Ask YC: How can I increase revenue from $1500 to...?

[petervandijck]

Hey all, I have this site that I've been running for a while (it's a travel forum) that brings in about 1500$ dollar a month with adsense. If I could double that, that'd be pretty great. Any thoughts on the possibilities? Of course, I'm expecting to get a lot less ad $ with the crisis and all... But then again, the site isn't really monetized much.. logged-in users don't see any ads for example. Of course, I don't want to put lots of ads on it either, which is why I'm asking the questions..

[pchristensen]

You must be doing pretty well to get $1500 from AdSense. You might try direct sale of advertising - they pay much more than AdSense so you could boost revenue without showing a ton of ads. (I haven't done this, just heard. No idea how hard it would be to sign advertisers).

[fallentimes]

Or if that's not your thing, even optimizing your Google Ads would go a long way. I'm certainly not an expert in this, but here are some tools & tips from people who are:

http://adsense.blogspot.com/2006/04/meet-ivan-optimiser-but-...

http://www.smashingmagazine.com/2007/03/22/google-adsense-fa...

http://uphook.blogspot.com/2006/04/getting-most-out-of-adsen...

Google Ad Manager is also awesome: https://www.google.com/admanager/

Please report back to HN about what you did and how things worked out!

[bdfh42]

First off - remember that free consultancy may only be worth just what you pay for it.

FWIW. I found the site landing page failed to tell me clearly what I could expect if I followed the links. I suspect that you may be losing a good part of your potential audience at this point.

Then, it has to be said, I did not see a lot of ads on the pages I sampled (none at all in most instances). I would have thought that a bit of work on the page keywords would enhance the attraction of your site for adsense dollars and then some work locating the ads at the right points to attract visitors when they are ready to buy something could pay dividends.

A specialised Amazon book store could add to the monthly take. Plus - where are the ads for travel insurance, cheap airline ticket shops etc. etc. There is a lot in this area you could do without overwhelming your site visitors with the commercial aspects - good well targeted ads are a useful resource after all.

Good luck with it - it's hard work running something like this but a little more application might just make it something special.

[markessien]

With affiliate links to relevant products. For example, software products where you get 30% of the sale price or so. Travel guides on Amazon, Language courses and so on. You'll get 1-2% conversion rate, so just calculate how many of such links you need to place, and on what pages. It will be pretty easy to do so in a week or so.

[mrtron]

The affiliate program I use has several travel programs - ranging from travel newsletter signups to airline pay per sale. I would really recommend trying one of those and messing around with placement to increase your conversion rate.

With my referral id, the site is: https://secure.neverblue.com/signup?ref=aff_66639

Email me any questions.

[easp]

First, take a good look at usage patterns on your site. What % is from repeat users? How often do repeat users return, on average? What % is from search referrals? What % is from referrals from other sites? What search terms are popular? Just looking at that data and thinking about the implications could be instructive.

I admire your stance on ads, but you might reconsider your decision not to show them to logged in users at all. You are providing a service by hosting the forum, and its not unreasonable to have a small amount of advertising to your regular users to help defray your costs.

This is important, because I'm guessing a significant amount of your page views are for regular users, and because they are regular users, they represent a targeted audience for advertising. Because they are a targeted audience in what sounds like a commercially viable niche, you should be able to get pretty good CPMs, and therefore, be able to realize a big boost in revenue without having to show them a lot of ads.

I'd start by putting a decent sized google ad (preferably one of the formats that supports image and video ads) "above the fold," but only show it intermittently, and not more than a few times per visit. Leave it there for a while and see if Google starts to identify your regular visitors and targets them differently than it targets passers-by (set up an ad channel to help with tracking).

You could then try moving beyond that by joining an appropriate display ad network, and doing a little work to sell ads yourself. These would probably be useful for monetizing your other users as well, but you'd probably command a higher CPM for your registered, regular users.

Your eCPM for AdSense doesn't sound bad, but you cant really be sure based just on the info people are giving you here. You need to try and benchmark your eCPM against sites that are similar to yours. You might be able to sign up for an AdWords account and see what it would cost you to buy ads for the keywords of the ads that tend to show up on your site.

Unless you've put a lot of effort into optimizing your ads, chances are that a little bit of work could get you a 50-100% boost in your revenue. Experiment with different ad formats, placements, and color schemes. As someone mentioned, just introducing some variation in color scheme (which Google makes easy to do) can make a difference.

Another thing you can do is have a prominent "landing site" that is displayed when you detect that a user has arrived via a search engine referral. The site can feature a larger ad than you'd usually show, you might also include a link-unit, and links to other content on your site that might be relevant to the search terms they used on their way to your site.

The last thing to consider is how you can make the best posts on your forum site easier for casual readers to consume, for search engines to find, and for Google to target. One approach, you could spend a little time maintaining a blog of the best posts on your site. Make sure they are tagged and categorized appropriately (pay attention to the popular search terms for people arriving at your site when choosing tags and categories). A little editing to provide the appropriate context, and make them easier for someone to read without reading the whole thread they were pulled from is valuable too. You'll end up with pages that aggregate a bunch of content on the same subject. This will be easier for search engines to index, easier for people to read when they arrive from a search engine or another site, provide a nice target for people to link to (which can help with your search engine rank), and also provide a crisper context for Google's ad targeting.

You could try and recruit a few of your most devoted (and best suited) users to help with this, and you could pay them a share of revenue from the blog pages.

You could also go a different direction, and start a wiki with similar content drawn from the forums, and then encourage your users to expand it and keep it up to date.

[easp]

I should have looked at your site before writing :)

The travel guides look like they fill the niche of the blog wiki idea I suggested, and they'd be perfect spots for a little advertising & affiliate stuff.

[pxlpshr]

think about ways you could market products to your customer base... affiliate sales is an easy way to begin as it doesn't require much time.

however you could probably get bigger margins if you handled more of the sales process, but this is a bigger time commitment. paypal and google checkout have made it easy to minimize the hassle and risk of merchant accounts. find a distributor that does drop shipping so you don't have to manage the inventory.

Here's a free idea: what if you packaged your own "travel" kits for each region that offered small products tailored to the region's experience? this include general things like quick-reference languages book, but also more region-specific stuff for snake bites, malaria, etc... for less of a time commitment, you could put these together in an organized manner on the site and just link them to amazon and affiliates so people can a la carte shop. would also give you an excuse to stir conversation to get community's feedback on what they commonly bring to the area.

[petervandijck]

I've thought about packaging the travel info, like here: http://poorbuthappy.com/colombia/travel/print/ into a book, and sell it on Amazon, make perhaps 5$ per copy... I'm gonna try that next year. We'll see...

[petervandijck]

ps: traffic is like 800,000 pageviews a month, if that helps. I guess my question is also: am I doing good with the ads, or could it be much better?

[modoc]

I think you're doing pretty well:) I push over double the page views, but am not making as much from AdSense as you are.

[mattmaroon]

So you're getting just under $2 CPM. Not bad for AdSense at all.

I used to get like $20 on my poker blog, but that was poker and largely through affiliates. Maybe you could try some good travel affiliate programs?

The only thing I can tell you is try to sell directly. You can probably make $5-$10 CPM off of just a couple banners. If nothing else, put up a link that says "Your Ad Here" and see if anyone bites. Maybe try some of the ad networks, especially if there's one specifically for travel.

[petervandijck]

the site is at http://poorbuthappy.com

[wesley]

I don't see any ads at all, where are they? Example page please.

[swombat]

This article is lengthy but excellent on the topic of monetising a blog. Some of the techniques should apply to your site too:

http://www.stevepavlina.com/blog/2006/05/how-to-make-money-f...

[brandnewlow]

A few things aren't feeling right here.

1. Other than that link you include in this thread, I can't find ads anywhere on the site. That's generally wise, but you could probably get away with running some more.

2. The homepage footer says you've had 32,000+ discussions today? I can't seem to find more than 10 or so. Do you mean"so far"?

Otherwise this is a neat idea and a clean, hipster-ish layout. Impressed!

[petervandijck]

What it means on the homepage is 32000 discussions so far, 'today;. Sorry, English isn't my first language, will improve that :) Thanks for the compliments!

[boucher]

Also consider AB testing different placements, types of ads, etc. Will give you hard data on what works better.

[noodle]

you're doing fairly well with adsense given the information you provide in the comments.

to improve, hunt down affiliate opportunities and consider looking for or soliciting for paid weekly/monthly sponsors to get banner ad face time for all visitors over that time period.

[petervandijck]

Thanks.. good tips so far. The income has been steady for about 2 years now.. so I'm thinking maybe the best thing to do is just to do some seo, focus on that and increase traffic.. that way I don't have to add more ads either.

[wesley]

If you hate ads, you should just show more of them to non-logged in users.. It can even be an incentive to get them to sign up if you mention it on the site :) Do you know the % of pageviews between logged in users and guests?

[pier0]

Peter, what's the name of the forum software you use, if I may ask?

[josefresco]

Direct ad sales, affiliates (within the travel niche), and look into other AdSense like programs that pay better.

Also I visited the site and didn't see any ads ...either your hiding them well or there aren't enough of them.

[petervandijck]

So I guess that the general consensus is: I'm doing ok with adsense, I could add some affiliate sales, or perhaps do my own travel products somehow?

[webwright]

Forums are notoriously bad for PPC advertising. Have you tried CPM? Affiliate stuff? Lots to choose from in the travel space beyond adsense.

[run4yourlives]

Check out johnchow.com He's got a ton of ideas and practical examples, plus he makes a ton of cash rambling about making a ton of cash.

[petervandijck]

I hate those sites, they all try to sell you loads of stuff about how to make money, it's like 1 huge pyramid scheme or something. Not to say there's nothing to it, but still. "Buy my guide on how to make money on the internet", thanks but no thanks.

[jakewolf]

What about allowing advertorials for a fee?

[rockstar9]

cool, the site seems pretty neat. btw, how long has it been around?

[petervandijck]

Has been around since 1998!