The Case Study: More Information

Before I start let me warn everyone that this is going to be one hell of a long pos, so please bear with me. It is worth it to read to the end if you plan on following the success of this new site of mine for the coming months. All screenshots are provdided at the bottom of the post so enjoy them while you can!

Hi everyone.

Before we start the actual process of talking about how much my new site is earning, and how much traffic it is getting I thought I wold drop some more background information on your ass.

So here goes.

Monetization:

As I stated in yesterday’s post the site is optimized with two main methods of monetization, they are adsense and adbrite. Before everyone goes on to tell me that I should be putting affiliate banners on my site I should tell you that I have already tried it, and not had much luck. Needless to say that I did try that in the start of the site and after seeing no turnaround I decided to run adsense and adbrite in its place.

The majority of my income from adsense comes from referrals. Just yesterday I was able to get $36.00 in referrals. I have to thank Randy Brown of Grown Up Greek for the idea of referrals, I’m not sure where I read it on his blog but I know I read it there somewhere or in his free e-book about the amount of money that he was making from GooGle referrals, I have tried it on my proxies and some other sites of mine, but never saw the success that I am seeing now. And I am not making my site show errors in IE to force people to download firefox either (I actually know people that do this.)

The other method of monetization that I have been using is adbrite. I first started using adbrite with my image hosts, because I quickly learned that you can’t just monetize that much traffic, and that much load on your server with just adsense so I had to implement a nice CPM advertiser because the CTR (Click Through Rate) on image hosts is horrible. Lesson learned easy enough there. My current daily average with adbrite is about $21.48, which is quite nice considering some poor suckers only earn $1.00 a day from adbrite and are quite happy with that as well.

Another monetization method that I use but can’t really count on is:

Amazon

For the first time I have used Amazon to try to promote their products as well, at first I had a huge widget on every page of content but was not seeing a great conversion for all the effort. I decided to just put a widget in the sidebar and see what happens. I am glad to say that at the moment with a 120X240 widget I am seeing the same earnings as the 250X250 box I had on every page under the content. I would put the average with Amazon at about $3.00 a day, which while not at the same earnings as Adsense or Adbrite is still worth the space that they take up on the page.

I have also tried the “new” adsense in-video ads. Since I have the market for something like this I thought it would be a good idea to try them out. If you are thinking about running the video ads provided by adsense let me tell you something. DO NOT DO IT. That’s right I said don’t run it, the conversion is horrible and the earnings are even worse. Essentially what you have is a youtube video on your site, the customer has to first play the video and than click on the ad in the actual video. HOW FRIGGIN HORRIBLE. I ran it for a total of 2 days before I decided to call it quits.

New Avenue of monetization:

Paypopup.

I have discussed before how I have used paypopup to rock the house on my image hosts and it worked wonderful. With only 5,000 uniques a day I was able to get $6.00 a day from them. I have not yet implemented paypopup on this new site but plan on doing it soon. If I have 20k coming in from this new site that could mean potential earnings of about $24.00 per day which would be a nice addition to the total earnings already coming through.

Now on to the traffic.

Traffic:

For the month of December we had a total of According to (GooGle Analytics):

• Unique Visits: 266, 123
• Page Views: 515,556

You guys are such stats whores like myself that I knew you would want to see a screenshot, and thats the reason why I have added some. (Don’t worry the earnings screenshots will be at the bottom of the post.)

Not bad, but it could have been much better if I had gotten my chance to shine and my hosting had not gone down for 3 consecutive days.

Breakdown of traffic:

Your all probably wondering where the heck all this crazy traffic is coming from so heres that information as well, According to (GooGle Analytics):

• Referring Sites: 143,780
• Search Engines: 102,757
• Direct Traffic: 19,435
• Other: 151

There’s another screenshot for you suckers. I am not going to be breaking down January’ stats in this post because I think it is getting quite lengthy already but I have plans to do that in a future post and also to include awstats as well. Just for the sheer fact that I love awstats (I know it is not the best way to keep track of your sites but I love it).

Now of coure you will all want to see some screenshots of my earnings, so here goes:

December Earnings With Adsense:

As you can see I have actually made more with referrals than I have with adsense for content.

And this is the reason why you don’t want to run adsense video units:

Was I right, or was I right? 10,876 impressions and only $.08 earnings?? The hell with that. I don’t need you taking u a 250X250 space on my site!

Now here are some adbrite earnings for the month of December:

There you have it ladies and gentleman, that was another long post, but expect more like it. If you like this post than I seriously seriously suggest you subscribe to the RSS feed as it is only going to get better and better from here on out.