SEM Tycoon

**marcus1060** · 05:25 PM

Hi,

I am the developer for a site, and we are currently looking at putting ads on our site to cover server costs. Making a profit isn't the point, so consistency is a goal. We currently don't have any ads, and rely on donations, which are not near enough to cover costs.

We have around 200,000 page views in a good month, maybe around 160,000 on a poor month. (Though we are currently working on new portions of the site that we believe in will increase page views by a lot).

We would be happy just earning $300 a month.
This should be possible.

How would you recommend going about this?
Using Adsense, or another contextual ad provider?
Or should we go with CPM or CPA?
Any other advice?

Thanks a lot!

**nyef** · 06-05-2008, 10:56 PM

AdSense is the easiest to get started on, so start with that and if you're not getting what you want out of it, expand into other revenue generation.

Adsense does really well as long as it has content on every page to make the ads contextually accurate.

**marcus1060** · 06-06-2008, 01:45 AM

Yeah, I have experience with Adsense, and I guess that's they way we'll probably go.
I'd be happier if we could get a nice rate for CPM, but I guess that'll be unlikely.

**JCarl95** · 06-06-2008, 09:48 PM

What about a nice affiliate program selling products relevant to your users. If you have lots of repeat users you will probably find that adsense is good for the first month and will then drop off quickly.

**marcus1060** · 06-07-2008, 02:42 AM

The site is a Star Trek writing RPG group.
The main site is mainly new users, but the forum (obviously) is repeat users.
Maybe I'll try Adsense on the main site, and a mixture of that and CPA on the forums.