Spent $4,000 - My website needs help.....

My Friend you should make money through affiliate just by inputting dating sites.

As you website is social networking site people will go through the banner and they will buy and it all depends on your traffic.

And rest I think it is fine...

Ok I'll take your post a face value. Your site has a lot of 'noise' (ie it's very busy). Your call to action isn't clear. What do you want people to do when they visit?
Promotion wise you need to get in front of college kids. I'd be speaking to colleges and seeing if you can advertise. Alternatively what about flyers to either hand out to college kids and/or place on their message board. What about running a competition for the whackiest spring break video (non adult) submitted?
Those are my thoughts. I'm sure others will add theirs.

Rich

I'd affiliate with some of the travel partners you have at the bottom of the page so you get a cut of their sales. Right now, you're promoting Spring Break trips without getting any financial benefits from your efforts.

hey buddy

you have a cool site there, but unless your traffic increases dramatically monetizing with adsense won't get you the income you need to cover the costs or recoup your investment into the site.

I'm going to echo what's been touched on already here - get on the affiliate marketing scene with this. You can approach travel companies organising spring break deals/flights/hotels etc and do JV's with them by driving traffic to their site from yours. It's a much better monetizing strategy than just adsense...

You can bill the affiliate companies as 'Spring Break preferred suppliers' or something..

$4,000 for coding someone that used a bunch of open source code ? You have many mistakes in your html and it is not very browser friendly as some images overlap text.

$4,000 and the website designer url is in your meta tags ? Oh no way, that would go for one thing.

Your charset is wrong it should be UTF-8

Your directories are not protected - Index of /images/home

Your site is way to cluttered, which ends up confusing many people

Your images are not seo'ed and apart from the meta tags neither is your site

That is just a few for starters...

Nice site and idea though ...

James

That is a really cool site, I wouldn't give up on it. You might also want to try and sell some banner space to a few relevant sites, this is the only thing I can really think of, everyone else has pretty hit it on the nose.

Speaking from personal experience, Ive built a number of sites like this before becoming involved in internet marketing. Infact I built five, each taking almost a year each to develop. Only one of those sites is still up today and actually makes me money. I could spend hours telling you various stories of heartache. Lost money, countless hours, and lots of stress.

From what I can tell, you're trying to do similiar here - as in a build a huge site attracting thousands of visitors daily.

The smartest thing I ever did was get out of this "build huge complicated websites" mentality.

Nowadays, I build 10 or 20 page flat html sites selling infoproducts that make me money almost instantly with next to nothing in terms of cost.

Youre overcomplicating the process - keep it simple.

You put WAY TOO MUCH THINGS in front of the first page.

I believe that this website has the potential but it's too cluttered.

I want you to look at this website:

Welcome to About.com

Yes, it's about.com. Is it cluttered? Is it well organized? Can I find what I want?

If you surf that entire site, you'll see a hierarchical navigation.

That should be the way your website should be.

Have a SINGLE, FOCUSED purpose in every part of your website, yet it allows people to visit other sections of your website.

In that way, you can target the right products, right affiliate products, right adsense, etc.

I suggest that you do a revamp of the structure.

I'm not rewriting that word 'honest' ... I mean 'honest' ... as in simple, pure, straightforward, real, humble, plain, ...

I've considered using Angela's links... so it's good linkbait, but it won't help as much with getting real traffic as genuine link building strategies via ezines, web 2.0, forum posting, etc. etc.... who cares about PR when you're thousands in the hole... you need real people! and PR really doesn't help that much ...

Kenneth

I think that the only reason is that you have a lot competition and there are huge social networking sites that get all the traffic and attraction.

You can still get traffic and signups but you have to find out a way to get your site in front of people. I would recommed you do article marketing and promote the website through the social networking sites.

Just try to make it to the front page of digg and other social bookmarking sites. Try using stumble upon and if you site gets couple of thumbups that domino effect can start and it can get you a lot of traffic.

Start a fan page of you social networking site on facebook and get some visitors to it. Also make sure that you do one thing, complete it, and then start doing something else because if you just touch article marketing and write some junk articles you won't get any traffic or any thing.

Also, if you need ideas for articles to write about then I would recommend writing a review about your site.

Edit: If forgot, write a press release and submit it to free press release sites and also if you can afford (it's not alot) pay PRweb.com to feature your press realease. Try asking all of your friends to sign up to your site and also don't forget promoting by twitter.

Just make sure that you do your best and finish what you start and you will be on your way to success in no time.

Pretty well whats been said. Page is WAY WAY too busy (but this may be what your market gravitates to). My eye IMMEDIATELY goes to the word 'member' and think you are trying to sell me a membership...no thanks, I can get this info free somewhere else. Click (just people's thinking).

Set up a more of a sales funnel. (google it)

I have dealt with the college market and it is EXTREMELY hard to make money from. Google college marketing and gain some basic marketing knowledge about that segment, then apply it a bit to your site.

And last, keep going at it!

BTW, why are you spending $4000! Learn some HTML and simplify the page and do it yourself. Get dreamweaver and only hire the parts that you absolutely have to.

wow...I'm on graphics overload. I agree with the others, there is just way too much going on. That scrolly picture thing in the middle made me ill looking at it. Most of what I have to give for visual feedback has been said so I'll focus on money.

Why not contact the bars that these kids go to for spring break and talk to them about a partnership. They either advertise for free on your site in exchange to promoting you to their lists or they pay for advertising space. One will get you visitors, one will get you money.

If you have schools in your area, find out where the kids hang and ask the bars if you can put up some fliers or maybe even sponsor a night to get the word out. You could see about getting some gifts to raffle away or get some cheap bracelets (those ones they use at concerts) to use for identification (so they'll remember what they were doing the next day ) for a discount or something. But you have to figure out a way to make it worthwhile to the bar.

Get creative, make sure everyone you've ever met knows about this and that they tell their kids and grand kids.

(BTW, just have to say this, definitely pare down your forum to just US, Mexico, Caribbean, Europe, Other. A single forum for each. Once you get more than a couple dozen posts on different topics you can split it into more sub-categories. You also want to monitor them because riht now the most recent posts are an ad for viagra and for a competing mexico spring break website. If you make it obvious that you're not monitoring the forum people won't want to participate because it'll just be all spam.)

Since you are presumably targeting college students who likely already belong to one or more social networks, have you considered making it easy for them to share what they post on your site with those other sites? For example, I've noticed more and more web sites with "Post this to your Facebook Wall" and "Tweet This" type buttons. Having someone with a lot of Facebook friends share a link to their "Spring Break Share" photo album or blog post would be free word-of-mouth advertising.

And just to expand on TheRichJerksNet suggestion that you hold a contest: why not hold a contest with a nice prize for the best video or photo or blog post, with the winner determined by the voting of other members - that way the people who enter are likely to encourage their friends to sign up too.

I'm sure with some brainstorming you could come up with lots of other ideas that would improve your word-of-mouth advertising.

I like it but your beach is 'too crowded'. Give it some breathing room so those girls smile better and that slide thing at the top has to go. Its distracting.

Too much use of keywords, 'Spring Break' and as for making money, use CPA networks. Add beauty ads, health ads, etc.

my 2 cents

Write some articles, also put up an opt in page FIRST. Give them a newsletter top ten spring break destinations. TIP SPRING BREAK IS NOT BIG IN EUROPE. We Go in the summer.

I looked at it. I'm not an IM expert. I'm probably closer to a 'customer' than some other posters.

Here are the things that struck me:

(1) It says "Comming soon" in several places. The correct spelling is "coming" not "comming". This just smacks of unprofessionalism. It would have made me immediately click away. This was the very first thing I noticed. Maybe I'm anal, but it annoyed me.

(2) It's way way too cluttered. I spent about a minute on your site and I don't know what it's for. Do you want to get people to go to the forums? Do you want people to read reviews of spring break destinations? Do you want people to read trip reports, and if so, won't this overlap a lot with the forum since it's a small site? Do you want people to look at pics of hot girls/guys wearing very little and having a good time?

(3) Your front page is LONG. If I have to scroll down more than an inch or two I'm not interested, simply because I don't know what the hell I'm there for. I think you need to simplify it and have links to reviews of good destinations, a (much smaller) forum, and perhaps a tiny preview of a photo gallery of hotties being drunk and stupid.

I like that idea.. Thanks

I don't think anyone touched on the aspect if this market is financially viable in this period of recession where world travel is down BIG time. That could be the number one reason why you are not getting revenue and lots of uniques on it.

Also, is the market hungry for going to a site like this, even in good financial times?

You may want to think about going back to basics and do niche market research on this topic. Is this spring break topic being searched hundreds of times a day? By looking at the meta tag words, I don't know if enough time was spent on your keyword and keyword phrase list.

Other than that, great idea. I would change it more towards a vacation themed site.

Good luck,

Bruce