

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 <i>want</i> to put lots of ads on it either, which is why I'm asking the questions..
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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://adsense.blogspot.com/2006/04/meet-ivan-optimiser-but-please-
no.html)

[http://www.smashingmagazine.com/2007/03/22/google-adsense-
fa...](http://www.smashingmagazine.com/2007/03/22/google-adsense-facts-faqs-
and-tools/)

[http://uphook.blogspot.com/2006/04/getting-most-out-of-
adsen...](http://uphook.blogspot.com/2006/04/getting-most-out-of-adsense-
top-10.html)

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!

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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.

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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.

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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.

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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...

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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.

~~~
petervandijck
Perhaps I'll just shut up and count my blessings then?

~~~
thorax
Maybe-- I have sites with the same pageviews and not too far from an order of
magnitude less in ad revenue. Keep up the good work!

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petervandijck
the site is at <http://poorbuthappy.com>

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

~~~
fallentimes
[http://poorbuthappy.com/colombia/post/uk-drug-users-
damaging...](http://poorbuthappy.com/colombia/post/uk-drug-users-damaging-
colombia/)

~~~
wesley
Play with the position and style of that ad (if you don't want to ad more..)

So put it in the middle of the article, under the article, etc.. Measure what
works best.

Even better would be to have it randomly change color (you can set this when
you create the adsense ad) though that could be annoying..

Or simply randomly change the format of the ad: small rectangle, big
rectangle, banner, etc.. you will need to code this yourself, but it should
help with banner blindness.

~~~
wehriam
I've had a lot of luck with Adsense in the left column, with similar font and
color to the primary content. Click-throughs were twice what they were with
the same ad in the right column.

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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...](http://www.stevepavlina.com/blog/2006/05/how-to-make-money-from-
your-blog/)

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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!

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

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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.

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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?

~~~
petervandijck
Yes, I already show ads only to users that are not logged-in. Don't know the
percentage of the top of my head...

~~~
wesley
Oops, excuse me for not reading the full description :)

Still, I think you should show minimal ads to logged in users too. Maybe the
adsense ad link format (plain links).

When something is free, users should expect to see some ads.

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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.

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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?

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

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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.

~~~
run4yourlives
His guide is free... I've read it.

He explores all sorts of different ways of making money, some good, some not
so good. He shares all this information on his blog.

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jakewolf
What about allowing advertorials for a fee?

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rockstar9
cool, the site seems pretty neat. btw, how long has it been around?

~~~
petervandijck
Has been around since 1998!

