SEM Tycoon

**willcode4beer** · 05-27-2009, 12:30 AM

Too often, we see folks trying to earn money on their sites before they've established serious traffic by going overkill with the ads.

It's counter-productive. Too many ads drives away visitors and prevents repeat traffic.

Start small, some text ads or a small adsense banner. Nothing more. Keep them unobtrusive. Your initial goal should be to get your traffic up to a level where ads can actually do something. Make your site simple, clean, and useful for your visitors.

Create your content, web apps, or whatever it is you are doing to provide value for your visitors. You'll probably make little to no money to begin with. You are investing time and effort at this point.

Don't get tempted into dropping ads on your site. Your initial goal is to consistently get a few thousand visitors/day (not hits, actual visitors). You do not want to scare them away.

Once you are at this point, go slow. Find an advertising program that works with your site. Ad one advertisement. Keep working on increasing visitors.

Watch your traffic for a month.
Did the ad hurt your traffic?
Does the ad provide reasonable income?
If it hurts or doesn't pay, change it. Monitor stats for another month, wash rinse repeat.

If traffic was unaffected and/or the payout was reasonable, then investigate if you want to go with another.

Saturating your site with ads (especially too early) can be like putting a ball and chain on your site. You need good traffic to earn ad revenue, too many ads will stunt traffic growth. Get the traffic first, and you will find the path to success comes much quicker.

Good luck

**GameFriends.com** · 06-05-2009, 01:12 AM

One of the better threads I have read which makes a lot of sense yet people keep ignoring. Look at Facebook, no ads on the homepage. Like Earl Nightingale said "you can only make money after you are successful". It is the last step to becoming successful online and you hit the nail on the head....problem is it's hard to be that patient with new sites sometimes.

**willcode4beer** · 06-05-2009, 05:00 PM

very true.

I remember a long time ago, when I first started with ads. After making a few pennies, I kept adding ads. It stunted the traffic growth so much, that all it did was pennies.

Now, I try to keep 'em as minimal and/or useful as I can. The text ads make about double my hosting costs (I use a VPS so, it's more pricey than most hosts).

I've got some Amazon ads that I try to keep related to the page.
So a page on the dojo toolkit has amazon ads for dojo toolkit books.
These ads are actually useful to my visitors and I can make quite a bit.

Right now, my primary goal is to increase the amount of useful content to give people a reason to go to the site.

**TagMan** · 06-15-2009, 09:00 AM

This is a fantastic thread!

Very useful, and addresses a real issue i think.

I am already thinking twice about ads.......

Thanks willcode4beer!

**GrantMePeace** · 06-23-2009, 07:56 AM

Good Advice. No point in monetizing pennies from the 10 people that visit your site!

But a little too slow. I wouldn't hang around for a month to see the effects of placing an ad. A week to two weeks is sufficient.

But the bottom line is take it slow like you said. Not too slow mind you

**hairygunther** · 06-23-2009, 10:38 AM

Quote:

Right now, my primary goal is to increase the amount of useful content to give people a reason to go to the site.

I'm a fool and a hack for sharing so much valuable ascii with so many direct competitors for my gold but the real trick, beery, is to do both at the same time - learn how to make genuinely useful content which just gets more profitable the more you do it - pure unadulterated traffic-friendly selling - quality items don't have to not be things which sell, after all. Or are we suddenly all marxist sartre-readers who believe in abandoning all property and living in a hippy commune?

I mean, many an endeavour has been respectable whether or not its most noticeable goal was to achieve profit. Myself, I build search engine tools for an a.i. experiment I started in 1999 and all profit I make is really just pushing me down that road. In fact I am very very very soon going to release, after 7 years, my own search engine software as fully opensource material.

I've thought hard and I suspect that I can eventually prove to myself that it will not impair me commercially, create any otherwise nonexistent competition or do anything else unsavoury, and then that's it - I shall release versions 1 and 2 straight away - version 2 being a cleaned up {mostly variable names} version of the current one which though brilliant is incredibly weird on the inside and though it'll be published, won't ever be used by 3rd parties because they'll never believe in a million years that they can possibly work with it so weird is it.

Until now I've always just alluded to my programming but never shared it wide open, every last bit - but now, unlike google, microsoft or anyone else "weak" i'm going to do it anyway, I reckon (although time will tell - I'm gathering the courage to do it - and the time to sit down and change the variable names - most other work's already done - all processes have had their efficiency maximised and where the software still fails to handle gigantic loads, the usual googlesque reverse engineering system has now been put in place, reducing 20 to 90 seconds of process time to nanoseconds).

Don't rush, it's true, but do expedite! I think that haste is bad but speed is good. Then you can beat me at my otherwise relatively smooth path to total technological-commercial monopolisation of planet earth. Give it a go - it's boring when it's too easy.

**nysilly** · 06-24-2009, 02:02 PM

Hey Im new to the web world and this post was really informative. Im really going to rethink my website and remove alot of the ads there. I think I went a little overkill, google, infolinks, pw, adtoll, smowtion, lol. Definitely gonna remove some.

**hairygunther** · 06-25-2009, 06:16 PM

Someone goes to your site about NY, and the phrase "good luck" is underlined and leads to an infolinks advert for a casino. Google adsense tries to lure traffic into clicking on an ad for "deal or no deal", and the top of your page tries to sell one of the hardest products on the web to move without a third party, adspace itself.

You can't possibly make any money from that collection of not very good adverts!

When you put all the work in the hands of others, when you don't target the clients yourself, that's what happens.

Just as an example of where 95% of people go wrong I'll tell you what you should do (count yourself lucky, today a guru told you how to make real money from your blog instead of the nickels and dimes those ads you have would generate in a month)...

NEW YORKERS.

That's who reads your page, that's who likes your page. That's what your page is "about" - because you have even named it after New York. So you have to go to the networks (lots of them, but why not go to the best, eg Commission Junction) and hunt down what in the name of Baron Greenback these new yorkers are going to be interested in.

Not just that. Any consumers. Eg you could have a lovely bright graphical advert designed by experts at Nokia, selling cellphones at reduced prices in mainstream stores, all over the top, you could have anything. I think since NY is a financial centre, you could find some sales come through if you set up advertising for Wall Street Journal (who are almost certainly willing to pay you via CJ).

Anyway, you get the point - I'm saying that most sites like yours are full of stuff which isn't ever going to make any money for anyone so even when you do get paid for a click it's not good business and has no longterm guarantee attached to it. What you need to do is to work hard at finding adverts which work for you - that means (as the chap said, as far as I recall, and i read it a few days ago I think), choosing appropriate adverts (by going to networks and browsing 100s and 100s of companies to find ones that will work - maybe you could sell cheesecake? New Yorkers love a bit of cheesecake - as much as old people love hospital food - more so, no doubt) and then testing them - finding out which ones make money, by testing them all out over time. There's lots of reasons why an apparently good choice can be a bad one (eg the company may have a rubbish sales manager who loses all the sales).

So yes, start by removing the barrage of silly ads, but don't stop there. Start to look for proper ads which make money for you. Again, I don't know why in hell I'm helping other people to take chunks out of my own market, but hey, as all mercenaries know, feed the newbies to the affiliate networks and that means more dosh for them to pay out to the so-called superaffiliates.

**Anic21** · 07-25-2009, 10:39 AM

Useful thread for me

**rake81** · 07-31-2009, 05:45 AM

Good point, you need to build solid traffic before you try and monetize. I find opting people in to a mailing list is a great way to build rapport with your viewers.

**andmcg1** · 08-07-2009, 03:25 AM

Very informative. Thank you. It's made me think about why my websites took so long to get the ball rolling...

**digitalstyle** · 08-09-2009, 07:24 AM

Thanks willcode4beer , for your nice suggestions..you are 100% true..first have huge traffic and then go for revenue..

If quality traffic is there then money will come automatically..no doubt in it.

**JonRhodesUK** · 08-26-2009, 11:29 AM

Yep, I find that with a brand new site that if you hold back on monatirising it, and instead focus on adding great content, it is far easier to build links to.

**lucky24libra** · 08-26-2009, 12:46 PM

very informative thread...really to think about it.....