

Ask HN: How to best monetize a website with 1M hits per year? - JfromSw

I'm in the process of buying an information site about parenting, which is one of the largest sites of its kind in Sweden.<p>Today the site makes about $30,000 in advertising per year from a third party, and that is also the asking price for the site.<p>I've seen all the numbers and it pans out nicely.<p>My question is, how do you best monetize a site with 1 million hits per year?<p>I understand that a lot depends on the market probably, but I'm new to online business and was wondering if there are some general guidelines or best practices.<p>Thanks!
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revorad
At $30 CPM, that sounds pretty amazing already. My guess is that you could
only make more by selling things directly on the site. Baby products are quite
a profitable niche, so you might be able to tie up as an affiliate with some
online stores. Check out this Mixergy interview of Trevor Ginn, who started
Hello Baby (<http://www.hellobabydirect.co.uk/>) and seems to be doing quite
well - <http://mixergy.com/trevor-ginn-interview>.

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JfromSw
The current owner mentioned something similar just that he did't have time to
build that part up. I'll definitely check it out, thanks!

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kellco
You've got some good advice already. After you do your due diligence and
varify all the stats and make sure they're accurate, there's different revenue
models you can add to your site.

You need to make sure the visitors stay around longer though, so more
interaction. Membership, newsletter, capture email, quizes and surveys, and
improve your content on the website. Without really seeing the website, the
advice here will be a bit general.

So if it were me, and since I don't think I know everything and I believe that
there are smarter people out there and experts, if I bought the site, I'd find
a really successful internet marketer and pay him a fee to review the website
and offer advice/consultation. That would pay for itself quickly once the
ideas and strategies are implemented. Or you can pay a percentage of the extra
profits generated from their advice and help that you wouldn't have gotten
otherwise.

Read up more on online marketing. Join a few online marketing forums. Split
tests and tweak things. Good luck.

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md1515
I have to agree with revorad - $30 CPM is quite good. I assume that comes from
the niche market plus the location - what percentage of hits are coming from
Sweden/Scandinavia?

I would suggest trying to make some affiliate partnerships with companies
selling baby products. Hopefully some of the moms visiting your site will buy
their goods after reading your content (which will net you a % of their
expenditures).

Best regards and if you need any help setting up affiliate partnerships, let
me know. I am working with some larger companies on that basis as well.

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JfromSw
Thanks for your reply! That is very true, the advertising is coming from a
third party that focuses on the niche market of pregnant women and new
parents. All of the hits are from Sweden since the site is in Swedish.

I'm very open to the idea of an affiliate partnership, but I must say that I'm
cautious since a many online stores advertise on the site (which generates
extra revenue separate from the third party)

I would very much like to look into it. Not sure if there's a DM feature on
HN, but if you know of companies that would be a good fit then I'd like to
explore the opportunity with you. Thanks!

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md1515
Yeah, well the other idea might be to just sit back and accept the $30K per
year. Within a year you will have a return on your investment so long as that
third party continues to advertise. Bulls make money, bears make money, but
pigs get slaughtered. Careful you do not overload your site trying to make
money!

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WillyF
Maybe you should also ask how you can grow traffic. If you're already seeing
$30 eCPM, then there's a good chance that revenue would grow in line with
traffic.

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JfromSw
Great point :) Revenue would increase with a higher number of visitors. Any
good tips on SEO or other strategies? Currently, 80% of the traffic is from
google. Thanks!

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ig1
What do you mean by "hits", it's not a well defined term. Are you talking
about page views, visits, visitors, unique visitors, etc ?

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JfromSw
Good point. The site has a little over 1M pageviews per year. Of those around
750K are unique visits. I don't know how many unique visitors it had, but I
can check.

What does this all mean in terms of generating revenue? Which ones are more
important to focus on than the other?

(again I'm pretty new at running an online business, thanks for all you input)

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ohashi
All I can say is WOW. 750,000 uniques in Sweden is MASSIVE. You've got ~8% of
the country going to your website if that's accurate.

Now the problem I see is you have 750k uniques and 1m pageviews. That means
1.3 pages per user. That would indicate your site has no stickiness, people
don't spend any time on there. How do you explain that?

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JfromSw
Exactly! Stickiness and the time spent on the site were problems that the
owner talked to me about.

The bounce rate is about 73% and the time spent on the site is a little over 1
minute. Is that good, bad?

The site is structured much like a web-portal was back in the days. There's a
TON of content on the front page which then leads further into the site.

The owner has been trying to keep visitors on the site by adding a forum,
competitions, slideshows etc. There's no blog but he does have quite a
following on the newsletter.

The ~750,000 unique visits (as it stated in Google Analytics), does that mean
unique visitors or unique visits as in say 1 person visiting 750,000 times?

I'm not completely sure as to what numbers advertisers care about?

Thanks again for your replies!

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ohashi
I don't think analytics is counting unique visitors. I _think_ it's unique
visitor within the past 24 hours. So it could be the same people visiting once
per day. But don't quote me on that. You should be able to see the returning
visitors stats, see how that adds up.

Time spent really depends on the type of site. 1 minute is not that sticky
though in my opinion if you're creating content and trying to get people to
stay on site.

Perhaps your best route would be to open a dialogue with the current users and
see what they do and don't like about the site. What they would like to see
more of rather than just blindly guessing and adding features.

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profitbaron
First of all as you are new to online business, I hope your numbers are more
than just looking at screenshots & videos. You should actually have your own
traffic statistics installed on the website to see if the stats add up as well
as, verify the third party ads (if its a network then join that network and
have the site let you run your ads on there for a while) although, this still
can be faked via buying traffic & getting them to click ads so thats just a
little warning/piece of advice for you.

With regards to monetizing the site, I would look at how the site is currently
monetized. Why? Well in my opnion ads are one of the best indicator of
monetization because, if they are converting well (for instance if the third
party is a CPC network) then you could find a similar company/the same one and
replace those adverts with CPA adverts - instead of getting paid per click you
would get paid per action (generally via a purchase - although this tends to
be much higher than CPC earnings - hence affiliates doing Adsense/Adwords
Arbitrage etc).

Secondly, you could easily roll out a membership area (if the site doesn't
have one) and offer paid memberships with certain upgrades. Theres loads of
stuff you can do with the membership area to monetize your users.

This leads onto point 3, which if the site isn't already you should send a
weekly/monthly newsletter to the members (if you implement a membership area)
or to people who are subscribed to the mailing list (you don't even need a
membership area to do this - just offer a newsletter on your site - which you
can sell advertising in, as well as offering products to them again using CPA
networks or your own suppliers).

Fourthly, you could roll out an iPhone/Android App (infact you could make a
few "parenting" apps) and have them either as paid apps or free apps (which
unless the apps provide real value added service, I would opt for the free app
option which can be monetized via ads within the app although this isn't your
only option).

Additionally, I saw that you said 80% of the traffic is from Google. This is a
double-edged sword - you're willing to lie and die by Google - If one day
Google decides to re-rank your site or changes its algorithms your site could
easily lose 80% of its traffic overnight. In order to combat this, you need to
diversify the traffic to the site as well as, at the same time you still need
to take advantage of the traffic Google commands which means, quite simply
adding more content, doing on-page seo and then focusing on off-page seo.
However, if you are focusing on diversifying your traffic streams via link
exchanges/content exchanges etc this will already be helping your off-page seo
strategy (to some extent) so you can rank for more long-tail keywords, as well
as increase the rankings of your current positions which means more traffic to
the site.

With all things considered, you have a lot of potential
advertising/monetization options and I haven't even touched most of the
options you could implement but you should focus on growing the revenue
streams as well as, diversifying your traffic stream so that your site will
continue to grow and provide a nice return from your investment.

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JfromSw
I've had a look at the Google Analytics profile together with the owner. The
site is not flawless and there's a lot of room for improvement, but it does
have significant traffic and I saw the statements from the third party showing
clicks and revenue every month since January 2009. This sealed the deal for
me.

The third party is a CPC network, I had no idea that CPA tends to generate
more revenue or how that even works. I'm not sure either what Adsense/Adwords
Arbitrage means but I would like to know more!

There is a membership area but no paid membership. Definitely something to
consider. The newsletter has about 5000 subscribers, also a source of revenue
there.

The iPhone/Android app was my first thought when looking at the site. I have
another company that makes apps and thought it would be a perfect fit.

Yes a huge chunk of the traffic comes from Google. Diversifying the source of
traffic is something I'd like to do but don't know exactly how. Which leads to
a question: Do you know of a good company I can turn to for these kinds of
services?

The other company I have is called weApps Sweden, please feel free to get in
touch with me at info@weapps.se

Thanks for you reply! This is incredibly helpful.

