So Where’s the Money?

You can check out the first part in this series of posts —I want to make $1 a Day from My Websites.

If you paid attention in my last post I’m sure you noticed that I made the statement that it was in 2005 that I realized that I could make a little income from the internet that didn’t directly involve designing. At the time that I’m writing this, the current date is 7 years later. What I hope to bring up in the next couple of posts is what I did during those 7 years. In short, a summary of my “lack-of” success and some thoughts on them.

I did manage a handful of Ticket Advertisers, but it was very apparent that I wasn’t going to get rich from that venue. I was going to have to try something else. It was about this time I learned about Google Adsense.

Google Adsense is a pretty straight-forward revenue generating system that I think is great for someone just beginning in the money-making game. It uses what’s know as the “Pay-Per-Click” model or PPC. The idea is simple. The whole process is pretty simple. Google displays ads on your site via a snippet of code that you embed in your web page’s code and if a visitor to your site clicks on that ad, you make some cash. The amount you make varies greatly. I’ve made as much as $5 for a single click to as low as 3 cents.
Google worked OK in my opinion. It was easy to set up and it produced results. But there was one thing that I began to realize as I began learning about monetizing my site.
Without website visitors my success was going to be very slim.
Now this statement is pretty elementary. Most people would respond with a “Duh!! You just realized that Sherlock!!??”
But while many people admit the above statement, it’s really easy to get caught up in the latest untold Google secret that’s going to get them $1000 a day or some new SEO method that will guarantee search engine success and lose site of the #1 drawing power of any website or blog. Content.

Another thing I tried was Affiliate Marketing. Bottom line: I place an ad for a product. Someone clicks on the respective ad and buys said product. I make a commission on the sale. Simple.
But again, it became apparent that without traffic, this wasn’t going to to be a great source of income for me either.

So, it just wasn’t happening. The flood of cash wasn’t coming in like I had dreamed it would. Why?
My Saints fan site had plenty of content – over 100 pages of “stuff”. I even ranked well for my keywords (#1 for “New Orleans Saints History”). What was the problem?
I started thinking that maybe it was my niche. “Niche” is just a fancy geek word for topic. Maybe the interest in the past accomplishments of the Saints were so interesting to some most people. I mean, before SuperBowl 44, success for the Saints was pretty scarce.

I started to think that maybe I was going to need another site to attract visitors. It was time to expand a little.

In my next post I’ll talk about my second site and my dive into CPM — Cost per Thousand Marketing.