marginally better, but not significantly. I've since reduced the campaigns to text links only until I find something that works well.
Keep in mind as you look at the stats, that my site is a "tool" site; meaning that the visitors are there to check their personal stats and perhaps go back to their myspace page. I believed originally that for the most part, visitors that come to the site aren't thinking "buy something". Thus I tried to do a couple campaigns such as the Zwinky's campaign, and MySpace surveys where you get paid on email submits (or leads). I'll cover how those performed below but first, here are some things that didn't work at all (some of these I ran for a month, some for a week depending if there were any clicks at all):
I ran 2 campaigns, a MySpace survey submit, and get Zwinked from RevenueLoop. I figured that the MySpace survey submit would do much better, but I was wrong - the Zwinky campaign was much stronger (although nothing to write home about). The get zwinked campaign is no longer available from RevenueLoop which is why it's disabled (both these are text ads):
I also ran the banner ad in addition to the text ad for the zwinky's campaign; and as you can see the click through wasn't bad for the banner (surprisingly enough). Anyway, the results are below - I'm not sure why the survey stats from RevenueLoop only show 4 clicks instead of the 251 clicks it actually recieved.
Basically the MySpace Cash survey earned only $0.015 per click, and the Zwinkys campaign made about $0.03 per click.
I've since put up another campaign that I started about 3 weeks ago from clickbank with one of those do survey's for money guides; having seen this site for sale on sitepoint - I wanted to see how well it's landing pages actually sold it's product. So far it has had 488 clicks:
And has made about $91 (3 sales), for a total of $0.18 revenue per click. Which so far is much better than the other two campaigns which didn't require to buy something. I now know why the experts say you have to experiement a lot before you find out what works and what doesn't!
Also, after looking at the demographics of the site (collected by a voluntary survey), two thirds of the visitors are female; I'll be trying some gender targeted campaigns next.
Currently I'm trying a few small adbrite campaigns out with clickbank offers; I'll be sure to post the results of those once they get going.
At first I thought that it'd be as simple as throwing up some affiliate links and watch the money pour in. Of course, it hasn't been as simple as that - and I've tried a couple other techniques such as intra content links (with images etc), those seemed to be marginally better, but not significantly. I've since reduced the campaigns to text links only until I find something that works well.
Keep in mind as you look at the stats, that my site is a "tool" site; meaning that the visitors are there to check their personal stats and perhaps go back to their myspace page. I believed originally that for the most part, visitors that come to the site aren't thinking "buy something". Thus I tried to do a couple campaigns such as the Zwinky's campaign, and MySpace surveys where you get paid on email submits (or leads). I'll cover how those performed below but first, here are some things that didn't work at all (some of these I ran for a month, some for a week depending if there were any clicks at all):
- Fast cash loans, auto loans and home loans had extremely low clicks and no conversions, and for the most part seemed to be avoided by visitors.
- Ringtones had very low click throughs and no conversions.
- Gambling sign ups or links did very poorly.
- Gadget City campaigns promoting things like phones, ipods etc did no conversions.
I ran 2 campaigns, a MySpace survey submit, and get Zwinked from RevenueLoop. I figured that the MySpace survey submit would do much better, but I was wrong - the Zwinky campaign was much stronger (although nothing to write home about). The get zwinked campaign is no longer available from RevenueLoop which is why it's disabled (both these are text ads):
I also ran the banner ad in addition to the text ad for the zwinky's campaign; and as you can see the click through wasn't bad for the banner (surprisingly enough). Anyway, the results are below - I'm not sure why the survey stats from RevenueLoop only show 4 clicks instead of the 251 clicks it actually recieved.
Basically the MySpace Cash survey earned only $0.015 per click, and the Zwinkys campaign made about $0.03 per click.
I've since put up another campaign that I started about 3 weeks ago from clickbank with one of those do survey's for money guides; having seen this site for sale on sitepoint - I wanted to see how well it's landing pages actually sold it's product. So far it has had 488 clicks:
And has made about $91 (3 sales), for a total of $0.18 revenue per click. Which so far is much better than the other two campaigns which didn't require to buy something. I now know why the experts say you have to experiement a lot before you find out what works and what doesn't!
Also, after looking at the demographics of the site (collected by a voluntary survey), two thirds of the visitors are female; I'll be trying some gender targeted campaigns next.
Currently I'm trying a few small adbrite campaigns out with clickbank offers; I'll be sure to post the results of those once they get going.