Need advice: 4 year old site getting 2,000+ unique visitors daily, but only making $1

Skribblez

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Jul 8, 2006
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Hi there, I have a 4 year old site that is presently getting 2,000+ unique visitors daily on autopilot, but I am only making less than a dollar a day, and on some days $1-$2

Link is Learn how to C Walk - PimpMyWalk.com

I also have a forum on the site with 32,000+ members, and ~100 active or more users online at any one time: PimpMyWalk (Powered by Invision Power Board)

It teaches people how to cwalk, a popular "dance" worldwide, but mainly in the US. The number of daily unique visitors has been pretty steady these past few years without much work on my part.

I have currently monetized the site with Adsense, which brings in about just under a dollar a day, or $1-$2 on some days. I just want to be able to make enough to not have to worry about the VPS (hosting) anymore, which costs about $76.50 per month. Adsense currently only brings in $50-$60, and even if I do manage to earn enough, adsense payment is pretty slow (NET-30) and the payment threshold is pretty high - $150 AUD for me. Not sure how much that is in USD.

Other things I've tried:

- Selling banner ads on the site/trying to find advertisers. No luck

- CPA. No luck. Got $1 leads here and there, but nothing compared to what I am earning with adsense now.

- Selling Clickbank products. No luck, only ever made a sale for a "hip hop instrumentals" product once in a 3 or 4 month period.

Things I do not want to try:

- Popups: I don't want to annoy my users with popups though, or restricting access to the content/tutorials using programs like CPALead.

- Selling the site: Some people have suggested selling the site, but I do not want to go this route. This is the only site that has been with me this long, and it has sentimental value to me. I also personally cwalk myself and upload videos on YouTube from time to time to help promote the site, and I've also met some good friends from my site.

Any advice?

Does anyone have any advice for me? I don't want to annoy my users with popups though or restrict access to tutorials using CPALead.

What would you recommend for my situation? I also have another site that teaches a different dance, which gets about 400 unique visitors a day. Have monetized the site with adsense, but only earn about 10 cents every other day, lol.
 


Try opening up certain sections of your forum to anonymous users. That way you can get indexed in SERP so you can catch more random traffic. That way you get more impressions to attract advertisers.

"Active" forum go-ers aren't too easy to monetize via ads because of banner blindness. But I could be wrong. Lets see if any media buyers come in with their opinions.
 
I registered on your forum to check it out. Just quickly glancing over, I only see two ad units on your forum: the link unit on the top and the leaderboard ad unit on the very bottom, below the reply form. I'm definitely, by all means, no expert but I think you could improve your ad placement. I don't really have much specific advice for you, but I'd try playing with the ad placement a bit; maybe you can integrate an ad into your threads so an ad shows below the thread's first post (not sure how easy that is). Good luck, it's a nice site.

Try opening up certain sections of your forum to anonymous users. That way you can get indexed in SERP so you can catch more random traffic. That way you get more impressions to attract advertisers.

I think this is a good idea, too.
 
I think it would be hard to monetize your site considering the demographics. More than likely most of the people you have coming to your site are 16 year old kids trying to learn how to crip walk after they have just listened to a snoop dog album.

You should hit Amazon up and start slangin' them cds. Or you could try and push a music service like Napster or Rhapsody.
 
What you need is dating offers with bitches with big ass tittys.

For the love of God yes. I'll put my white boy dancing shoes on for those if you add them.

I think ad placement is your failing point right now. Take a look at a well monetized forum (moe's loansafe.org forum would be a good start) and analyse the ad placements carefully.
 
16 year olds may not have credit cards or be interested in buying shit(especially that demo), but they do have cell phones.

Offers I would suggest:

Crunking
Dumb Test
My new monkey jokes
Who Da Baby Daddy

Pm me if you can't find those offers on offervault

Also try looking for a network/advertiser approved incent version. Give them something of value in return for filling out the mobile offer.
 
Yep, I'm definitely going to try and open the forum up to guests now. I closed off the forum to guests hoping it would result in more members, but I guess it would be better to just show all the forums to start getting the topics indexed, and hopefully some more SE traffic from random topics in the forum like you said.

Hmm, I'll play around with the ad placement on the forum. I used to have an adsense mod that would place an ad under the last post in each thread, but that didn't work out. Barely got much clicks, forum index ads still got the most clicks. However, I think your idea could work out better - ad under the first post in a thread.

If anyone could suggest any CPA networks for me, that would be great.

I tried signing up to MaxBounty, but got rejected, lol. Don't really know any other decent ones that pay through PayPal..
 
Well 1 thing is readily apparent the design is very bad for those adsense ads. You basically shoved into a black hole of the site and your brain is trained not to look there. Since they're obviously between the content. Move them in there beside the video make them apparent and style them to blend into some of the text that people will be reading and clicking nearby. That alone could double your adsense money I'd bet or more.

It looks like you're ashamed to even have advertisements on the page. If that's the route you're going to go you should just remove them all together.
 
I'd be interest to purchase this site from you. pm me if you have a change of heart or want to talk about it.