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TV Blog For Sale (and how I made it work)
1stly, I’d like to apologize for not posting for a while. I haven’t forgotten about the blog, I’ve just been focusing more on some of my other projects, such as affiliate marketing.
Anyway, I’m currently selling the Sarah Connor Chronicles blog. This is a TV show blog built around the TV show, which airs on fox. The site brings in $250/month when the show airs and gets over 76,000 unique visitors. I’m unsure how much it will bring in over the summer when the show’s not airing, but I would guess around $50/month.
If you’re interested in buying the site, see the auction at sitepoint:
What can you learn from the success of this site?
This site has been a success in my eyes. If I had more actively advertised the site and sought out advertisers to buy ad space on the site, I have no doubt I could have doubled both my traffic and revenue. I simply didn’t have enough interest. But why did this site still turn out fairly successful? I believe there are a few reasons. Firstly, I started earlier. I began the site about 9 months before the show started. This gave me several advantages. Not only did it have the rest of the year to generate backlinks and begin ranking in the search engines, I had the advantage of virtually zero competition. I got the domain name, which was prime for SEO. The domain, combined with the time and lack of competition is what gave this site so much interest.
Another valuable thing I learned from the site is that I really need to diversify revenue. At one point the site was earning $20/day through Adsense alone; but Adsense lowered their rates and that dropped to nearly $5/day with the same amount of traffic. This can happen overnight. This led me to diversify the site’s income even more; today, the blog earns money from Kontera, Adsense, Commission Junction, Private Sales, and Amazon Affiliates/Unbox Downloads. This solidified the income enormously.
This post is just a brief update about what I’m up to. Hopefully through this site I’m selling you can take away something; plan ahead and diversify your revenue.
BANS - Affiliate Marketing with Ebay
BANS, Build a Niche Store, is the new ebay affiliate software that’s been all the talk lately. The software takes ebay RSS feed with your affiliate ID and publishes them as it’s own store/site. BANS allows users to select which categories to display, enter keywords and descriptions, and even add additional content pages. Overall, the BANS software is very customizable.
There are some big affiliate marketers out there, some bringing in thousands and tens of thousands a day in affiliate revenue. I realize most don’t make it as an ebay affiliate, but some do. This is my first real step of getting my piece of the pie.
Over the next few months I’ll be working with a few of my own BANS site. I see real potential to make money here, though, to be honest, I haven’t made a cent as an ebay affiliate to date. I plan to build up revenue through BAN sites through PPC, SEO, and social bookmarketing and see which works best. I’ll be trying various marketing techniques and will report their success (or failure) back here in a month or two. Regardless of my level of success, I will share what I did right or wrong.
Until then, I suggest you check out BANS and build a site of your own.
Note that the links above are affiliate links.
Goals for 2008
2008 is just around the corner, and with it brings new opportunities. Up until the past few weeks I’ve been very unmotivated in my web endeavors, but that will change in 2008. I’m going to college in next fall, hopefully to NYU or Northeastern. Both charge outrageously high tuition, so if that’s not a good motivator I don’t know what is. I intend to pay for the bulk of my college tuition through website revenue.
Some of my goals that aren’t related to specific websites:
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Spend an average of 5 hours a day working online.
Currently, I may or may not be doing this. I’m not sure. I hope to better keep track of my productive hours working online. This may be difficult between schoolwork and my job, but I think I can do it if I remain focused. While I’m easily spending this much time online and then some, I’m not sure all of the time is productive. I need to be more productive in what I do.
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Keep Records
One of my major flaws right now is I don’t keep track of what I do. Recently I’ve started a daily to do list, which has helped. Starting January 1st, I will keep track of 1) Revenues earned, both gross and net, 2) Hours worked, tasks completed, 3) tasks/jobs to complete, 4) short and longterm goals. I think keeping track of these things will help me stay focused. Moreover, I hope to occasionally post in this blog about the progress I’m making; hopefully some readers can keep me accountable.
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Establish a net income of $2000/month by December 2008
I don’t expect to be able to accomplish this right away, but it’s my goal to reach by the end of the year. On average, that’s a little less than $65/day. It’ll be hard, but it is doable. I’m not sure what I’m making currently because I haven’t kept track, but it’s around $6-$7/day. So, in one year, I need to multiply my earnings by 10. Ideally I’ll make between $200 - $400/month on 4-5 sites plus additional revenue through affiliate marketing and miscellaneous income sources.
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Save 100% of the revenue earned for college
As I mentioned above, I’m heading off to college next year. I haven’t been accepted to either of my first two choices yet, New York University and Northeastern University, but I really hope I do. Tuition is around 40K, plus about 10K room & board. That adds up to about $50,000/year. Not cheap for a Midwestern kid from a lower-middle class family with four children. Yikes. No more splurging on new laptop(s), new gadgets, or other unnecessary things. Any earnings I make online will either be reinvested in my sites through new designs, features, and advertising, or will be saved for college. This is something I’m going to be cracking down on this year. If I can manage to make $2000/month, my first goal, that should pay for about 1/2 of my college tuition for each year (if I can keep the earnings consistent).
A Look at the Future
- Real Mad Hatter
This site, my webmaster and personal blog, is still new. However, I think that within a year I could reasonably pull in $250 a month or more through private ad sales. In the next three months I hope to revamp this design and get a custom logo/character for the blog. My RSS subscriber goal for the end of 2008 is 500 readers. I also hope to consistently post 4-5 times a week with productive, intelligent posts.
- Writing Forums
Thus far, WritingForums.Org has been my greatest success. In the next few months I plan to upgrade it to vbulletin 3.7, install a custom review/critique modification, establish more writing contests, and much, much more. I have big plans for the site. It’s currently bringing in just over $100/month. My goal for 2008 is to increase this to $350/month. Currently stats: 6,833 threads; 118,942 posts; 2,665 members. By January 1st, 2009, I intend to have 300,000 posts and 5,000 members. Ideally I would like 500,000 posts and 10,000 members by the end of next year, but I think that may be setting myself up for failure. It’s good to be ambitious, but bad to be unrealistic.
- Admin Addict
This is my newest project. I have high hopes for it. Since I’m still developing it I can’t tell you much about it, but the general idea is that it’s a resource and forum site for forum administrators. Tyler, my partner in this endeavor, and I are currently developing this project. This forum is more for fun and to help other forum administrators, but I don’t think it’d be too hard to image us pulling in $400/month from the site within a year. I intend to have at least 2,500 members and 100,000 posts by the end of next year. For the blog on the main site I hope to have 500 subscribers, as well as many [currently secret] features.
- Daily Movie Reviews
This site is another new one from me. The goal is to provide one new review of a movie I’ve seen every day. This will mostly include newly released movies, but may include others as well. In addition to a movie review each day, I intend to post about additional movie and tv news, sneak peeks, and inside information. I still need to change some settings and create a custom header for the site, but this should be done soon. Most of the revenue here will be from affiliate sales, but also private advertisers and adsense. My goal for this site is $400/month and 250 subscribers.
I have many other goals as well. While I wouldn’t consider this a new year’s resolution, per se, I think it’s important to make goals to accomplish throughout the year. What are your goals for 2008?
Heroes Forum For Sale
I’ve decided to sell my Heroes Forum over at DP. The site made over $100 last month and receives more than 10,000 unique visitors/month. Current high bid is $250. The Buy It Now price is $1200. While I still love the show, I’ve lost interest in running the forum and don’t have the time to do so very well.
Ads Kill: Good and Bad Methods of Earning Forum Revenue
Ads kill… just like guns. Oh, wait. Guns don’t kill, people do. The same goes for advertisements; it’s not the advertisements themselves that can kill your website, but rather the placement or type of advertisement selected by the webmaster. Chances are that if you’ve created a forum - or a website of any kind, for that matter - you’ve probably intended to make money from it. Let’s face it - we all have monetary motives. Even if this is not the case for you, you probably wouldn’t mind a little pocket change or for the site to pay for it’s own hosting through advertisements.
When dealing with placing ads on your forum, you must be careful, especially since its common knowledge that forums are difficult to successfully monetize. You may feel compelled to place the ugliest ads that make the most money on your forum; oftentimes, these ads make you loose money in the long run by hampering your forum’s growth. I urge you to tread carefully in this area. while some of these methods will make you money, I’ve found that they’re like a poison to a forum - and it can be deadly. Further on in the post I will go into more detail.
When to Implement Ads
Regardless of what ads you choose to use, I strongly recommend they be implemented ASAP. If possible, start advertisements when your forum is small. While this goes against conventional wisdom, that doesn’t make it incorrect. If you have ad-free forum and suddenly get a boatload of banners on your page, it just might be possible some users might get a little angry or frustrated. On one of my forums I had limited advertisements, but because of a hosting upgrade was forced to ad an Adsense Banner below the first post and a small ad united at the bottom. While many users were very understanding about the situation, several also get angry about it - a few enough to leave. Many of the forum members voiced their annoyance. This is with Google banners. Image if I had added in-text advertising; that would have been a nightmare.
Top Worst Advertisement Methods
- In-Text Links
The #1 worst advertising method you can use for your forum is any form of in-text advertising. While I think this is a legitimate form of advertising, I simply don’t think it’s suitable for the forum. Forum users hate them. Though they do bring in a pretty penny (I’ve heard up to three times your current earnings), I think it’s safe to say that it will hurt your forum’s growth. I know that, as a forum member, if any forum I posted on implemented in-text advertising from a ad network such as Kontera, I would leave. The only time I can see using in-text links are if you use them from day 1 so the users are never surprised, or if you display them only to guests. Not only are in-text ads wretchedly ugly, most of the time they’re not useful to the users. They are very intrusive (in posts, forums, profiles, etc). Don’t use intrusive ads!
- Deceitfully Integrated Ads
The word “integrated” in this case is misleading. Integrated ads are good - ads meant to deceive your users are bad. If you make the users think the ads are threads or posts or a menu, you are deceiving your user. Most forum users aren’t stupid; they’ll know you tried to mislead them. In the end, it hurts your forum. Additional related “deceitful” ads are links mingled in with the users profiles/interests or huge Adsense squares in the users actual posts.
- Popups/Popunders
If you don’t know that popups and popunders should never be used on a forum, you shouldn’t be reading this blog.
Top Best Ad methods
- Subscriptions
The #1 best way to bring in money to support your forum is through paid subscriptions. Vbulletin offers a paid subscription system built into their software where you can set prices and payment gateways for users to pay through. Subscriptions are the best way of bringing in revenue because 1) it’s optional; the user doesn’t have to pay unless their willing. With almost all other forms of advertisement the user has no choice in the matter. 2) You can make the payments reoccurring. If you offer the users features they like - and you make supporting your site popular, there’s a very high chance your users will subscribe again. 3) It shows you that you’re doing something right if you can get people to pay money. Typically I give users features like a bigger PM box and a user badge if they become a subscriber. I like to add new features periodically. I’ll likely do a post in a few weeks about forum subscriptions.
- Text Links
Text links are the oldest way to bring money online, and they’re still good at it. Text links are a good method of revenue if they come from a third party that lets you approve the ads or if you sell the text links independently. Text links are a good second method of income for a forum because they’re not intrusive. They’re easy to see, but they don’t get in the users way; furthermore, they typically bring in a steady revenue stream each month.
- Independent, Well-Defined Banner Advertisements
Banner advertisements are impossible to avoid on today’s internet. They can also bring in a decent chuck of revenue. There are a few things I would like to stress about banner advertisements. Most importantly, make sure they’re not too flashy or intrusive. Secondly, keep the position of the banner in mind. Make sure the user knows it’s an advertisement. I like to have a banner either in the header, footer, or sidebar of a forum. This allows the banner to be displayed in a way that is show sitewide but is not deceptive. Keep in mind that banners on forums typically make more money on independent advertisers than through an ad network such as Adsense.
- Strategically placed PPC or Affiliate Banners/Links
I would like to recommend one strays away from Pay-Per-Click and affiliate banners and links in a forum. I’ve tried with them both and haven’t been very successful; with PPC I’ve brought in decent, consistent revenue, but it isn’t anything near what I can make from private advertisers. I’ve had the worst luck with affiliate links on forums also. This isn’t to say they can’t work; I’m sure they do. This is just to say you have to have the right niche; your forum post be about a specific area or field that has affiliate offers users will actually participate in. Affiliate marketing and PPC can be a fantastic forum revenue source if it works for your forum.
In conclusion, be careful what kind of advertisements you use on your forum. What works for some forums might not work for others; this could be because of the size of the forum, the forum’s niche, or even the attitude of the administrator. Moreover, be sure to diversify your earnings. Don’t put all your eggs in one basket.
Remember, ads can kill!