Help! Need your opinions on monetizing a website!

Yes, I have lots of ideas for monetizing a site with that much content.

First, let me ask you . . . where did the content come from? Do you have permission to re-publish all those articles online?

If you want to monetize and get paid for your content you'd better make sure you own the copyright or have the express consent of the copyright owners. I simply ask because I didn't see attribution to anyone or any site on the posts I reviewed.

Steve

This may hurt a little but its the truth...

1. Move the Terms, Privacy and Disclaimer to the bottom. Above the fold space is your prime real estate and you are encouraging people to spend time on non money making pages. Instead, add a HOME button. If you click on any other page, its impossible to get back to the home page except for using the back button (not user friendly at all).

2. I am surprised you have 2500 subscribers, I couldn't find where to sign up to your email list. This should be much more prominent, who knows, you could have a 25,000 list if it was front and center this whole time.

3. Chinese visitors is an immediate red flag. China has an absolutely HUGE population, and they put out tons of internet content. Generally, they will not access a site like yours. I highly suspect you have some weird back links or are the target of some kind of bot/junk traffic. Just the fact that you need a VPS to carry the China traffic is bad news.

Just think about this, how are they finding your site? How much time do you spend on websites made by Chinese? Does this make sense for you to get this traffic?

Also, even if its real, monetizing Chinese traffic is very different from monetizing US traffic and since you are having difficulty enough monetizing I would focus on your US, Canada, UK etc users.

4. You shouldn't 'steal' content but if you are going to, at least put a link for DMCA on your site so that content owners can easily ask you to remove it. Also would be a good idea to give them credit for the articles by including a link back to their site.

5. Your header graphic isn't very nice to look at. I would change it.

6. You have no images at all in your content, looks super plain. Add some images or something to spice it up.

So that's a start! If you go and fix all these things, I would go back and try adsense again. As an advertiser, I would stay as far from your site as possible because super plain sites look like MFA sites/ its all about the ad. Also your Chinese traffic is super suspicious and I personally would never pay you on CPM or CPC, only CPA.

Best way to monetize that is offer your subs some exclusive deals that you negotiate with product owners.

I am doing that very productively!

If you need more help or simple advice..let me know!

Shouldn't be so hard in the IM niche right?

- Hostings
- SEO tools
- Coaching
- Service that you offer yourself and perhaps outsource to others.

Plenty of possibilities.

Personally I frown on traditional monitizing methods because for the most part, placing all those ads will only take people away from your site, and that's not what you want. You want people to stay on the site and get all the information that you 're willing to give.

Most sites have too many ads on them, and quite frankly, they're just too busy-looking with all those ads. Sure you want to make money from ads, and that is fine, but if the site is a niche site focusing on a particular topic, then I would just try your best to keep the traffic that you get instead of driving it away to the ads on the site. Too many entrepreneurs crowd their sites with ad after ad thinking that they're going to make boatloads of money, when in fact, they're loosing money because everybody is leaving the site for those ads and the stuff that other people are offering.

If you really want to monitize your site, then monitize it with stuff that you're selling so that you will keep 100% of the money instead of giving the money to somebody else. Does that make sense to you?

Ever thought about offering your services?

Maybe for small businesses who want to set up a blog as a promotional tool?

Apart from that you could sell Ad Space, Build an email list and do affiliate marketing, create your own info product on blog traffic or something,

Hope that helps :-)

Something is really weird with your stats, I checked through your site and the only way you'd be able to subscribe would be if you're logged in with wordpress or something.

anywyas, here's a link to some adsense alternatives
The Top 10 Alternatives to Google Adsense - best adsense alternatives

it should help you come up with some ideas.

Page views are not an important metric in this case, how many unique visitors are you getting?

A couple of basic things you could do, is add a popup, I know IMers hate popups, but Statistics
have shown to increase conversion rates. The next thing you could do, retargeting/remarketing and create OTO offer using a CB offer.

Doesnt need to be fancy, just effective.

If you are pretty sure that Google is not going to provide you adsense, you should go for BuySellAds.com or Chitika. They will be able to bring some extra income for your site.