Building Website Traffic...

[markp-r]

Well,

One thing I have learned over the last couple of days participating in this forum is that I need to generate substantially more page views for my websites.

I was looking into Kontera (http://kontera.com/publishers_qualify.asp) (Joel mentioned it in his Internet Money Tree e-book). In order to be able to participate, they look for sites with over 150,000 page impressions per month. Wow... that seems like a lot to me! Now I can see the potential of the ad revenue even clearer.

It makes me realize that I'm not only leaving money on the table... I Need a BIGGER Table!

So, how about some of the members sharing what has been working for them? How do you attract visitors?

I think we can all increase our earnings if we can increase the number of eyeballs that view our websites.

Thanks in advance...

[MickC]

This is what has me puzzled too.

I think our sites should do pretty well, but we also need more eyeballs.

We have one site (http://www.stitcherymall.com/) that averages around 250,000 page views per month. About half of the pages have AdSense on them (the other half are on the SSL server and AdSense doesn't work well with SSL pages). We're finally going to break $200 in AdSense on that site this month. But that's not too bad as we sell things on that site and the majority of our page views are actual customers who are looking to buy from us specifically. And our percentage of those sells is considerably higher than Google gives us.

What's hurting us on this site as far as everything goes it seems is SEO. The best we've done on Google is page 4 for our keywords (although we're in the top 10 at MSN). I think we'd increase the number of customers by getting better search engine rankings and we'd certainly increase our AdSense revenue.

Then, obviously, we have our new site. And it's been spidered by Google, but I don't know when, or if, we'll ever do well for our keywords there. The competition does look pretty weak, but I hate waiting. The answer there might be reciprocal links in hopes of getting better PR, but there's the obvious questions of who to link to and will they link back to us?

The only other thing I can think of would be to advertise. Like paying for AdWords. But it seems that if you do that, that you'll end up spending far more on AdWords than Google would pay you in AdSense.

[markp-r]

MickC,

I really like your Stitchery Mall website (http://www.stitcherymall.com/). My mom will just love your excellent selection!

I'm going to tell you MickC... 250,000 monthly page views sounds awesome to me. That's great to see.

I used to feel pretty good about my 25,000 - 30,000 monthly page views. Now, I strive for much higher!

Anyway, MickC, I do have a couple of suggestions for more AdSense integration for your site.

[INDENT]#1 - On your "Cool Stuff -> Newsletter" (http://www.stitcherymall.com/newsletter.cfm) page, perhaps you might try adding an AdSense 336x280 block centered directly above your paragraph that starts with "Ultimate Boxes and Cards". Perhaps have it borderless with colors matching your text and link colors you currently are using on that page - so it "blends in". This area would seem to be prime real estate for AdSense... especially if the ads blended well.

#2 - On your "Cool Stuff -> Projects" (http://projects.stitcherymall.com/) page, I see that you are using word press - (nice job). I believe there are several "mods" that will automatically insert an AdSense ad after the first "article" (nice to keep it toward the top).

I believe that testing these two spots might kick up your earnings a notch or two. Just my humble opinion...

[MickC]

Our goal for the Stitchery Mall site is to eventually provide us with $3,000 monthly in income. We keep a certain percentage of every sale, and end up after taxes and fees keeping about 10% of sales. We added the AdSense blocks because the business is still growing and we're along way from that money paying our bills. I mention that because it appears that we're going to need a lot more than 250,000 page views per month to reach that goal. At the current ratio, we're going to need pretty close to 5 times that amount. This is why this thread hold such potential importance to us. More eyeballs on the page will mean more sales and more AdSense click throughs.

I'm not sure about adding more units on the pages you mention. That's because those pages are sales pages. If we add them on the first page near the Ultimate Box stuff, the ads will pretty much only display our competition for the same products.

The point of the projects site is to give people inspiration ideas that will spur interest in the designs that we sell. Perhaps that isn't such a bad fit, as those ads are more likely to be for threads and supplies (which we're hoping to carry at some point in the future, but don't today).

Looking at your site, I like the layout (and love WordPress). But, I'm wondering if you might see some better results if you move your colors on the AdSense blocks' links to match the link colors of the rest of the site. Have you tried that already or just stuck with the current blue from the very beginning?

[RAD]

I've heard of buying expired domain names and sending that traffic to your site. If you can find the right niche. Has anyone tried that?

Increasing your reciprocal links should help too.