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I have a website over 10 years old with over 300 pp of good organic content (all written by me), and have never advertised before. It's been up as an educational site, but I would now like to monetize it.

It gets 200,000 PV, 150,000 visitors, and 130,00 UVs a year. Traffic has doubled in the past year, and I'm in the process of editing/adding articles, and anticipate more growth over the next year. My problem is this: After waiting for months to get in, AdPlanner finally added my site to their network. I had eagerly anticipated this, and expected to get some offers immediately. I started out asking $4.00, then $3.00, and dropped down to $1.00 today to see what happens.

So far, nothing. Zip. Not even from sleazy spammy sites.

Then I decided to try affiliate marketing. I tried about 6 advertisers and made $58.00 total in a month.

What the heck is going on? Why am I not getting offers from advertisers? What can I do to attract merchants with quality products? I'm a health care professional, and want to maintain the integrity of my site as much as possible. I don't want to advertise products that I don't believe in, but there are tons of merchants who sell quality baby or parenting products. I just don't know how to find them.

BTW, I should mention that I know next to nothing about computers. I know 5 year olds that know more than I do. The only reason I've been able to get this far is that I have a friend who's an internet marketing developer/programmer who's been helping me out (that's why the traffic has doubled over the past year), but he doesn't know anything about the advertising side. He also works FT, and did this as a favor to me, but doesn't have time to devote to generating advertising revenue.

So...I have a well established and respected site, good traffic, good rankings, good content - and no money coming in. I don't have money to buy expensive software or pay someone for a package deal - design a site, find content, increase rankings, etc.

I just need someone to help me monetize this site somehow. My situation is unique, as far as I can tell. I haven't seen any other sites that have been up this long, and have this kind of content and this amount of traffic, and have never advertised beore.

Can anyone advise? I'm pretty desperate at this point.

www.breastfeedingbasics.com

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I hate to be discouraging but "high volume"? If you intend to make money from a model where your only source of income is ad revenue, you need that kind of traffic per month or week, not per year. – Kenneth Vogt Mar 14 '11 at 16:33

5 Answers

up vote 2 down vote

Your best bet is just to call vendors who would view your visitors as potential customers. Ask for their marketing department. Then be honest with them and tell them about your site and that you are wondering if they'd be willing to sponsor you. You can just throw out the number you hope they are willing to pay per month (or year) OR after telling them your situation tell them you don't know much about the advertising business and ask if they'd be willing to make an offer.

We get calls like this, and we appreciate the opportunity to work directly with the site owner and cut out the advertising middleman.

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I have heard that some big blogs sell directly to advertisers. Pick up the phone and do some calls. You can even offer an ad free to an advertiser for one month, in exchange for a recommendation to future advertisers. – Joseph Turian Mar 16 '11 at 1:49
up vote 1 down vote

In your background on "breastfeedingbasics.com" you state....

"As the mother of six wonderful breastfed children, and an IBCLC (International Board Certified Lactation Consultant) with over twenty years experience in lactation counseling, I can offer not only the ** very best breastfeeding products on the market **, but professional advice and information as well."

To Dave's point above, approach each one of those companies with the " very best breasfeeding products" and see whether they will want to do a special advertising deal with you.

Good Luck and nice site. You clearly are passionate about the issue.

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up vote 1 down vote

Similar to those above but I would put together a few "packages" with something like

  1. Banner Adverting - Main page - $X per click or per impression
  2. 3 boxes down the side on main page - Limit these to create a scarcity
  3. Banner/boxes on low value content pages
  4. Banner/boxes on high value content pages (landing pages)
  5. Maybe have a "contributing articles" section which you put a disclaimer saying it is coming from them but they can put their articles on a topic ... make sure to count the click through for them on this one. - This would be a premium payment for top sponsors

Basically make a nice 3-4 page PDF and then as everyone else suggests go door knocking to see if people will sponsor either for 3 months or for 1000 click through.

Your key advantage over other mediums is that while you have a small (as others point out) base, the benefit is that they are highly qualified and thus a single click through is worth more than google/FB or where ever.

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up vote 0 down vote

I don't understand your numbers - 200,000 page views by 150,000 unique visitors looks like only 1.3 pages per visitor. Some people are looking at two or more pages, a lot are just looking at one page. Does your web traffic report generator eliminate search engines and the hundreds of probes per day by nasty people looking for security holes? Your numbers will be skewed otherwise

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up vote -1 down vote

You can try Google's AdSense but your traffic is small, so don't expect much.

Ad rates are finicky but one realistic number I have is that 200k PV can make you $666 on AdSense, which is $55/month in your case. This is in line with what you're already making from affiliate sales.

I don't think you can realistically expect more especially given you're not an expert on monetization of traffic (as you yourself admit) and today content monetization is a highly competitive area.

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