I'm getting the traffic...but damn is it hard getting conversions

[Dominick DeCocco]

New to this, so I'm not sure if this is considered good or not -but I started a blog where I write articles and then market them through social media postings.

I've been at it for 4-5 days so far (depending on how you look at it) and I've managed to get close to 5K visitors and 100 fb likes for my blog's page.

Everything is done organically without any SEO etc. I've still got a lot of ways to go and I'm essentially at the beginning of the learning process.

My only concern is that I've gained only $10 from these 5k visitors from my adsense. I know I know, people are gonna say it's too early to make any serious money. But I learned that a CTR rate of 2-10% is the standard conversion rate for ad clicks. And if you do the math, $10 isn't even .25% of 5k.

I noticed a bulk of my visitors are mobile users. I guess I'd have to optimize the layout of the website for mobile users.

Any advice? Sorry I'm all over the place.

 

[dandylion]

Sprinkle in a few advertorials and affiliate links

 

[Dominick DeCocco]

Sprinkle in a few advertorials and affiliate links

I should have specified that it's a news blog, so affiliate marketing is not in the crosshairs.

Also, the pull I'm having with the traffic is a direct result of a few anchor articles that I have. i.e. 3/20 articles I have so far written have been getting 80% of the views/visitors.

 

[Deleted member 813988]

AdSense is pretty bad these days - there's better ad networks.
Put more advertisers on the site, but since most of them require specific volume of traffic you should do something about it first.

 

[Dominick DeCocco]

AdSense is pretty bad these days - there's better ad networks.
Put more advertisers on the site, but since most of them require specific volume of traffic you should do something about it first.

I'm going to apply for taboola soon. But I heard you need to have at least 1 month history for them to look at to determine whether or not they'll accept your application.

 

[Deleted member 813988]

I'm going to apply for taboola soon. But I heard you need to have at least 1 month history for them to look at to determine whether or not they'll accept your application.

Most probably you'll need 500k visitors and yes, they'll need to verify that.

 

[bartosimpsonio]

Hey you're doing pretty well for 5 days effort. Try to keep focused and scale this up, within months you could be making a blast.

 

[Dominick DeCocco]

Hey you're doing pretty well for 5 days effort. Try to keep focused and scale this up, within months you could be making a blast.

Thank you!

Currently trying to figure out how I could possibly try and scale this up. It's hard to do when your funds are as low as your IM experience. But never say never!

 

[dwpg002]

Hi Decocco

How you maanage to get 5k traffic from 4-5 days. Is it daily traffic or monthly traffic

 

[Dominick DeCocco]

Hi Decocco

How you maanage to get 5k traffic from 4-5 days. Is it daily traffic or monthly traffic

I got lucky, the blogposts I was writing turned out to be intriguing

 

[XZixZi]

Try getting a Wordpress plugin to insert the Adsense code in between the content.

Ads placed in typical banner locations get ignored by people unconsciously. How many times have you seen a 4x4 ad in the top right corner, or one going down the side of the page? It's called advertisement fatigue, and the only way to defeat it is by placing ads in the one place the people have to look: the content!

Other points of consideration to your strategy are:

The interest and traffic for news content falls off fast, especially concerning content that's curated on social media. No one likes reading old news. You may get an influx of traffic from people checking what the story is about, but once the visitors have consumed your info they are going to bounce from your site very quickly. In other words, there is little incentive for people to click through to the other parts of your site, which affects conversion. There's a correlation between how many pages a visitor goes to and clicking on an advertisement.

So another project you could consider looking at is creating articles that are in an evergreen niche, as this type of content will generate a sustainable amount of traffic and income for you well after it has been posted.

The other thing is that advertisers will not value the traffic that's coming from your site very much at all. News-related sites appeal to an extremely broad range of visitors, which means that the traffic that would be clicking on your ads is untargeted to any specific niche or interest. In order for an advertiser to make a positive ROI, companies pay a very low amount per click to compensate for the quality of traffic.

If you ran a website for say, indemnity lawyers in Texas, you would be earning a much higher amount per click because of the type of ad that would be shown on your blog. A more targeted and profitable ad means the company is getting a lead to buy from their business, better leads means more money and a healthy ROI.

I'm not saying that your strategy can't work, but for it to be feasible I'd advise to investigate options to greatly increase the amount of traffic you are getting if you are doing it by volume, or perhaps diversify into other sites that will give you a more regular income.

xzi

 

[bartosimpsonio]

Thank you!

Currently trying to figure out how I could possibly try and scale this up. It's hard to do when your funds are as low as your IM experience. But never say never!

Don't give up. Your initial experience has been excellent. A lot of IMers spend months trying to nail the first dollar.

 

[mangoman]

the traffic is the hard part. just keep scaling

 

[We Bring Rank]

My Suggestion is to build affiliates for your aadsense. Build the traffic for that site like your money site, From that also you can earn more money

 

[Dominick DeCocco]

Thanks for your advise / encouragement everyone.

I'll keep you posted on what sort of changes I'll be making.

More advise is appreciated

 

[judaculla]

Former news niche pursuer here: Change Niche

Adsense is horrible now, exept on really high-value niches like medical supplies, loans, insurance, lawyers, etc...

The best I ever did with adsense/news was $200/mo. First mo I switched to niche-based Amazon sites I made $500+ and put in way less work.

Some potential ideas:

Amazon ads—work just like adsense except they're product based and you need an amazon affiliate account.
Content Locking—Hustle for page likes, to which you can then promote affiliate offers
Email Gathering—Probably won't be great for general traffic, but you should be trying anyway.

I had an original article make it onto the front page of reddit/r/news, got 25K+ hits in one day, and made $22 from adsense. I left the news niche shortly thereafter w/o thinking twice. Now, that was just general news. You'd probably have better luck with a niche-news site like "latest forex news" or "latest east African news".

 

[Dominick DeCocco]

Former news niche pursuer here: Change Niche

Adsense is horrible now, exept on really high-value niches like medical supplies, loans, insurance, lawyers, etc...

The best I ever did with adsense/news was $200/mo. First mo I switched to niche-based Amazon sites I made $500+ and put in way less work.

Some potential ideas:

Amazon ads—work just like adsense except they're product based and you need an amazon affiliate account.
Content Locking—Hustle for page likes, to which you can then promote affiliate offers
Email Gathering—Probably won't be great for general traffic, but you should be trying anyway.

I had an original article make it onto the front page of reddit/r/news, got 25K+ hits in one day, and made $22 from adsense. I left the news niche shortly thereafter w/o thinking twice. Now, that was just general news. You'd probably have better luck with a niche-news site like "latest forex news" or "latest east African news".

Well I'll tell you what, I made it to 1st rank on 2 different sub reddits with about 600K subscribers between the two of them. And that's how I've been able so far I think to generate that much traffic, is because it created buzz on reddit and then people shared it themselves to others etc.

I'm sitting on 5k visitors today form this 1 article. And yeah, I'm not making diddily squat from it from adsense, but I suspect that's because of my sub-par website layout- especially with the mobile platform because I learned more than half my traffic comes from mobile users.

I gotta tweak a lot of things with the website theme and layout and ad-strategy etc. After I nail that, I hope to see some improvement with how many clicks i'm getting on adsense.

How long did you spend on the news blog? I'm asking because news/politics/writing is somewhat of a passion for me, so I don't see it as something I can faze out and move on from. I know there are better methods, but this niche is just something I live for.

 

[judaculla]

Well I'll tell you what, I made it to 1st rank on 2 different sub reddits with about 600K subscribers between the two of them. And that's how I've been able so far I think to generate that much traffic, is because it created buzz on reddit and then people shared it themselves to others etc.

I'm sitting on 5k visitors today form this 1 article. And yeah, I'm not making diddily squat from it from adsense, but I suspect that's because of my sub-par website layout- especially with the mobile platform because I learned more than half my traffic comes from mobile users.

I gotta tweak a lot of things with the website theme and layout and ad-strategy etc. After I nail that, I hope to see some improvement with how many clicks i'm getting on adsense.

How long did you spend on the news blog? I'm asking because news/politics/writing is somewhat of a passion for me, so I don't see it as something I can faze out and move on from. I know there are better methods, but this niche is just something I live for.

It was a passion of mine as well. Spend 2+ years, a lot of which was learning web-design & etc. I still believe it can be powerful done well, but I didn't have the time to keep pursuing it.

 

[Deutsch69]

Certainly traffic comes from 3th World

 

[poxaxo]

yep, mb traffic is not that good