Surprise site earnings

by Sapphire (August 13, 2008)

After my recent surges of traffic to Project B-2 Bomber, Project Mai Tai got a delicious inbound that sent thousands of new visitors. A month ago, I had only one site that was above 10k and struggling to hit the 15k mark. Now I have Mai Tai over the 15k mark (up from around 8k) and B-2 closing in on… drumroll please… 50k uniques per month. These are not AwStats numbers, either. These are Quantcast’s more conservative numbers (which are really close to another stats package I’m now using on a few sites - Mint.) The AwStats numbers are even higher.

I’m slowly putting monetization back onto Mai Tai. I removed most of the monetization a few months ago, to see if that helped with traffic. I don’t think it did. I think ads make no difference except when they annoy the hell out of visitors - and also when their code loads above your content code. Having content as close to the top of your source page seems to really boost sites with Google. More on this in a future article.

Suddenly, Mai Tai is able to make a few cents a day from nothing but AdBrite ads that show only on the single post page, below articles. Not much, I know, but (A) it’s AdBrite, which is solid but never a huge earner and (B) it’s not like it’s a leaderboard ad on the front page. So what’s my next step? You guessed it! A leaderboard at the top, tucked nicely into a little space I’ve carved out in the theme. And some other tasteful ads - no flashing graphics, no ads that fly in and land on top of the content. Just stuff visitors don’t mind.

B-2’s earnings haven’t increased as dramatically as one might hope with the traffic increase, considering its only ads are CPM. So I’m going to try monetizing products mentioned on it via Amazon again, now that Sean has fixed whatever was causing Alinks to dump all that code above the content on my source pages. I still think the future of this site lies in becoming a real, genuine business unto itself, not in just selling ad space and affiliate marketing. But people tell us they’re buying stuff on our recommendation, so why not?

I got another nice earnings surprise this month - one of my rinky dinky “magazine” sites where I post PLR articles is suddenly earning about $1 a day on AdSense since I last updated the articles on it a couple of weeks ago. Which is surprising considering it gets under 1k visitors per month. This tells me I can stop dividing my attention among all my article reprint sites and start focusing on this one a bit. Two of the others continue to bring in decent amounts from text link ads (and a tiny bit of AdSense), and another one just does nothing. Absolutely nothing.

Which brings me back to what I was saying last week about considering selling ChillyCool, or even this site. I don’t think any  of my sites are worth selling right now, and last week my feeling was that I lack the time/interest to work on them to get them to where they’re worth selling. But that was in the throes of the great traffic storm, and now that it’s settled down, I’m thinking maybe I can find time to update around here more often. Keep stocking that magazine site with new articles at all times. Maybe in time, some of these sites would be worth selling.

Don’t worry: if I ever sell this one or Chilly, I’ll merge all the articles onto the domain I keep so they’re still around. In fact, what I think would most likely happen is, I’d sell this one and move things over to Chilly because that’s a cooler domain name. And because that domain is pulling in 4k per month when I haven’t touched it in months. I don’t even see where the traffic is coming from in my stats - it’s just little inbounds all over the place, mostly going to the directory. Whatever! This one would not do that well if I stopped updating for a few months.

Posted in Affiliate Marketing
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