Need some tips

[Chris369]

Hi

I read Tyler's post 20 months later post on sitepoint.com and it really gave me some inspiration. I hate working full time in a job and want to earn my income online ... obviously it's not all that easy so I'm putting a lot of my spare time into running my sites.

I only make a few dollars a day with AdSense and nearly all of it comes from my proxy. I want to up my daily income to $10 and looking for tips from people that have done it on how to achieve this? E.g. are their any other ad networks you would recommend that might pay more? General promotion tips etc.

My gaming news site had 2700 unique visitors in the first two weeks of starting it up (I think that's quite high for a new site) but it hardly generated any income which I was disappointed with :( Maybe I'd be better off with something else for that site?

Thanks for any tips :)

[camuk19]

For your proxy site, I would recommend adding a stylesheet to the frontpage, the fonts are boring and standard at the moment, clean it up a bit with some unique colors/style could keep users coming back. Also adding some Ads for the results page could result in a lot more clicks, but could put off users.

Your video game news site, which has some great content, you need to work on the positioning of your ads. The google ads at the top are well placed, but you could try adding a 468x60px banner ad into the banner itself, could attract a lot of attention due to it bring in a prime space. Adding some ads to bottom of each post could add more revenue, and seeing as search engines pick up individual posts, could receive quite some exposure. The current ads you have at the moment on the sidebar I think are really annoying, yes it is a good place, but not being able to see the different updates could result in users just reading one article then going, instead of catching their eye, and them therefore reading more posts, with ads in the end of each of these posts, you could easily earn much more. Text links at the bottom could help too.

But remember don't over do it! Hope that helps.

[zac439]

I reccomend staying with the gaming news site, if indeed you have the traffic you say you do. Just try and figure out a way to get your visitors to notice and click your ads. Running a forum is a great way to do this. The blog-style format is kind of less favorable to getting good ad placement. If you want to stick with the same template/blog format, experiment with putting the ads in your posts maybe.

Proxies will end up costing you more to run, killing profit. Plus, you have some good traffic on videogame-news. I reccomend you stick with it.

[Chris369]

Thanks for the replies, some good advice :)

For your proxy site, I would recommend adding a stylesheet to the frontpage, the fonts are boring and standard at the moment, clean it up a bit with some unique colors/style could keep users coming back. Also adding some Ads for the results page could result in a lot more clicks, but could put off users.

Your video game news site, which has some great content, you need to work on the positioning of your ads. The google ads at the top are well placed, but you could try adding a 468x60px banner ad into the banner itself, could attract a lot of attention due to it bring in a prime space. Adding some ads to bottom of each post could add more revenue, and seeing as search engines pick up individual posts, could receive quite some exposure. The current ads you have at the moment on the sidebar I think are really annoying, yes it is a good place, but not being able to see the different updates could result in users just reading one article then going, instead of catching their eye, and them therefore reading more posts, with ads in the end of each of these posts, you could easily earn much more. Text links at the bottom could help too.

But remember don't over do it! Hope that helps.

Yeah my proxie site is a bit boring and I need to change the layout but I really have no idea how to :( I'm rubbish at designing and CSS. About the results page and ads, do you mean the "proxified" pages? I did do that originally but I saw a few posts saying it was against AdSense TOS so took them down.

For VGN, I have ads at the bottom of the posts but only if you view single (e.g. http://www.videogame-news.com/2007/02/04/buy-a-psp-and-get-a-ps3-free/). I've removed the AdSense referral image and the gamerfly commision image, they didn't work too well anyway. I think I need to find out how to put an adsense block after the first post on the index, do you think that would be a good place?

I reccomend staying with the gaming news site, if indeed you have the traffic you say you do. Just try and figure out a way to get your visitors to notice and click your ads. Running a forum is a great way to do this. The blog-style format is kind of less favorable to getting good ad placement. If you want to stick with the same template/blog format, experiment with putting the ads in your posts maybe.

Proxies will end up costing you more to run, killing profit. Plus, you have some good traffic on videogame-news. I reccomend you stick with it.

Yeah I did get 2700 unique visitors last month and upto about 700 so far this month according to AwStats. I get news straight from Press Releases and submit it to n4g.com (news 4 gamers) and that is where I get a lot of traffic from. Also got links in sigs and lots of posts indexed in Google ... e.g. search "wii chipped" in Google :p

So if I didn't keep submitting to n4g.com I don't think I'd have so much traffic but I imagine after a month or two, my site might be more well known and visitors will just find me (that's what I'm hoping!)

Just got a forum going, trying to promote that at the moment, got a competition to try and pull some members in.

Also, proxie is really efficient at the momennt, only uses a meg or two bandwidth with about 200 visits a day. I think most of the visitors are teens at school as I get very little traffic at the weekend and the most visited URL's are myspace and bebo :p


So to summarise, I need to make proxie look better and experiment with ad placement on news site. *goes off to do some research*

[Submerge]

I'd recommend blending in the ads if you didn't do this, other wise just getting more traffic. I have a site that reaches $10 a day with just around 4,000 visitors.

[ablaye]

I'd recommend blending in the ads if you didn't do this, other wise just getting more traffic. I have a site that reaches $10 a day with just around 4,000 visitors.
Are you getting 4000 visitors/day??? How did you achieve this???

[Reckless]

Nice tips, maybe using a CPM ad on the site google doesn't preform well?

[Submerge]

Are you getting 4000 visitors/day??? How did you achieve this???

Yes that is daily. It';s not really hard to achieve, you just need to have a quality site people want to visit and advertise a little.

[Chris369]

Seems the word is getting around by my site, just been looking on my referral list. Someone made a thread about one of my posts on the official Xbox website and on the Capcom website (can't find the thread on there though).

Xbox forums has a page rank of 8, will that help my page rank even if it's just a link in a post?

[Submerge]

I highly doubt it'll help you because the thread won't have much of a page rank. But this IS a great way to gain traffic, keep it up.

[Chris369]

Ah ok, didn't think it would but thought I'd ask anyway :)

[Chris369]

Had a little play around.

On VGN, I moved the side bar ads down to the bottom and moved the subscriptions to the top, hopefully people that comes from n4g.com to thread a particular article will spot these and use them and then return again. They were at the bottom before so would have been missed by these visitors.

On the index, there is an ad after the most recent post and on the forum I have placed an ad after the first post in every thread.

So lets see how things change now :)

Proxie was the only site to make me any money again today! I hope my changes on VGN work and then both sites will be earning.

[camuk19]

Looking alot more user friendly mate, ads blending in well, although remember search engines index individual posts as well as the homepage, so if you recieve lots of hits from search engines, just the ads on the first post won't really help much! Won't really matter much if most is linked traffic though.

[Chris369]

There's ads at the bottom of every post when you view single e.g.

http://www.videogame-news.com/2007/02/05/nintendos-master-plan/
http://www.videogame-news.com/2007/02/05/gopets-announced-for-ds/

Just not on the main because I#d end up with too many and I think you can only have 3 ad blocks.

[andyw]

2700 unique visitors in the first two weeks... thats a great start.

[Chris369]

It's even better this month with the help of some cool news stories (halo 3 leaked screens and Casino Royale for first 500k PS3 owners) which I managed to submit to n4g.com before anyone else. I also had a thread started about my site on overclockers.co.uk - 765 clicks to my site! I'm upto 4400 uniques this month now :)

I've started getting more clicks on gaming site now, changed the colour to red so they stick out more. They are just really poorly paid though :/

Proxy has stopped making me money too. I think traffic has dropped on that but I don't know for certain because Awstats has stopped working :(

So as for my goal of $10 a day, I'm still no closer.

[camuk19]

If the PPC's arnt working, look into private advertising, paid banners and such. With a good amount of uniques and a popular niche, you should have no trouble selling space.

[Chris369]

How do I go about finding people though? Is there a site for things like this?

[Chris369]

4 clicks today and a huge $0.18 ! :(

[Chris369]

I've changed the look of proxie.co.uk - what do you think?

[Chris369]

Need more tips ... I'm screwed now that AdSense banned me so I need some ideas of what to use next.

Tried AdBrite but then found out that it wasn't targeted and just showed stupid ads. Got rejected from text link ads. Where do I go next? :(

[bdude]

You could try Private Advertising, even through a network like AdVolcano

[Chris369]

Cheers, I'll take a look at them.

[Mystic]

How do I go about finding people though? Is there a site for things like this?
I dont know for banner ads, but for text ads, you can try text-link ads (http://www.text-link-ads.com/).
Google Adsense alternatives (http://www.johnchow.com/other-advertising-networks-besides-google-adsense/).

[Chris369]

I've set up some AdVolcano packages. I think they are quite cheap so check them out if your looking for advertising ;)

http://www.advolcano.com/dir/selectPuPo.cfm?StId=397
http://www.advolcano.com/dir/selectPuPo.cfm?StId=398

I signed up for text-link-ads and got rejected. I've sent them an email to see if they will re-consider though.

I will have a read of John Chows post too.

Thanks