I have one money site and dozens of supporting sites and also some other sites that I am attempting to get up there in the rankings in order to make some money with them. But right now, I have 1 money site.
It is getting 500+ uniques on strong weekdays and 300+ uniques on the slower days (like Saturday).
Right now I am monetized only with Adsense.
I am looking at ways to boost my ecpm. Currently it is running around 25 to 30 bucks or so. If I had a thousand visitors per day this would be great. As it is, I get about half that and so it is only so-so in my book. Yes it is growing steadily due to targeting new keywords and also link building but this is going to take a while to double the income.
Let me talk about 3 basic routes that I could go in which to earn more revenue from my visitors. I understand that there are many other ways, but let me focus on these 3:
1) Affiliate sales
2) Create a product and sell it
3) Direct ad sales
Now for my particular niche, please understand that the related affiliate products are AWFUL. The Adsense revenue is great, a bit better than average I am told, but the affiliate products suck. This is because there are essentially no real physical products for my niche, there are only services. A good analogy would be to think about the anxiety/depression niche. Can you create a product for that? Sure you can, and many have, but it is usually a spammy eBook with a hyped up sales letter a mile long and it preys on the desperate buyer. That is not my exact niche but it’s in the same ballpark.
To give you an even better idea, all of the clickbank products in my niche have a gravity rating that averages LESS than 1. If you know what that means then you understand that this is pathetic. The number has to do with volume of sales and how many have been made recently. There is just not much volume there. Affiliate products have to be a dead end in this niche.
In fact, all of the existing affiliate products are so bad, that I can’t really see putting them on my site. It is just that bad.
Option number 2 is to create my own product. I think I could go this route and create something of real value (with a tremendous effort), but I don’t think it would sell itself and I think I would end up having to resort to long sales letter stuff and desperate buyer tactics and so on. Essentially you are trying to turn free information into a product and that is always a hard sell. Information wants to be free so if your product is digital that is a big strike against you in my opinion.
That leaves the third option of direct ad sales. I hesitate on this for two reasons:
1) I feel like my site might not be big enough yet or have the volume sufficeint to negotiate direct ad sales.
2) I have no experience doing so, and would be unsure of how to proceed.
Thoughts? Opinions? Anyone else in a similar situation?
Once you had a proven money maker, how did you raise your ecpm?