Affiliate Marketing Forum

retrogamestore · Joined: 08 Feb 2009 Posts: 4

Hi,

I have put in alot of time on my web directory site in trying to increase traffic and feel I now have good enough 'footfall' to try to earn a little income from my site.

I consistently get 300 visitors a day, 9000 a month half of which are unique.

I have tried Adsense on my site for a number of months but only achieve [a few dollars - actually amount deleted. Admin] a month!

Surly I should be able to generate more than this?

I was wondering if someone could visit my site and give me their thoughts.

Cheers
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goozleology · Joined: 08 Feb 2009 Posts: 18 Location: San Diego, CA

Hello,

Having success with Google ad sense is mainly about placement of your ads and the color that you use for your links.

I have found that 250 x 250 box placed at the beginning of the text of your page works the absolute best.

And I've found that having all of my links with a dark blue like #000033 draws the most clicks. And then I also like to have the URL that's displayed appear like a dark gray.

However, the color should match your website and the ad placement is the most important thing. The top left corner seems to work the best!

Also, while football might be a popular subject, there might not be a huge desire for advertisers to focus on it. After all, how many monetization opportunities are there? The only one I can think of is "tickets".
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AllanGardyne · Posted: Mon Feb 09, 2009 1:36 am Post subject:

Not football, Ed, footfall. In other words, traffic. Smile

Your tips all make good sense to me.

It certainly ought to be possible to generate revenue from 300 visitors a day.

I wonder if the problem is what's going on in your visitors' minds? I imagine your visitors come to your site for one reason, and that's to submit their site to your directory. They're so strongly focused on doing that, they can't be distracted.

What do they see immediately after they've submitted their site? Perhaps that's the time to catch them. Perhaps that's the page you need to be concentrating most of your attention on. Could it contain a keyword-rich, eye-catching article, wrapping around a 250x250 box AdSense ad very high on the page?

On the other hand, maybe that page should be pre-selling them a related service - something to do with getting traffic - from which you earn more than you currently are from AdSense.

Keep experimenting. With 300 targeted visitors a day, you definitely should be able to sell something.
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goozleology · Joined: 08 Feb 2009 Posts: 18 Location: San Diego, CA

I'm never heard that term before. Laughing

Learn something new every day![/code]
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retrogamestore · Joined: 08 Feb 2009 Posts: 4

Hi,

Some great ideas here which I will start to implement straight away.

I will change the colour and also put a square adbox towards the top of the page.

Please could I have more ideas as a CTR of [actual clickthrough deleted - less than 1%] is not good at all.

THANKS
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AllanGardyne · Posted: Thu Feb 12, 2009 8:19 pm Post subject:

retrogamestore, Just a reminder... It's against the AdSense Terms of Agreement to publicly discuss such details as click-through rates.

Yes, I know it's a silly rule, but you agreeed to it when you joined AdSense. We don't want to kicked out of AdSense, so please don't break AdSense rules here.

You can still give us a good idea of what you're talking about, for example saying "single-digit dollars", and "less than 1% clickthrough". We'll get the picture that you're doing horribly and something needs fixing.
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niche · Joined: 24 Jul 2008 Posts: 209

I'd suggest two things

Increase your traffic. With 300 visits a day you just are not going to make a fortune with adsense

test different ad formats and positions.
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InternetMarketing_IQ · Joined: 13 Aug 2006 Posts: 1142

It's not about YOU it's about your visitors.

Adsense was designed to help content providers monetize their sites in the absence of other opportunities. It was not designed to make anyone rich other than Google.

And it's not about Traffic its about Targeted Traffic that comes to your site looking for a solution. If Adsense offers that solution then you win if not then you have to figure out what will or you abandon your efforts and move on to a more profitable venture.
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retrogamestore · Joined: 08 Feb 2009 Posts: 4

Hi quest,

Thanks for your reply although I'm not sure I understand fully.

I have been playing around with my ads and there positioning and nothing seems to improve.

I currently receive 600 visitors a day with 100 submissions a day (so as a minimum there are at least 100 people wanting to promote their site and are interested in this topic). All my adsense ads shown are highly specific and relevant.

I still believe that I should be receiving more than 2 or 3 clicks from around 2000 impressions or can this be normal.

I am trying affiliates also through cj and also chitika but all seems quiet so far.

Any more thoughts anyone ?

THANKS
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vsl.online · Joined: 18 Feb 2009 Posts: 12 Location: Philippines

Hello there. I saw your site and I think I saw the problem directly. The visitors in your site will be misguided because it all look like ads out there, and there are less content to guide them to what the site is.

Misleading the visitors to click your ads is one of the strategies in getting income from those ads, but without contents there will be a problem.

And one more thing, an image ad is just as effective sa the 250 x 250 as well.
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InternetMarketing_IQ · Joined: 13 Aug 2006 Posts: 1142

Sign up for Google Analytics and look at your traffic closely.

People are coming for a purpose but does their purpose convert to an Adsense offer that will also help them archive their intent?

Let me explain. Nearly everyone owns a cell phone right? Does that mean they are going to click on a cellphone offer?

Lets say that you have a page on your website that contains an article on a baseball players new contract. The article happen mentions that this player was out of town when the offer was extended. For some reason the offer mentions the entire transaction took place over his cell phone. Google picks up on this phrase and somehow you end up with Ads on your page about Cell Phones.

Your visitor found your article using a keyword phrase about baseball and the players name.

How many clicks would you expect?

Now conversely lets say you have the same article and it contains ads about how you can get baseball cards for 50% off, season tickets, etc. All baseball ads.

How many clicks now?

The point is understanding the INTENT of your visitors. What do they want? Analytic s allows you to figure this out.

Once you know this you can tweak your pages, put your ads in the heat map areas. Test the colors etc.

People who are just coming to your site to drop a link are not even looking at the ads.

Thats the marketing game. Figuring out what your customer wants/needs and putting the right offer in front of them.
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nhynes57 · Joined: 24 Aug 2004 Posts: 17

Your vistors come to your site to submit their site and do so as quickly as posssible as they are possible submitting to many site in one session. So you have to have some compelling offer to get their attention.

Experiment with differnt offer and check out other sites in your niche to see what they are doing.
Hope this helps.
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gowriter · Joined: 11 Mar 2009 Posts: 46

There seems to be conflicting interests on your site. It appears to designed for website submission. All of your page links goes back to the exact same landing page, another website called Lazy URL.

Are you actually Lazy URL? Or Are you your own submittal service? If you are Lazy URL, then simply showing your website Lazy URL is just fine. If you are an affiliate of Lazy URl, create a small review recommending the service, or put up a banner.

Secondly, don't mix free submittal with paid submittal service because a webmaster is going to pick the free service every time. If you have one company with limited free capability but more capability if a person decides to upgrade the service, then that's fine.

The Adsense ads are likely to be ignored because people who visit your site will peruse your site, thinking it's directory submittal. They are not likely to leave your site for an Adsense ad. This can create confusion for the reader. What is your site intended to do?

You've worked very hard on your website, and it looks good aesthetically. Unfortunately, sometimes we get so bogged down on the mechanics of design and SEO, that we forget the purpose of our website to begin with.

I recommend taking a step back, reassessing, and actually walk through the process of what you want your customers to do. That gives you a better idea of how to monetize your site and make money.
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retrogamestore · Joined: 08 Feb 2009 Posts: 4

Many thanks for all your help, especially to you gowriter, you seem to know exactly how I feel about my site.

I have put in a lot of hard work on the main purpose of the site which is web submissions. I have also worked hard on increasing my traffic. At the moment I get around 500 visits a day and around 100 submissions - pretty good so far I think? You are right saying that I have been concentrating on the look of the site and may have forgotten the main purpose.

I'm happy with the look and the amount of traffic and submissions at the present time, obviously I will now keep working on increasing visitors.

What I want from the site is firstly to provide a good web directory service for others to use. Secondly I would like to earn just a little income from the site, I'm not greedy but a couple of hundred dollars a month would be nice eventually.

LazyURL is an affiliate I'm trying to recommend both in order to help others (as I have used their service myself and was very impressed) and also to monetize my site. I am both an affiliate and a partner so I can either send traffic to them or provide their services myself to others.

Suppose I have lost my way a little and need help and ideas of how I can monetize my site.

Any ideas would be greatly appreciated.

Many thanks.
websitejoint.com
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megahertz · Joined: 09 May 2009 Posts: 4 Location: HULL, UK

I wonder if you're using Adsense in the right way?

I think Adsense can be used in two ways

1) You get a visitor to your site and ideally you want them to sign up to your offer - the best way for you to make money from them is to sell to them directly. But, if they don't end up buying from you, then they MIGHT just click on an Adsense link, rather than hit the back button. That way, you at least get a small revenue from that visitor.

2 ) You set up a site just purely with the idea of making money from Adsense - in other words you actually want them to click on the adverts, rather than anything else on the page.

I stuck Adsense on one of my commercial sites because it was getting a lot of traffic, and I was really pleased when I discovered I was making a few pounds (I'm in UK) a month from it. But then I realised that I was giving work to my competitors, who actually made far more from the leads than I was doing. But I also took the view that they might have ended up on their site anyway, so at least I got something. There has to be a balance.

It strikes me that you want visitors to sign up, and if they do so, you should count that as a success. If they don't sign up (and wouldn't have anyway) you can count it as a partial success if they click on a paid ad instead. It's a fail if they go away without signing up and don't click on an ad.

Tim
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