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

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.

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.

Thanks for the replies, some good advice

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/2007/0...t-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?

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

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


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

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.

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Best regards, Submerge

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

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

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.

__________________
Best regards, Submerge

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?

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.

__________________
Best regards, Submerge