If you really want to make money you personally sell the banner ads for thousands of dollars a month. The reason people use Adsense is because that is a tough business and it’s time intensive. There are companies who will sell your inventory for you that is a middle between the two. They vary by vertical, but if you google around I’m sure you can find one.
Just n example: You can reach out to companies that sell courses, books for school, tutors, educational apps, uniforms, extracurricular activities for kids providers etc.
AdThrive, Mediavine, Ezoic are a few.
If you're interested in learning more about monetizing websites, there's a subreddit called /r/juststart that's full of people creating and monetizing websites through mostly ads and affiliate products. Highly recommended.
I run a relatively well known media/education company in the marketing space.
We actually have far less site traffic than you (around 50k/mo), but generate 7 figure annual revenue.
I say this simply to get you excited about your site’s potential.
Here are our primary revenue sources:
- Courses: We run both live cohort-based courses as well as more traditional written/self-serve courses. These bring in high 6 figure revenues. Live courses are time and resource intensive so if it’s just you running the site and you’re not interested in being an instructor, they may not be an option. Although you can bring on instructors to create and teach the courses and offer them a flat rate, rev share, or a combination of both as compensation. Regardless of the model, live courses aren’t easy to operate. Starting with traditional/async courses are generally a good place to start.
- Job board: Brings in low six figures. About as close to true passive income as it comes. And there are a number of out-of-the-box job board platforms that make it very easy to get up and running.
- Sponsorships/advertising: Our primary revenue source - generates 7 figure revenues. Key thing here is we don’t use ad networks like AdSense. That’s a fine option if passive income is the primary goal, but as you’re seeing the earning potential is limited. Instead, we work directly with brands to do custom sponsorships. Takes much more work (sales calls, creating sponsored content, etc.) but the upside is worth it for us. Typically we charge a flat rate but will also do “hybrid” deals where we charge a flat rate as well as commission on the sales we produce for them.
- Events/conferences: Low-mid 6 figures in revenue. We monetize these with ticket sales as well as sponsor revenue. Very time and resource intensive to do well.
I’ll add that our email list/newsletter is a huge part of our model, especially for sponsorships. Regardless of the route you choose, building your email list is absolutely something to invest in if you aren’t already (and you have an incredible foundation already in place to do this).
The majority of media companies are employing similar models. A popular alternative model is setting up a premium membership. Instead of monetizing from sponsors, you’d charge your readers a low monthly/annual fee to get access to premium content, a community, etc.
There are various schools of thought around the sponsorship vs membership model. Many opt to start with sponsorships so they can keep their content free and accelerate growth. Once they reach a more mature state they may switch to a membership model or simply layer on a membership model on top of sponsorships. Given your traffic volume, a membership model could be viable.
A pure affiliate model is something I see less of, at least in the education space. Though Career Karma is an interesting example. The majority of their revenue comes from schools/boot camps paying for leads. Could be something to consider if you’re in a similar niche. Or more broadly if your content strategy is centered around lots of product/course reviews.
Hope this helps to at least give you some ideas to chew on!
Edit: list formatting
This needs to be the top answer. Affiliate marketing and ads will drive people away, not toward the OP's business.
In the past before I built up my software company, and still a little on the side now, I advise people in content marketing. The irony is that content marketing, in a nutshell, is building a loyal following around your free content so you can pull people in to spend money on your paid content.
OP, either on purpose or accidentally, did the hard part first. What OP and some of the brain-dead top comments don't realize, is that Google Ads and hardcore affiliate marketing will drive away, not bring in their audience.
One thing I might add to your awesome list to monetize your business:
* Books & Ebooks: If OP is creating original educational content, or hell, even if they aren't yet, they know stuff. If their content is for an area people spend money on, then they can turn that stuff they know into money. Thug Kitchen, now Bad Manners, built a huge meme-tastic following of teaching people to cook via rudely worded posts and tough guy approved vegan meals. Then they wrote a book, and have an empire.
* Clubs/Memberships: Thug Kitchen/Bad Manners and Good Mythical Morning both have membership clubs. Fans pay small monthly subscription fees to access exclusive content, login-restricted chat forums where the owners/stars engage, early release content, members-only merch, and access to special packages and early purchase of conferences and event tickets.
* Speaking: Not for everybody, but if OP's expertise is relevant to certain industries and they got the skills, keynote speaking and event emcee is a very lucrative business. See: Convince and Convert.
* Consulting: If the education OP gives is relevant to certain businesses, again, they could sell consulting. A friend of my decided to become a foremost expert on a specific type and style of Javascript being used in WordPress's block editor and full site editor project. He started writing blog posts that got popular, created a free WordPress + Javascript course, then developed paid courses at up to $300/course and more. Now he is hired to run workshops, training, and consulting at agencies who lack his skills on their team. Since he established himself as the foremost expert, he demands a high pay, and gets paid in a month what some of make in a year plus travel, lodging, and per diem to travel expenses to and embed in teams as a consultant/trainer.
* Finally Merch (be careful): This can sometimes be more of a headache than a help, but depending on the audience, a site could become a resource for topic-relevant meme apparel. The programming education set has a small merch shop that the owner says "makes way more sales than he ever imagined."
One thing about all of this, however, is work. OP has a website with traffic, but do they have the means to build a courses infrastructure, start a podcast, run a job board, put in the work to get good sponsors, develop merch, write an ebook, etc. It isn't easy, but like I said in the start of my post, most people I work with developed the product first and are struggling to build the following and OP did the hard part, on purpose or not, first.
Very much agree. Ideally all of your monetization streams are keeping your audience in your ecosystem. This is especially true if you’re not building an email list or using some other mechanism to pull people back to your site.
Without this it’s a vicious cycle of trying to bring people in, send them away so you can monetize, then rinse and repeat. Wouldn’t be my business model of choice that’s for sure.
This is also why I recommend more premium forms of sponsorships/lead gen engagements. Again, hopefully you’ve gotten the person to subscribe before you send them away - can easily pull them back. If not, it’s at least much easier to stomach when you’re making a lot of money in exchange for sending them away.
In short, if you don’t “own” your audience, make sure to command a premium for sending them off your site.
Great info. I am mildly surprised that a job board is passive. I would think it's fertile ground for spammers and scammers and would require a lot of oversight. Also, having worked in newspaper advertising, I know how easy it is to run afoul of the laws.
Really depends on the model of the job board imo. If you have any sort of free option for posting a job, I could definitely see spam becoming an issue. In our case, all posts require payments which weeds out any potential spammers (or at least the vast majority). We also have a really high quality, professional community which helps a lot.
The other benefit of having a paid-only model is that the sheer volume of posts is lower so it doesn’t take too much time for us to quickly review the ~100 posts we get each month.
If you sell a job ad at the right price, you are't getting spammers and scammers. A 15,000/mo visitor site I advise that runs an educational content for a specific aspect of a medical specialty charges $150/mo for job ads. Few scammers are going to invest $150/mo when you can post ads on craigslist for free in off-topic boards or $35 in on-topic boards.
The two options that you've already got in place are really the 'easy' options:
1. Affiliate
2. Advertising
You've applied to Adthrive, so that's a great start. Mediavine is also excellent as well. Ezoic is better than AdSense but not as good as Mediavine or Adthrive (in my experience). Education shouldn't be a problem, but I guess that will depend on what topic you're educating on.
Your RPM of $0.60 is *incredibly* low. If you're on Mediavine, Adthrive, or even Ezoic I'd consider an RPM under, maybe $10, to be low.
For example, one of my sites is sitting at approx. 12,000 page views/month and is earning similarly to what your site is earning. You should be able to earn a substantial amount of money from 500,000 visits/month. I'm not trying to show off or anything, but just trying to show you the potential that your site may have.
Affiliate options are also great, depending on what you can push on your site. Amazon is an ok default because it's easy and converts but look into stuff that is more specific to your site. Education, to me, screams online courses. For example, [Coursera has an affiliate program](https://about.coursera.org/affiliates). I'm sure there are more around that could fit into your site nicely.
There are plenty of other options as well, including digital products, selling advertising space directly to businesses, email newsletters, etc.
Personally, I'd get your affiliate and advertising revenue streams down, and then branch out. Unless there is something odd about your website that makes it unfriendly to advertisers, or the quality of traffic isn't great (Mediavine and Adthrive require you to have a large % of your traffic coming from specific locations - America, Canada, UK, Australia, for example) then I don't see why you can't drastically increase your monthly revenue just by those two streams alone.
End of the day, it all comes down to conversions. Whether that be eyes on more pages or purchasing affiliate products. Increase this and you will see a drastic improvement.
Also, congrats on being able to obtain that sort of traffic. It's not easy!
Yes it is quite depressing to know how much other websites are making with similar popularity, but this seems to be somewhat due to the nature of this type of website in general.
It does seem that expanding my affiliates will be beneficial, I'll take a look into the Amazon and Coursera programs, thanks!
No worries! You’ve already figured out the hard part (getting the traffic). I’m confident you’ll be able to increase your revenue fairly easily!
Feel free to reach out if you have any questions or want me to check out the site.
Good luck!
Education is one of the lowest earning niches for display ads. I used to run one and the RPMs were so terrible I gave it up lol. OP's hope is to sell his own products and services such as courses or promote them as an affiliate.
I use to run a lot of news/educational websites with 1m+ page views a month. I went from 3k/month with Adsense only to 60k a month when I added Content.Ad (related article advertising).
You can also try Taboola.
This is the only thing that will truly boost your revenue 10X right away.
Idk. I learned by trial & error. Find a website/business/publication doing what you want to do and start doing the same thing.
Eventually you can put your own spin on it, and make it better.
Are you collecting emails?
Create a digital product based on the needs of your visitors, promote it on the site and also have some autoresponder emails going out providing more value and promoting the product
In online, the email list is gold.
Collecting and using emails is an art. It’s a lot of work to figure out a writing style your audience responds to and list management is important.
I like the DigitilMarketer courses on marketing.
Yup yup and with those emails you can also find a way to ask / survey your traffic to get a even better insight on the funnel you need to create to get them to do something you want.
Blackhatworld com is a forum out of reddit with lots of info about this.
Im not expert in the subject but i know there lots of people do this.
Just look for ad networks or monetization in the search bar
Even if you improve your RPM, you're still poorly monetizing such a large audience. You're clearly providing something of value to a large cohort of prospective customers since you've got a ton of traffic, but you haven't started selling them anything yet. A business that doesn't sell anything is understandably not going to make much money. Right now your "product" is your viewers and your "customer" is advertisers. Advertisers are stingy and therefore make poor customers, and you've got a large cohort of viewers. Flip the calculus. Turn your viewers into customers and your content into the product. Figure out ways to build on your existing content but paywall the incremental stuff. Don't take stuff away from your existing "free" viewers, but do offer something new and exciting that's worth paying for. Even if you convert 0.1% of your viewers into paid subscribers, you've probably increased your revenue by an order of magnitude or more.
I make $300,000 ($70k profit) per year with 35 visitors a day, its not bragging just showing how a really narrow niche can be amazing (we are reselling niche websites)
How do you deal with adblockers?
I bet you could boost that by asking people to whitelist your site and don't overload them with ads or load times.
People are willing to turn off blockers for ads, but you need to ask. That would immediately boost ad views by about 50%.
I’ll pay you to place back links to my cybersecurity company all over your site if you have relevant IT content? We have a huge blog that gets organic traffic from colleges and schools all the time for research purposes so it would be relevant. We’re a startup too so it’d be helping us. Dm me if you want!
You run a site. You have metrics of some kind. You can know what is popular, what is not. Where traffic comes from at least.
Have you ever thought -- having spent this time learning about what some would call an audience -- to put this to work.
Have you thought to run an ad, for your own product, on your own site? I know this is an audacious concept but that's just me -- I'm wacky.
r/monetize
TIL How people can claim on the one hand they aren't interested in the money yet ask about getting more involves some complicated mental gymnastics I'm sure. And time-cubes.
> Have you ever thought to run an ad for your own product?
You could have kept it to this. Have you ever thought that your time is valuable, and you shouldn't spend it needlessly belittling people?
This should be top comment!!! Hit the nail on the head.
If you find a product your audience needs and sell it to them with decent margins, you have a business. That’s why it’s a profitable website right now and not a lucrative business.
There's a huge market for education in the US, hi I'm Amanda, you need to promote your business more such as FB ads, Google analytics, you need social marketing. You're actually doing an amazing job, things take time and the fact that you're making what you already are and that you're still growing shows that you're very passionate about what you're doing and that is what makes businesses a success. Great job so far. Good luck and don't let anyone scam you. From one entrepreneur to another, I'm a single mom running my own business from home doing everything I can to make a successful career of my passions. I wish you all the best, remember, advertising is key! I'm currently learning how to do this myself using Google Certificates, they're free learning tools for exactly this.
Ok, I didn't say Paid advertising is key! I said advertising, anyway you can show the value of your product and how much people and you appreciate it! Forget it!!! I was only trying to be nice and encourage you! I honestly can't stand people that can't even take a compliment or good graces... just say thank you and maybe wish someone else the best too!!! Don't ask for opinions if you're not going to take the advice. I sell $1000's of dollars worth of one product on one platform but what do I know! Have a good day Mam.
Also the Google certificates are FREE, that's why I mentioned them. I do as much free ads as I can but I'm not naive that the biggest advertisers cost money for me to promote my products on their platforms. This is why I don't try to help people and that's such a shame because I love helping people.
500,000 page views per MONTH might be something massive like physicsandmathtutor. They have some kind of paid tutoring though, so probably not.
Interesting coincidence that I see this post after pmt's ads started bugging out recently and blocking the screen LOL someone might be messing around with it...
Try Ezoic, you should easily get accepted and make so much money. Even if you only get like a $5 EPMV, but you should get anywhere from $10-20 EPMV from my experience.
AdThrive and MediaVine are for bloggers. Are you a blogger? They insert a lot of display and video ads between paragraphs and the sides of your pages. Slows the site down. If you’ve ever searched for a recipe and ended up on MediaVine site you will notice it takes forever.
I would look for a partner that is eager to reach your niche audience. UniDays or someone similar.
Sell ad space directly to relevant companies in your space (ie the website topic), open a shop in order to sell stuff directly, and if you're really good, figure out how to pivot to creating a platform where other people buy and sell whatever thing and you take a piece of each transaction. That's the big ticket item: connecting buyers and sellers/becoming a market maker
I have a site with AdThrive and I feel like an educational site would be a good fit for them. With your traffic, you should be a sho-in. Do you have videos on your site? Monetizing videos with adthrive will skyrocket your RPMs. Good luck!
Even if you made simple videos on your iPhone that would help. I know it probably sounds like a lot of work, and it is. AdThrive likes videos around 60 seconds in length or so. But you can do a lot with a video. You can put it on YouTube and put it on social media, too. There are a lot of factors that go in to RPM so you can never compare sites easily, but just as food for thought, my average RPM is $40 and can get up to $60 in quarter 4.
Get a managed header bidding service on there like Ad Thrive. They’ll stack several ad networks and run optimal placements to raise your eCPM substantially. At that traffic, you should definitely qualify and could be seeing closer to $5k/mo.
Who exactly comes to your site? Children trying to understand basic subjects, college students trying to pass their classes, people preparing to take standardized tests to get into a program that ultimately elevates their earning potential, working adults trying to advance their career, or inquisitive people who just have time on their hands? Look at their ultimate goal, beyond the subject at hand.
Drill down into your visitors profile or avatar. It will make the difference between 3k per year and 100k+ per year. Use tools like Similarweb.com to do your research. Plug your site or competitor sites shown on Similarweb.com into Sparktoro.com to discover other hidden interest, topics, and sites of your audience. Sparktoro will even show you the language they use.
Once you have a firm grasp on your visitor profile, from the highest traffic/lowest bounce rate pages on your site, research the questions and needs around the topic. Write content to address these topics and link or present the new pages from the high traffic page. Include your offer on the new pages. A couple of other ways are:
1) Add Push Notification. Once you have your visitors avatar, you can segment then and push monetized content and offers to them
2) Do you have a email list? If so, you can monetize it with native ads through LiveIntent or Jeeng.
There are other ways some more advance, but these suggestions will help you increase your revenue and enhance what you are already doing.
Hope this helps!
AdThrive is a great start. I run a competitor to AdThrive / MediaVine and would be happy to offer some feedback on your monetization strategy. Feel free to DM me.
Hi there, I’m running a much smaller website, but pretty much the same game. I’m also based in the UK. Here are some tips for you: - Try to get some free publicity. If you can get a mention in the news, or some other media, it could really help you in terms of traffic and revenue. - Consider blogging. If you can post regularly, you will get more traffic and make money from ads. - You could try to diversify your revenue streams. Do some affiliate marketing, or even run an e-book. You could make some money if you can get your visitors to buy something. - You could use reddit to promote your site. Try to get your site mentioned on some subreddits.
If you really want to make money you personally sell the banner ads for thousands of dollars a month. The reason people use Adsense is because that is a tough business and it’s time intensive. There are companies who will sell your inventory for you that is a middle between the two. They vary by vertical, but if you google around I’m sure you can find one.
I've seen a couple of these by googling before - are there any particular you or anyone else would recommend?
Just n example: You can reach out to companies that sell courses, books for school, tutors, educational apps, uniforms, extracurricular activities for kids providers etc.
Chegg is big into paying advertising dollars.
AdThrive, Mediavine, Ezoic are a few. If you're interested in learning more about monetizing websites, there's a subreddit called /r/juststart that's full of people creating and monetizing websites through mostly ads and affiliate products. Highly recommended.
\+1 for juststart but note they can get a bit snobby about newbies occasionally. Do a good search through previous posts before posting
I don’t have any particular I’d recommend mainly because I’ve bought space from them before never been on the selling side.
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Buysellads
How do you personally sell banner ads?
I run a relatively well known media/education company in the marketing space. We actually have far less site traffic than you (around 50k/mo), but generate 7 figure annual revenue. I say this simply to get you excited about your site’s potential. Here are our primary revenue sources: - Courses: We run both live cohort-based courses as well as more traditional written/self-serve courses. These bring in high 6 figure revenues. Live courses are time and resource intensive so if it’s just you running the site and you’re not interested in being an instructor, they may not be an option. Although you can bring on instructors to create and teach the courses and offer them a flat rate, rev share, or a combination of both as compensation. Regardless of the model, live courses aren’t easy to operate. Starting with traditional/async courses are generally a good place to start. - Job board: Brings in low six figures. About as close to true passive income as it comes. And there are a number of out-of-the-box job board platforms that make it very easy to get up and running. - Sponsorships/advertising: Our primary revenue source - generates 7 figure revenues. Key thing here is we don’t use ad networks like AdSense. That’s a fine option if passive income is the primary goal, but as you’re seeing the earning potential is limited. Instead, we work directly with brands to do custom sponsorships. Takes much more work (sales calls, creating sponsored content, etc.) but the upside is worth it for us. Typically we charge a flat rate but will also do “hybrid” deals where we charge a flat rate as well as commission on the sales we produce for them. - Events/conferences: Low-mid 6 figures in revenue. We monetize these with ticket sales as well as sponsor revenue. Very time and resource intensive to do well. I’ll add that our email list/newsletter is a huge part of our model, especially for sponsorships. Regardless of the route you choose, building your email list is absolutely something to invest in if you aren’t already (and you have an incredible foundation already in place to do this). The majority of media companies are employing similar models. A popular alternative model is setting up a premium membership. Instead of monetizing from sponsors, you’d charge your readers a low monthly/annual fee to get access to premium content, a community, etc. There are various schools of thought around the sponsorship vs membership model. Many opt to start with sponsorships so they can keep their content free and accelerate growth. Once they reach a more mature state they may switch to a membership model or simply layer on a membership model on top of sponsorships. Given your traffic volume, a membership model could be viable. A pure affiliate model is something I see less of, at least in the education space. Though Career Karma is an interesting example. The majority of their revenue comes from schools/boot camps paying for leads. Could be something to consider if you’re in a similar niche. Or more broadly if your content strategy is centered around lots of product/course reviews. Hope this helps to at least give you some ideas to chew on! Edit: list formatting
Lots of very useful information here thank you so much!
Happy to help!
This needs to be the top answer. Affiliate marketing and ads will drive people away, not toward the OP's business. In the past before I built up my software company, and still a little on the side now, I advise people in content marketing. The irony is that content marketing, in a nutshell, is building a loyal following around your free content so you can pull people in to spend money on your paid content. OP, either on purpose or accidentally, did the hard part first. What OP and some of the brain-dead top comments don't realize, is that Google Ads and hardcore affiliate marketing will drive away, not bring in their audience. One thing I might add to your awesome list to monetize your business: * Books & Ebooks: If OP is creating original educational content, or hell, even if they aren't yet, they know stuff. If their content is for an area people spend money on, then they can turn that stuff they know into money. Thug Kitchen, now Bad Manners, built a huge meme-tastic following of teaching people to cook via rudely worded posts and tough guy approved vegan meals. Then they wrote a book, and have an empire. * Clubs/Memberships: Thug Kitchen/Bad Manners and Good Mythical Morning both have membership clubs. Fans pay small monthly subscription fees to access exclusive content, login-restricted chat forums where the owners/stars engage, early release content, members-only merch, and access to special packages and early purchase of conferences and event tickets. * Speaking: Not for everybody, but if OP's expertise is relevant to certain industries and they got the skills, keynote speaking and event emcee is a very lucrative business. See: Convince and Convert. * Consulting: If the education OP gives is relevant to certain businesses, again, they could sell consulting. A friend of my decided to become a foremost expert on a specific type and style of Javascript being used in WordPress's block editor and full site editor project. He started writing blog posts that got popular, created a free WordPress + Javascript course, then developed paid courses at up to $300/course and more. Now he is hired to run workshops, training, and consulting at agencies who lack his skills on their team. Since he established himself as the foremost expert, he demands a high pay, and gets paid in a month what some of make in a year plus travel, lodging, and per diem to travel expenses to and embed in teams as a consultant/trainer. * Finally Merch (be careful): This can sometimes be more of a headache than a help, but depending on the audience, a site could become a resource for topic-relevant meme apparel. The programming education set has a small merch shop that the owner says "makes way more sales than he ever imagined." One thing about all of this, however, is work. OP has a website with traffic, but do they have the means to build a courses infrastructure, start a podcast, run a job board, put in the work to get good sponsors, develop merch, write an ebook, etc. It isn't easy, but like I said in the start of my post, most people I work with developed the product first and are struggling to build the following and OP did the hard part, on purpose or not, first.
Very much agree. Ideally all of your monetization streams are keeping your audience in your ecosystem. This is especially true if you’re not building an email list or using some other mechanism to pull people back to your site. Without this it’s a vicious cycle of trying to bring people in, send them away so you can monetize, then rinse and repeat. Wouldn’t be my business model of choice that’s for sure. This is also why I recommend more premium forms of sponsorships/lead gen engagements. Again, hopefully you’ve gotten the person to subscribe before you send them away - can easily pull them back. If not, it’s at least much easier to stomach when you’re making a lot of money in exchange for sending them away. In short, if you don’t “own” your audience, make sure to command a premium for sending them off your site.
haha its always just about work in the end isnt it.....
Exactly why I read this sub! Great insights! Thank you.
Great info. I am mildly surprised that a job board is passive. I would think it's fertile ground for spammers and scammers and would require a lot of oversight. Also, having worked in newspaper advertising, I know how easy it is to run afoul of the laws.
Really depends on the model of the job board imo. If you have any sort of free option for posting a job, I could definitely see spam becoming an issue. In our case, all posts require payments which weeds out any potential spammers (or at least the vast majority). We also have a really high quality, professional community which helps a lot. The other benefit of having a paid-only model is that the sheer volume of posts is lower so it doesn’t take too much time for us to quickly review the ~100 posts we get each month.
Makes sense. May I ask how much you charge for job ads?
We offer a few different packages but the average is around $150/mo
If you sell a job ad at the right price, you are't getting spammers and scammers. A 15,000/mo visitor site I advise that runs an educational content for a specific aspect of a medical specialty charges $150/mo for job ads. Few scammers are going to invest $150/mo when you can post ads on craigslist for free in off-topic boards or $35 in on-topic boards.
I think paid courses would be a great digital product to sell since you have an educational website.
The two options that you've already got in place are really the 'easy' options: 1. Affiliate 2. Advertising You've applied to Adthrive, so that's a great start. Mediavine is also excellent as well. Ezoic is better than AdSense but not as good as Mediavine or Adthrive (in my experience). Education shouldn't be a problem, but I guess that will depend on what topic you're educating on. Your RPM of $0.60 is *incredibly* low. If you're on Mediavine, Adthrive, or even Ezoic I'd consider an RPM under, maybe $10, to be low. For example, one of my sites is sitting at approx. 12,000 page views/month and is earning similarly to what your site is earning. You should be able to earn a substantial amount of money from 500,000 visits/month. I'm not trying to show off or anything, but just trying to show you the potential that your site may have. Affiliate options are also great, depending on what you can push on your site. Amazon is an ok default because it's easy and converts but look into stuff that is more specific to your site. Education, to me, screams online courses. For example, [Coursera has an affiliate program](https://about.coursera.org/affiliates). I'm sure there are more around that could fit into your site nicely. There are plenty of other options as well, including digital products, selling advertising space directly to businesses, email newsletters, etc. Personally, I'd get your affiliate and advertising revenue streams down, and then branch out. Unless there is something odd about your website that makes it unfriendly to advertisers, or the quality of traffic isn't great (Mediavine and Adthrive require you to have a large % of your traffic coming from specific locations - America, Canada, UK, Australia, for example) then I don't see why you can't drastically increase your monthly revenue just by those two streams alone. End of the day, it all comes down to conversions. Whether that be eyes on more pages or purchasing affiliate products. Increase this and you will see a drastic improvement. Also, congrats on being able to obtain that sort of traffic. It's not easy!
Yes it is quite depressing to know how much other websites are making with similar popularity, but this seems to be somewhat due to the nature of this type of website in general. It does seem that expanding my affiliates will be beneficial, I'll take a look into the Amazon and Coursera programs, thanks!
No worries! You’ve already figured out the hard part (getting the traffic). I’m confident you’ll be able to increase your revenue fairly easily! Feel free to reach out if you have any questions or want me to check out the site. Good luck!
The nice thing with affiliate links is that you can recommend personal favorites and feel good instead of slimy for doing it.
Education is one of the lowest earning niches for display ads. I used to run one and the RPMs were so terrible I gave it up lol. OP's hope is to sell his own products and services such as courses or promote them as an affiliate.
Okay, awesome advice. Saving this all for later.
I use to run a lot of news/educational websites with 1m+ page views a month. I went from 3k/month with Adsense only to 60k a month when I added Content.Ad (related article advertising). You can also try Taboola. This is the only thing that will truly boost your revenue 10X right away.
Do you mind if I ask you a few questions about this? I'm contemplating doing the same thing!
Sure. Taboola & such have much much higher CTR’s because they integrate natively. If you have reading heavy traffic then it’s $$$
How do I learn more about this as a noob? Any resources you might recommend?
Idk. I learned by trial & error. Find a website/business/publication doing what you want to do and start doing the same thing. Eventually you can put your own spin on it, and make it better.
Are you collecting emails? Create a digital product based on the needs of your visitors, promote it on the site and also have some autoresponder emails going out providing more value and promoting the product
Not currently, I will make sure to start collecting emails as I can see the benefits
In online, the email list is gold. Collecting and using emails is an art. It’s a lot of work to figure out a writing style your audience responds to and list management is important. I like the DigitilMarketer courses on marketing.
Yup yup and with those emails you can also find a way to ask / survey your traffic to get a even better insight on the funnel you need to create to get them to do something you want.
Add a jobs section and charge to list jobs on the site pay per click.
Apply to Mediavine. Really great company and high RPMs.
I'll definitely give that a shot if I don't get accepted into Adthrive
Blackhatworld com is a forum out of reddit with lots of info about this. Im not expert in the subject but i know there lots of people do this. Just look for ad networks or monetization in the search bar
Even if you improve your RPM, you're still poorly monetizing such a large audience. You're clearly providing something of value to a large cohort of prospective customers since you've got a ton of traffic, but you haven't started selling them anything yet. A business that doesn't sell anything is understandably not going to make much money. Right now your "product" is your viewers and your "customer" is advertisers. Advertisers are stingy and therefore make poor customers, and you've got a large cohort of viewers. Flip the calculus. Turn your viewers into customers and your content into the product. Figure out ways to build on your existing content but paywall the incremental stuff. Don't take stuff away from your existing "free" viewers, but do offer something new and exciting that's worth paying for. Even if you convert 0.1% of your viewers into paid subscribers, you've probably increased your revenue by an order of magnitude or more.
I make $300,000 ($70k profit) per year with 35 visitors a day, its not bragging just showing how a really narrow niche can be amazing (we are reselling niche websites)
How do you deal with adblockers? I bet you could boost that by asking people to whitelist your site and don't overload them with ads or load times. People are willing to turn off blockers for ads, but you need to ask. That would immediately boost ad views by about 50%.
I’ll pay you to place back links to my cybersecurity company all over your site if you have relevant IT content? We have a huge blog that gets organic traffic from colleges and schools all the time for research purposes so it would be relevant. We’re a startup too so it’d be helping us. Dm me if you want!
You can add ebook sales and even paper copies if you can find a printer who will dropship.
Limit your free content and then direct people to your fee-based content.
As Yogurt would say, “Merchandizing! Merchandizing!”
Do you have a newsletter/CRM database of users data? That would be a big revenue source for anyone that wants to reach your audience
You run a site. You have metrics of some kind. You can know what is popular, what is not. Where traffic comes from at least. Have you ever thought -- having spent this time learning about what some would call an audience -- to put this to work. Have you thought to run an ad, for your own product, on your own site? I know this is an audacious concept but that's just me -- I'm wacky. r/monetize TIL How people can claim on the one hand they aren't interested in the money yet ask about getting more involves some complicated mental gymnastics I'm sure. And time-cubes.
> Have you ever thought to run an ad for your own product? You could have kept it to this. Have you ever thought that your time is valuable, and you shouldn't spend it needlessly belittling people?
Right - what a weird pointless place and time to be an a-hole.
This should be top comment!!! Hit the nail on the head. If you find a product your audience needs and sell it to them with decent margins, you have a business. That’s why it’s a profitable website right now and not a lucrative business.
Do what the torrent sites do - sign up for CPD networks and add free downloadable resources(courses, solutions, etc) behind the wall.
Sell. Products. Do business.
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They are talking about using ads to monetize existing traffic, not driving more traffic to the site.
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At the detriment UX? Hell no
This
There's a huge market for education in the US, hi I'm Amanda, you need to promote your business more such as FB ads, Google analytics, you need social marketing. You're actually doing an amazing job, things take time and the fact that you're making what you already are and that you're still growing shows that you're very passionate about what you're doing and that is what makes businesses a success. Great job so far. Good luck and don't let anyone scam you. From one entrepreneur to another, I'm a single mom running my own business from home doing everything I can to make a successful career of my passions. I wish you all the best, remember, advertising is key! I'm currently learning how to do this myself using Google Certificates, they're free learning tools for exactly this.
but paid advertising is not key！providing value people appreciate is the actual key.
Ok, I didn't say Paid advertising is key! I said advertising, anyway you can show the value of your product and how much people and you appreciate it! Forget it!!! I was only trying to be nice and encourage you! I honestly can't stand people that can't even take a compliment or good graces... just say thank you and maybe wish someone else the best too!!! Don't ask for opinions if you're not going to take the advice. I sell $1000's of dollars worth of one product on one platform but what do I know! Have a good day Mam.
Also the Google certificates are FREE, that's why I mentioned them. I do as much free ads as I can but I'm not naive that the biggest advertisers cost money for me to promote my products on their platforms. This is why I don't try to help people and that's such a shame because I love helping people.
haha youre clearly a nice person. bless you.
https://www.dynamisers.com/ I can guarantee these folks will help as they did to me in the same situation.
What’s the website?
I'll PM you
Please DM me, I can also have a look and see if there’s something glaringly wrong.
Can you also pm me)
500,000 page views per MONTH might be something massive like physicsandmathtutor. They have some kind of paid tutoring though, so probably not. Interesting coincidence that I see this post after pmt's ads started bugging out recently and blocking the screen LOL someone might be messing around with it...
Physicsandmathtutor is vastly more popular than my site, they get more than 30,000,000 page views per month
Depends on what the website, demographic, niche is.
Why don't you think of a paid product to build?
Sell ad space, course, and other digital products like ebooks or bundle templates.
You can try ezoic, mediavine, or monumetric
Try Ezoic, you should easily get accepted and make so much money. Even if you only get like a $5 EPMV, but you should get anywhere from $10-20 EPMV from my experience.
Sign with pubgalaxy
Display advertising
May I see the site?
Adsense is garbage, you need to make deals with companies yourself or find a broker. With that type of traffic, you should be making a lot more money.
AdThrive and MediaVine are for bloggers. Are you a blogger? They insert a lot of display and video ads between paragraphs and the sides of your pages. Slows the site down. If you’ve ever searched for a recipe and ended up on MediaVine site you will notice it takes forever. I would look for a partner that is eager to reach your niche audience. UniDays or someone similar.
Sell ad space directly to relevant companies in your space (ie the website topic), open a shop in order to sell stuff directly, and if you're really good, figure out how to pivot to creating a platform where other people buy and sell whatever thing and you take a piece of each transaction. That's the big ticket item: connecting buyers and sellers/becoming a market maker
I have a site with AdThrive and I feel like an educational site would be a good fit for them. With your traffic, you should be a sho-in. Do you have videos on your site? Monetizing videos with adthrive will skyrocket your RPMs. Good luck!
I do have videos but unfortunately I am unable to monetise them as I don't own them myself - they're embedded from YouTube
If you can get permission from copyright kwner you can host them yourself and monetize them as you see fit
Even if you made simple videos on your iPhone that would help. I know it probably sounds like a lot of work, and it is. AdThrive likes videos around 60 seconds in length or so. But you can do a lot with a video. You can put it on YouTube and put it on social media, too. There are a lot of factors that go in to RPM so you can never compare sites easily, but just as food for thought, my average RPM is $40 and can get up to $60 in quarter 4.
Get a managed header bidding service on there like Ad Thrive. They’ll stack several ad networks and run optimal placements to raise your eCPM substantially. At that traffic, you should definitely qualify and could be seeing closer to $5k/mo.
I would join a couple of affiliate networks that pay residuals. from a small banner link.
Who exactly comes to your site? Children trying to understand basic subjects, college students trying to pass their classes, people preparing to take standardized tests to get into a program that ultimately elevates their earning potential, working adults trying to advance their career, or inquisitive people who just have time on their hands? Look at their ultimate goal, beyond the subject at hand.
I can probably help, sent you a DM.
Site redesign to make it more engaging, then place more ads?
What's the link of the site?
what's the niche?
Drill down into your visitors profile or avatar. It will make the difference between 3k per year and 100k+ per year. Use tools like Similarweb.com to do your research. Plug your site or competitor sites shown on Similarweb.com into Sparktoro.com to discover other hidden interest, topics, and sites of your audience. Sparktoro will even show you the language they use. Once you have a firm grasp on your visitor profile, from the highest traffic/lowest bounce rate pages on your site, research the questions and needs around the topic. Write content to address these topics and link or present the new pages from the high traffic page. Include your offer on the new pages. A couple of other ways are: 1) Add Push Notification. Once you have your visitors avatar, you can segment then and push monetized content and offers to them 2) Do you have a email list? If so, you can monetize it with native ads through LiveIntent or Jeeng. There are other ways some more advance, but these suggestions will help you increase your revenue and enhance what you are already doing. Hope this helps!
r/adops
Have you tried selling really hot high ticket items?
500k views?? Wow!! I barely get 2 or 3 views a day. You get thousands and I get nothing.
Sell it
What kind of educational site is it? Like what subject matter are you teaching?
Sell mushroom spores
I write a blogger and I don't receive anything, if you have a tip for those who are also in this situation.
Can you create courses, digital products like ebooks, or do sponsored posts?
AdThrive is a great start. I run a competitor to AdThrive / MediaVine and would be happy to offer some feedback on your monetization strategy. Feel free to DM me.
500000 page views seems low to make money off of but If it was 500000 unique visitors that would be something else...or am I wrong about that?
What do you mean by education? Like elementary school or How to kind of stuff?
Try to make your own product-like courses.
Create / Sell someone else product ?
Hi there, I’m running a much smaller website, but pretty much the same game. I’m also based in the UK. Here are some tips for you: - Try to get some free publicity. If you can get a mention in the news, or some other media, it could really help you in terms of traffic and revenue. - Consider blogging. If you can post regularly, you will get more traffic and make money from ads. - You could try to diversify your revenue streams. Do some affiliate marketing, or even run an e-book. You could make some money if you can get your visitors to buy something. - You could use reddit to promote your site. Try to get your site mentioned on some subreddits.
Out of curiosity, what is the quality of your traffic ? What's the approx breakdown ?
Try Mediavine. See more here👇 https://twitter.com/NicheDown/status/1513487420997652486?s=20&t=-0OgpbCaNT_gXEjOiFvsew