Ads on your website, can you make money?

MSE_Martin

Hi folks

The answer to how this site make money is (wait for it) contained in the 'how this site is financed' article which is linked to from every article on the site - i think you'll find the first para especially enlightening

As for site ads, the problem with adwords is you don't choose content. This has been an especial problem for saynoto0870 where adwords often includes ads for 0870 providers as it matches ads to content.

The key to any website though is traffic - if you've got traffic it will work. Getting traffic needs two things

i. Content/Service. You need a reason for people to visit the site, unique content or service is the best way to do that.
ii. People need to know about it. The best site in the world won't have any traffic if people haven't heard of it.

In my experience this is the best way to get traffic

1. Word of mouth/recommendations
2. Online links from big sites
3. National TV with namecheck
4. National Radio with namecheck
5. Front pages of newspapers
6. Search engines

Pretty much everything else including money pages of papers, magazines and local radio doesn't drive any significant traffic.

Of course that's easy for me to say - options 3,4 and 5 aren't easy, I'm lucky it is my job and options 1 only works if you've already got traffic and option 2 comes from competitive pressures

That leaves search engines as the main route for most and that requires optimisation and or advertising.

Unless you're lucky enough to go viral getting significant traffic is difficult

Good luck

Hope this helps a bit

Martin

brisck1

thanks for the advice Seraphim! You are right, I've been working to make them as non intrusive as possible without being invisible. I'll pm you an image of my design if you you want?

Im hoping that if it is popular I could gently encourage people to click and ad and help keep the site free.

Another idea was to add a paypal donation button. Good idea or bad?

Edit: thanks for visiting Martin!

I dont think publicity will be too much of a problem, I know lots of great site it could be promoted through, so hopefully I got that covered, I just hope I can keep people coming back.

Anyway im off to read your article and be back to comment later!

Seraphim

What Martin says is true to an extent about AdSense, however you are able to tailor the ads to match the content fairly easily so that the ads are relevant. Obviously with a forum, this can be interesting because it oftens picks up on words you don't want it to You can block certain ads that you don't want too, although this is an on-going battle against dodgy ads...I won't go into this in much detail here as there is much written about it elsewhere....

Encouraging the users to click will generally be against TOS (it definitely is with Google), so I wouldn't do it. A paypal button may work for large forums/sites, and also when you specially ask for money for hosting (think wikipedia's annual drive for money), but in general, I don't believe it's a big moneyspinner. Feel free to PM with the design...I'm happy to help

brisck1

Wow great stuff Martin! I share your ethics on keeping things free, but im not sure how it would work for my site as I will be providing a different type of service and content which is mainly multimedia based (lol not !!!!!!!) :P

Not sure how I could adapt this technique, but worth thinking about.

Astaroth

brisck1 wrote:

Astaroth and Chippy, what sort of traffic do you get on those sites per month? as in hits and unique hits etc? (if you can find out)

be interesting to know as I can compare it to what im estimating I could get.

I get about 1000 google adsense impressions a month and have a click through rate of around 5% which according to some "how to make money from google" how tos is fairly low but I personally dont think it is too bad at all... just unfortunately the price per click is fairly low for the ads which come up on a family history site.

brisck1

thanks for the info Astaroth, good to know!

Astaroth

Certainly the pay for affiliates tends to be much higher for affiliate schemes - you can sign up to trade doubler free of charge and see what is on offer.

A lot depends on what sort of site you are developing. Ads are appropriate to sites that give out information or simply provide things like forums.... if you are selling something (items or services) then ads really arent that good at all as it takes people away from your site and potentially to a competitors... it can be good, if there are complementory goods/ services to gain a partnership with companies offering these and deal with it outside of the normal affiliate schemes if you feel it is going to be particularly strong.

purplepixi

I've only been using adsense on my sites for 3 months. I must admit, some of them have gone by the wayside and don't look very good as I just haven't had the time.

But the ones that I put the time into such as my cat web site, is doing fairly well. I'm nearly up to my first $100 (so I sould get a cheque soon).

It's interesting to see how the work you do turns into money. For example, if you have no visitors, you'll have no clicks, so promote, promote, promote. And use the google heatmap for placement, it's pretty accurate, i.e. you'll get more clicks if you place your ads in different positions on your website.

In the past 3 months my earning have been:

April = $3.79
May = $19.73
June = $45.65

OK, it's not a huge amount, but surely if I repeat what I did to get to June's earning, they can only go up. So that's my plan.

But as for help and advice, try http://forums.digitalpoint.com. The amount of information on there is amazing, I found most of the information used to improve my site from here (not inculding the ones I haven't worked on yet). Some of it is just people asking how to make loads of money - ignor those. Go to the Google section and search for shoemoney and nintendo - these two people give really excellent advice and are very helpful.

I hope this information is useful.

R0CKY

I don't use adsense at all on my site(s), I use targetted banner ads. Targetted advertising can work extremely well if you have the traffic. In addition to what's already been said, if you are looking to cover the cost of your website the other factor to consider is exactly what you plan on putting on your website i.e. what are the bandwidth requirements going to be.

If you have a bandwidth heavy site (i.e. lots of downloads, or large images as opposed to text only), then the more visitors you get, then so the cost will increase as the bandwidth starts to shoot up. That can be a bit of a catch 22.

On the other hand, if your site's content is mainly text, then you can go hell for leather and maximise the amount of visitors you can,to reap the benefits of advert click thorughs, as the visitor/cost ratio will remain low.

It depends on your site's content whether or not you will be able to find an ad agency to work with that can serve you nicely targeted adverts. That's extremely important.