I own a site that was left to me by an old domain customer when he passed away.. 100's of pages of content unchanged in over 7 years..

It's called Smile-A-Day.com and is an online amusement park with fun graphics and midis..

I've done literally nothing to build a list or monetize it, except slap some adsense on it and text-link-ads, as I'm simply too busy with other things..

However, the traffic to this site is pretty impressive... and every christmas time the Adsense revenue skyrockets because it's usually in the Top 5 for "advent calendar"

And it's also number #1 in Google for: puff the magic dragon
Good for about 9000 Visits a month, the biggest entry point into the site.

Here's a screencap of the stats
http://www.smile-a-day.com/sadstats.gif

This site makes about $100 a month.. I know it should be making $100+ a day with these numbers.

Any suggestions on how I should monetize this niche?

If I were you I would put some effort into giving it a face lift. Loose the front page markup, give it a decent new design and some solid code. Bring it up to date, and it could do even better.

As for monetising it I'll let someone more qualified than me answer that. Good luck with it.

Thanks, unfortunately that's easier said then done..

There's over 500 pages indexed in Google alone and they were all hand written in html, (I edited a few pages with frontpage over the years) there are multiple link mazes, graphics and midi's... it's a monster job.

And remember it's designed for young kids..

Maybe I'll post something on Scriptlance and see if someone can rip the html and do an overhaul..

Thanks

Originally Posted by GotZipInc

Thanks, unfortunately that's easier said then done..

There's over 500 pages indexed in Google alone and they were all hand written in html, (I edited a few pages with frontpage over the years) there are multiple link mazes, graphics and midi's... it's a monster job.

And remember it's designed for young kids..

Maybe I'll post something on Scriptlance and see if someone can rip the html and do an overhaul..

Thanks

Might be - but it'd definately be worth the effort.

If it's designed for young kids, are they likely to be clicking AdSense?

A tidy up is definitely required - it could be even more targeted to young children with better design, layout and navigation.

As for monetization - how about packaging various parts of the site into eBooks aimed at parents of the children who are browsing it?

I'll try to find a designer whose worked on kid's site and do a major renovation..

The ebook idea is interesting.. to be honest I don't even know what half the content is on the site.. and whether it would be packagable..

Thanks for the ideas...

CPC won't work, Try placing some CPM banners

I definitely wouldn't redesign it, it would lose its charm.
As for the monetization - what about placing some targeted affiliate links on each part of the "Magic World"? If you get a good ranking on "advent calenders", find an affiliate selling advent calendars.
As for the AdSense - frankly, it just doesn't fit there, above all because of the non-matching fonts (Comic Sans vs Arial).

Generally I'd say text links (whether sold links or affiliate promotions) are the way to go.

If the site is getting a lot of traffic try CPM. I'm not sure how well CPC would do for you anyway since your site doesn't have that much text.

I would change the design, it looks like a page made 7 years ago, and not very appealing.

I know there are a large amount of indexed pages on the site.. so this might seem drastic.. but how about scrapping whats there and starting over again?
Maybe making it an online games site or something.. its a 7 year old domain? That in itself is priceless. If it were me I'd build a modern, appealing site on that domain!

It does have that old fashioned web design appeal. Back in the day when everybody was doing their "first site". I think instead of a complete redesign, why not work on making the navigation a little more intuitive and interesting. You could basically slap on a cover page or fix up the main pages and make the navigation easier and more fun. You could probably use a variety of CPM and CPC on there if you've already got some traffic.

I think you could probably create more exit pages with similar contents and place contectual ads like Google Adsense and YPN on those pages.