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I've been running a website on wordpress for awhile that was just a content website, but I've recently restarted the blog portion (just tonight actually), so I guess that makes it a blog. It's all about backpacking and backpacking gear, and is located at Ten Pound Backpack. The site is monetized via affiliate links. The main feature of the website is the gear lists, which are a useful tool for backpackers looking for the lightest 3 person, single wall tent, for instance. The lists are just really big sortable tables, and took a hell of a long time to build. Had to do it all manually. For October I made ~$350, which is about as much as I was making in some of the summer months. Traffic was ~5000 unique visitors for the month. The problem is no one does much camping or backpacking over the winter, so traffic goes way down. I've managed to keep things fairly steady by growing the website, which has compensated for the overall decline, and I'm expecting that once spring/summer roll back around and people start buying camping gear again the site will do quite well. I'm hoping that I will see some sort of boost over christmas, but I have no idea if people buy camping and backpacking gear as christmas presents as the site was only started last February. I definitely started the site because I really like backpacking, and didn't really realize the monetization potential until after it was built. So that was a bit of a lucky coincidence, but I'm hoping that one day I can pay most or all of the bills with this site.
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Nov 4, 2011 10:00
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Sbull posted:Google tool. But what if it doesn't appear swamped even in a Google search? This is a half decent guide to analyzing the first page on Google for how good the competition is.
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Nov 7, 2011 07:08
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Yea 10-15% of my traffic is (not provided).
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Nov 8, 2011 10:04
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I think we must be working with two different definitions of content aggregator, because I looked through the entire list of sites and could not find one. As far as I know, content aggregators are sites that take content directly from other sites. Regarding readership, about 80% of my visitors are first time visits, so 20% is returning visitors. I have no idea how well that compares, but I doubt it's a terrible number. As for monetization strategies, I would be interested to hear some more concrete numbers on how much you make with CPM. I have another website other than the one in the OP that is more of a pure review / affiliate site. With ~100 uniques per day I make about ~$10, so with your 1000 visitors I could be making ~$100 a day from that one site. Versus your pennies per visit (say 3 cents per visit?) is .03 x 1000 (or however many page views you get) = $30 per day. I suppose it's entirely possible that you are getting 3 or 4 page views per visitor if your content is really good, which would bump that up to $90-$120.
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Nov 8, 2011 19:31
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SLICK GOKU BABY posted:This is a pretty informative thread. Just started working on a new blog this last weekend (http://angelfishfacts.info). I have made a few other blogs in the past that have failed, although I was using free domain names (co.cc) and sub domains which certainly wasn't the best thing to do. I would suggest a picture, both because your theme does not have any color really and because search engines find it useful. Just be sure to make the image name / alt text the keyword that you are targeting. So in this case it would be 'angel fish facts'? Foter is a good source of royalty free images and they have a wordpress plugin too. Also you spelled diseases wrong (deseases) in the blog info. For picking keywords for posts, I go to the Google Keyword Tool, type in a broad word that my blog covers ('sleeping bags', for example), with [Exact] clicked under match type and 'Only show ideas closely related to my search terms' clicked as well (and the Location set to United States if you're like me and from somewhere else). This should give you a big long list of potential long tail topics. For the sleeping bag example a lot of it is stuff like 'princess sleeping bag', which isn't right for my blog, but just go through and filter out the bad stuff. You'll notice a lot of duplicates as well, like 'compact sleeping bag' and 'sleeping bag compact', and I usually just write the one that gets more views, unless I can make the two posts reasonably different. It depends on the niche, but for anything below 500 global searches or so, the competition is probably going to be low enough to warrant writing. Anything above that it might not hurt to just check the first page of Google and see. If you use the Google keyword tool you can go through and check the box next to every topic you want to cover. Then go to Download -> Selected and it will give you the option to export everything you clicked to a CSV for excel, which you can use to keep track of everything. I have a few such CSV files that I'm working through at the moment.
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Nov 9, 2011 19:37
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SLICK GOKU BABY posted:I was looking through some of the blogs in the main post and it seems that quite a few people need to read Google's Adsense TOS (I know it's hard to actually read those things) which is found here https://www.google.com/adsense/support/bin/answer.py?answer=48182 Yes this is definitely something to everyone should do. Here is a good privacy policy generator. From what I understand it's also good to have an About page and a Contact page at a minimum.
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Nov 9, 2011 19:43
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Devian666 posted:I'm going through and looking at a lot of keywords. Primarily I'm looking for low competition with 300k monthly hits and $1+ cpc (or a lot more). Am I hunting around the right region or am I a bit out? Are you using Google Keyword Tool? If you're seeing 300K I'm guessing you're not using exact match? Uncheck Broad on the left sidebar under match type and use [Exact] instead. Google keyword tool is useful, but you really need to go and actually look at the first page of the Google results for whatever the keyword is and see what kind of chance you have of getting there. This is a half decent guide on analyzing the first page of Google to see what your chances are, but if you're willing to put more work in, more competition for the first page is acceptable.
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Nov 15, 2011 09:51
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Old Man Pants posted:So there are a couple of monetized blogs I have wanted to start for a long time, that I think would generate interest, and upon googling there isnt currently much like it. I've been using an ad on my front page since the start of the month. It's made me about 2 dollars, while my affiliate links have made me a little more than 300. So for me at least, it's not really worth it. I'm probably going to replace it with an ad from my affiliate. I'm sure I could be doing things better as far as the ads go, but I doubt I would be making anything close to that 300.
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Nov 16, 2011 23:27
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Yea this is my first christmas season doing affiliate marketing and I'm hoping it's a good one. For those who have been through it before, when do things really kick off, as far as sales go? Black friday? November has already been fairly good for me, but I'm hoping this is just the start.
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Nov 17, 2011 23:18
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cartooncart posted:Can someone tell me if I did this affiliate marketing thing right? I'm really not sure if I am. Yep looks good. The only other thing I would suggest is to include a few images and make the image links go to the appropriate amazon page. I've never understood it, but people like to click on images.
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Nov 19, 2011 04:50
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I use the cheapest option at Lithium, $10 for a year I think, and I've never had any problems. Make sure to sign up with the goon discount though, because I don't think you can add more than one domain to that plan if you don't use the goon discount. I use Dreamhost for domain registrations though, mainly because they offer free Whois protection.
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Nov 21, 2011 00:20
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Do you focus on adsense or is the money from adsense just that much better than Amazon? I would have thought that affiliate links would be the way to go for something like black friday.
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Nov 29, 2011 07:00
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RTB posted:Here you go - http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Black_Friday_%28shopping%29 It's a bit like boxing day, which is a commonwealth thing, I think? I'm Canadian and boxing day is popular here at least.
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Nov 29, 2011 23:19
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VideoTapir posted:Is it better to use a domain name that closely matches or contains your likely keywords, or something clever that people might actually remember? Matt Cutts explains it well.
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Dec 6, 2011 19:41
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I use the cheapest plan from Lithium and I've never had any problems.
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Jan 2, 2012 01:58
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I figured I would give a little plug for Stumble Upon's Paid Discovery program. Basically you pay 10 cents per visitor through SU. But the great thing is that if you get a few paid visitors to your site giving you an up vote through SU, you start getting organic SU traffic as well. If you have a site / content that is social bookmarking friendly this can really snowball. I got burned out a few months back and spent a few weeks working on a side project, at https://www.alistofbooks.com. I spent $20 for 200 visitors through SU just as an experiment, and that was enough to get a few up votes. After a week or two I reached some sort of critical mass with up votes and got ~14,000 visits in a day from SU, and have been getting ~8,000 SU visits every day for the last 2 weeks or so, plus a steady stream from Facebook likes. As of right now I'm up to 224,000 SU visits as per the counter on the site, and it doesn't seem to be slowing down. Not bad for an initial $20 investment. The site is ideal for social bookmarking, which was no doubt a big factor in creating that momentum, but if you have a site or content that should work well with social bookmarking this is a great way to get an initial boost. Unfortunately not a lot of SU users click through to the book pages and then use the Amazon links, so I haven't made much $$$, but I figure as I start getting more referral traffic the affiliate sales will pick up.
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Nov 24, 2012 02:42
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Alfalfa posted:What type of blogs would benefit from this? I'm not very familiar with SU. I'm not overly familiar with SU either to be honest, but my impression is that it's more about the kind of content. So things like large lists, image rich content like slideshows, or anything sensational really. Content that is easily digestible and instantly grabs your attention. The small amount that I've used SU, I've just kept hitting the stumble button, loading a new page over and over again, and I imagine a lot of other SU users do the same. So what that means practically is that most people wont navigate away from the page that they land on, and if you lose their interest they can immediately find something new and interesting by hitting the stumble button. It also means that you wont get many subscribers / ad clickers / affiliate link clickers, but with enough traffic you do get a few that convert in whatever way you're looking for. SU has a category for just about anything though, and is easy enough to use, so if you want to know what works well in whatever niche, I'd say just sign up and test it out for an hour or so.
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Nov 26, 2012 08:05
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