Something Different: A Poetry Website

[larslonderre]

Hi everyone,

I'm new here, and I figured I would take you guys along for the ride as I build a (hopefully successful) poetry website.

This is mostly a fun project as I don't really need a ton of money, but obviously I would love to make the site profitable to whatever degree. Right now I pay exactly one dollar for the domain name, already made half of that back with ads, so I might even break even in my first month haha. But anyway.

I will write original poetry and maybe some short stories down the road, we'll see about the latter.
The nice thing about Poetry is that it can easily be broken down per verse, I have a python script that prints the quote on top of an image, together with my site url and a white border around it, looks pretty nice.

I have already automated sharing to twitter and Tumblr for every Instagram post that I make, then my script automatically uploads one image to Instagram whenever I run it. The only thing I haven't really figured out yet is how to get my quotes images on Pinterest, I don't really want the manual work of tailwind (even if it's not a lot of work to schedule a lot of posts) and Zapier that I use for Tumblr and twitter only posts to pinterest on the Premium plan for 19.99 per month, that's a lot of money just for one feature.

Can someone give me pointers for Pinterest? I never worked with it, what should I be doing on that front? And is there a service here somewhere that can get my pins on some group boards or whatever the current fashion is?

So as of right now I run a-ads while I wait for adsense to approve me, which may or may not happen, it's already over a week of waiting time.

It'll be interesting to see where this journey leads, I feel like I have a good foundation to make this work, plus a lot of fun with the actual work.

 

[Zera Api]

poetry website

You can also have spirituality section there

 

[larslonderre]

You can also have spirituality section there

I'm going more for sexy / erotica quotes and poems, I feel like that opens up more possibilities to promote.

 

[RookieButFine]

I'm going more for sexy / erotica quotes and poems, I feel like that opens up more possibilities to promote.

May attract more visitiors for sure but keep in mind your rate per visits will be much lower with adult content.

 

[larslonderre]

May attract more visitiors for sure but keep in mind your rate per visits will be much lower with adult content.

Yes I know, we'll see how that pans out. But this way at least the quotes are good and might attract some viewers. I'll report back as soon as I have stats worth talking about or next month, whatever happens first.

 

[larslonderre]

I am honestly not doing bad with this project, the above equates to about fifty dollars in my first month just from selling erotic stories, and there is a bit more from ad revenue and earnings on Medium / affiliate sales. Things are looking quite promising if I can keep this up and improve. Plus, I am having tons of fun with the whole project, it's more like a hobby than actual work.

 

[Starblazer]

View attachment 178651
I am honestly not doing bad with this project, the above equates to about fifty dollars in my first month just from selling erotic stories, and there is a bit more from ad revenue and earnings on Medium / affiliate sales. Things are looking quite promising if I can keep this up and improve. Plus, I am having tons of fun with the whole project, it's more like a hobby than actual work.

So you're posting ebooks on Kindle instead of website?

 

[larslonderre]

So you're posting ebooks on Kindle instead of website?

Right, since I can't get approved for adsense (naturally with erotic content) I have affiliate banners and ebooks as my main monetization, plus some bitcoin ad banners. The website itself is poetry and I have a complete pipeline set up that auto-shares everything to social media. This way I have shareable content public and the ebooks behind Amazon paywall, seems like a good concept.

 

[Starblazer]

Right, since I can't get approved for adsense (naturally with erotic content) I have affiliate banners and ebooks as my main monetization, plus some bitcoin ad banners. The website itself is poetry and I have a complete pipeline set up that auto-shares everything to social media. This way I have shareable content public and the ebooks behind Amazon paywall, seems like a good concept.

Adsense hates adult content so what you're currently doing is perfect monetization strategy. You should also consider building a mailing list. You can write some occasional exclusive content for them, promote new books and even adult affiliate offers.

 

[larslonderre]

Adsense hates adult content so what you're currently doing is perfect monetization strategy. You should also consider building a mailing list. You can write some occasional exclusive content for them, promote new books and even adult affiliate offers.

Thank you for the feedback, I have a mailing list in place but so far only one subscriber. I will work on that in the future, as well as writing more stories for Kindle Unlimited.

 

[blackbeans]

A poetry website may be successful if you build a solid author brand.

A lot of people are under the impression that certain whole categories of websites and content simply won't be successful. The reason for this is that they think in terms of categories.

And if that truly is the case, then only a relatively small percentage of all the topics out there would be worth pursuing.

But when you go to Google and you search for all sorts of topics, people publish across a wide range of themes, topics, and categories.

Surely, not all of these are money losers.

My point is this: If you go out of your way to build a brand and more importantly cultivate and nurture an organic community around your content, you'll do fine.

Because when you establish a poetry site, the main product is you, not your poetry. So you get people to basically follow you because of your creativity, and you become some sort of "creative celebrity."

And you can pull like-minded people from social media, forums, Wattpad, Quora, and others.

Think outside of categories if you are willing to put in the time to build a successful brand.

 

[PinnerMe]

Hi, I like writing poems too, I usually go for haiku and short poems maybe i could help you in writing one.

 

[Deleted member 141666]

A poetry website may be successful if you build a solid author brand.

A lot of people are under the impression that certain whole categories of websites and content simply won't be successful. The reason for this is that they think in terms of categories.

And if that truly is the case, then only a relatively small percentage of all the topics out there would be worth pursuing.

But when you go to Google and you search for all sorts of topics, people publish across a wide range of themes, topics, and categories.

Surely, not all of these are money losers.

My point is this: If you go out of your way to build a brand and more importantly cultivate and nurture an organic community around your content, you'll do fine.

Because when you establish a poetry site, the main product is you, not your poetry. So you get people to basically follow you because of your creativity, and you become some sort of "creative celebrity."

And you can pull like-minded people from social media, forums, Wattpad, Quora, and others.

Think outside of categories if you are willing to put in the time to build a successful brand.

+1 for tumblr

 

[larslonderre]

So a little update, it's been a while now. I have found some relative success and am now at 182€ for the past two months in Kindle income, in part driven by the website but also by getting serious about the whole e-book writing thing and settling on a niche.

I have started to write in one niche and focused on that, including spending time on keyword research and everything, setting up a cover template, and translating my books from English to my native German. For a hobby level project I find this success quite motivating.