Need advice: 4 year old site getting 2,000+ unique visitors daily, but only making $1

[CrazyDev]

Hi there, I have a 4 year old site that is presently getting 2,000+ unique visitors daily on autopilot, but I am only making less than a dollar a day, and on some days $1-$2

Link is http://www.pimpmywalk.com

I also have a forum on the site with 32,000+ members, and ~100 active or more users online at any one time: http://www.pimpmywalk.com/forum

It teaches people how to cwalk, a popular "dance" worldwide, but mainly in the US. The number of daily unique visitors has been pretty steady these past few years without much work on my part.

I have currently monetized the site with Adsense, which brings in about just under a dollar a day, or $1-$2 on some days. I just want to be able to make enough to not have to worry about the VPS (Hosting) anymore, which costs about $76.50 per month. Adsense currently only brings in $50-$60, and even if I do manage to earn enough, adsense payment is pretty slow (NET-30) and the payment threshold is pretty high - $150 AUD for me. Not sure how much that is in USD.

Other things I've tried:

- Selling banner ads on the site/trying to find advertisers. No luck

- CPA. No luck. Got $1 leads here and there, but nothing compared to what I am earning with adsense now.

- Selling Clickbank products. No luck, only ever made a sale for a "hip hop instrumentals" product once in a 3 or 4 month period.

Things I do not want to try:

- Popups: I don't want to annoy my users with popups though, or restricting access to the content/tutorials using programs like CPA Lead.

- Selling the site: Some people have suggested selling the site, but I do not want to sell the site. This is the only site that has been with me this long, and it has sentimental value to me. I also personally cwalk myself and upload videos on YouTube from time to time to help promote the site, and I've also met some good friends from my site.

Any advice?

Does anyone have any advice for me?

What would you recommend for my situation? I also have another site that teaches a different dance, which gets about 400 unique visitors a day. Have monetized the site with adsense, but only earn about 10 cents every other day, lol.

[Bill Roy]

Hi CrazyDev,

What a nightmare, 2k visitors a day and no income, actually I doubt it is that unusual a situation.

I just had a quick look at the site.

My suggestions (for what they are worth - dancing of any kind is definately not my forte) are as follows:

1) Are there any 'Dance Games' out there?

The addition of a game or games to a site does seem to increase visitor participation and increase the number of return visitors. This will not of course directly impact income but could well make your site more 'cult' attractive.

2) Banner ad selling would seem the way to go, here you might want to concentrate on footware and music - remember when contacting prospective advertisers that to have your pitch aimed at them specifically (learn about your target advertiser and make the site relevent to them when pitching it).

3) Also just come to mind is do you know the market leaders in the music industry for cwalking? Contact them directly, they may well be able to incorporate your site into an advertising/marketing strategy, remember the music industry is definately a dog eat dog business and if you offer one dog an advantage in getting a bigger bone that dog may love you (but watch out for it turning around to bite as well).

4) You do not have a history section up on the site - where did cwalking start and from whence did it originate? Here a little bit of work could produce a huge impact on Adsense earnings by relevent ads being placed for older but linked music/dance forms. Here you might try incorporating Amazon as well.

I know the above is not much, and I hope if nothing else I have given you hope that there are still avenues to be tried to monetize the site.

Good luck.

[Credit]

Let me know if you're interested in selling the site.

[Acro]

Park it. As it is, there is nothing visually attractive to entice people to effectively browse. From my experience, sedo parked domains convert well with traffic of this volume but you need to experiment with the keywords. Music does not pay well.

[INFORG]

You could try:

Amazon
Apparel or music ads from CJ.com
Selling banner ads - takes some work to find the right advertisers
You should also be capitalizing on that 32K membership by sending weekly emails with site updates +ADS
Why not hit up your forum members for donations? Do a webathon a couple times per year.

[copper]

Do you utilize adsense channel?
I mean, do you know which ad units are getting most clicks?
Did you try ad just above and/or below videos?

[whitebark]

It needs a total overhaul. I know you don't want to sell but if you change your mind please contact me with a price. I will work with you to ensure you can still put your personal related stuff on the site..

[bdprem.com]

I think, you may add some high paying key word on your site. So that, income must be incise.

[beyond.domaining]

If you are more concerned with money than purity of experience you need to make the ads more prominent to improve CTR and you need to maximize your Google Ad units (3 total per page) AND Google Link units (3 total per page) for a total of 6 Google AdSense units per page. You could also consider adding some OpenX display ad network ad units to the page.

You could also make a push to collect email addresses and put a Co-reg / Survey lead gen in the registration path.

Or sell some (no-follow) link ads on the site.

Lots of things you could do here.

[Gerry]

It needs a total overhaul.

Couldn't agree more. Very unappealing site. Nothing to keep the visitor enticed to stay.

[CrazyDev]

Thanks to everyone who has posted in this thread except..

Couldn't agree more. Very unappealing site. Nothing to keep the visitor enticed to stay.

Nothing to keep the visitor enticed to stay? Have you not seen the tutorials on the site?

There are plenty of tutorials that they can watch to learn the dance.

And then there's the forum with 32,000 members, where they can share their videos and "battle" other members, and talk about related topics.

Well, thanks for your "constructive" criticism.

[Nathan King]

You have highly targeted traffic so you should display highly targeted ads; they pay the best and will get clicked on the most. IMO your best bet would be to work directly with advertisers instead of going through Google.

[Daniel Yankee]

Loose the banner. Put Large Rectangle (336 x 280) TEXT AD over the video

Select highly targeted keywords like Hip-Hop Dance Lessons. This will attract LOCAL (=highly paying) advertisers

Also, edit ad’s colors to complement your design. I agree with some previous comments – some design changes might be in order. We give you our honest opinions here, no need to get defensive..

Good luck,
Dan

[18493]

CrazyDev - it's tough to take criticism since it does have sentimental value to you. I would think 2 or 3 times about what Acro is saying. He knows what he is talking about.

I visited the site for the first time today. It was not a very appealing site. The upper half of the homepage is wasted and could be maximized for ads; content info; an e-book on cwalking. Due to the colors I had trouble finding the Google ads when that was what I was looking for. You need some ads on the site that standout.

[tetrapak]

I couldn't disagree more with Acro. That's just a sad domainer mentality. If we were all to follow the typical domainer thinking, then the Internet would be full off "overmonetized" useless no-value minisites and parked pages. If you park your website then:

- you lose your sites age (hence making it harder to start a new project on the domain)
- you lose traffic
- you lose PR
- you lose rankings
- you lose valuable members
- we lose free content

What do you gain from parking? Higher income in the first months, until the traffic completely dies out.

About your site:

You should really consider re-designing it for better ad placement, the banner takes up too much space, also not sure if it is a good idea to have a video take up so much space on the landing page.

[eTalkMoney]

I would suggest to create a product or a memership section in your site, including some parts of your forums. I don´t know about your topic and don´t have any idea about those kind of visitors. But creating a product can be an e-book about the topic, or a monthly membership can be very profitable. Anyways, I would recommend to read one of my partner site: http://www.makemoneyonline.us.com is kind new and really full of good information.

[myst woman]

I don't normally click on these but whitebark's note above made me take a look.
holy gawd how many website crimes have you committed? black space, banner absorbs almost 50% of the screen and after reading most of the text i don't know what a c walk is. And the sound from the onload media startled everyone within a 5 table radius of me.

Not something someone would pay for. can you do an ebook? i advise a reworking.

---------- Post added at 10:52 AM ---------- Previous post was at 10:48 AM ----------

black space absorbs half my screen, i read everyhing and still don't know what c walk is, and your user base is notorious for not paying for anything.
Congratulations, you've made a popular free site.

But if the goal is to make money, monetize the site with sophisticated design and advertise mountain dew and GTA red dead.

---------- Post added at 10:53 AM ---------- Previous post was at 10:52 AM ----------

black space absorbs half my screen, i read everything and still don't know what c walk is, and your user base is notorious for not paying for anything.
Congratulations, you've made a popular free site.

But if the goal is to make money, monetize the site with sophisticated design and advertise mountain dew and GTA red dead.

[iestates]

What I would do is this:

1. Create some premium content or pull out some of your current content and move it to the premium area
2. Send an email blast out to everyone once per month asking them to upgrade for a measly $29/yr to get access to the premium content and help cover costs of the site
3. Continue adding premium content and let everyone know on a regular basis

If your Hosting costs are $70/mo, that's $840/yr, which means you'd have to have about 30 people (one tenth of one percent) sign up to cover your costs.

Another idea is to regularly promote the fact that your members can buy ads for as little as $xxx on your site through adbrite. I'm guessing most of them have no idea.

Beyond that, I also agree with most of the suggestions on here. The design could definitely use some work including lots of video, but it's not as bad as I was expecting after reading this thread.

Good luck!

[DexSmart]

So, obvious u dont have tagetet traffic, that's why your revenue is so low. You might try some off page maintenaces or some SMO advertise. Because its pretty bad , for such a website , with a good feedback , to have a low income.! good luck!

[PokerPie]

I'm guessing most of the traffic is on the forum, so you can work with placing the adsense better, such as between posts etc.