$1k+ a month with a Celebrity Website

I normally find that the amount I post is inversely proportional to the amount of money I make therefore when I’m onto something good you might find things quiet around here. Either way, on with the show.

This post is in relation to a question I had a few weeks ago (feel free to ask questions here):

Stuart, I have a website that gets around 3,000 uniques per day (in the celebrity space) but I can’t seem to make more than $6 per day from Adsense. What advice can you give on increasing this?

So lets assume you already have a celebrity site getting a decent amount of traffic (anywhere from 1k+ visitors per day), if you don’t then check out some of my earlier posts on affiliate link building & the 2008 link building guide.

Celebrities can be a tough to crack, but you just have to persist:

• There’s plenty of niches to pick, I’m not going to go into details but there’s hundreds if not thousands
• Traffic is HUGE, millions of people unfortunately lead boring lives & need their celebrity fix. So you’ll be focusing purely on volume here then figuring out testing the best way to monetise it.
• These sites are usually littered with ads, so in other words, they also can’t make enough money from just adsense. We need to be smart about monetisation.

Bread & Butter Monetisation Networks

Celebrity Sites are notorious for offering up low CPC’s with Adsense, there’s a few quick methods to increase your income:

Adsense: I normally run with a 728×90 Adsense above the fold, this is tried & tested for me as being the optimum spot for clickthroughs. I’ve recently been playing with YieldBuild, which automatically tests & rotates combinations of ad sizes & colours then continually tries to optimise for the best eCPM. I’ve seen a 25%-30% increase in about 30 days.

You could also go through & filter out the MFA ads but I’ve not had much luck with that.

Value Click Media: I average about $110 on around 420k Pageviews for one site with Value Click CPM advertising. Not the best, but it’s an addition to Adsense.

Right Media: I also run Right Media & let advertisers fight for my ad space, this generates decent returns but since my overall income is split between 4-5 advertisers I end up getting 4-5 US Cheques (I’m in Australia) which cost me $10 each to cash. Bit of a pain but it’s another income stream.

Zango Cash: This isn’t something I’ve exclusively had time to trial but I’ve had reports from at least 4 or 5 contacts that are making some decent bank from the Javascript Overlay on Celebrity Sites. I wouldn’t plan on using this if you don’t want to annoy your visitors, if you don’t care then you’ll make some decent money here.

Ideal monthly income breakdown by Network:

1. Adsense: $300-$600+
2. Valueclick: $150+
3. Right Media: $200+
4. Zango: $300-2k+

Others to consider: Tribalfusion, Fastclick, Clicksor & Adbrite (Interstitials)

Use your Analytics to Profit / Understanding your Visitors

I can’t stress enough that making money with these types of sites isn’t about slapping up the banner advertising above & moving onto the next project. Always check your analytics on a daily/weekly basis.

An example of this may be:

You notice that a particular page dedicated to Megan Fox is getting a significant amount of traffic this week from a movie website all drooling over her pictures. Do you A, sit back & watch the Adsense dollars trickle in or B try to find an offer that appeals to fans of Megan Fox, it may be the transformers DVD or it might even be a Megan Fox Poster?

Either way you get the idea here, you can target individual pages with different offers depending on where you’re getting the traction. There’s no point setting up a niche offer on every page until you see the traffic come in.

User Interaction

Interaction is key to monetisation. Ask yourself this question:

Once a visitor leaves your site are they ever going to come back?

If the answer is no then we need to find a why to bring them back over & over again. This can be done in a number of ways:

• Email List: Creating an email list that mails people when you update the website. The hard part about this is getting people on the list in the first place, try offering an incentive like a competition or a free giveaway.
• Forum: Everyone loves a forum, this is by far & away the best way to keep people coming back again & again.
• Social Features: Allow interaction with content & users.

Expand your Network

Are you dominating this niche as much as you can? or are you simply moving onto the next one without first capitalising what you have? Remember, it’s easier to grow what you already have than it is to grow something from scratch.

Think carefully around potential partnerships with similar sites & also unique advertising deals that (if you’re the leader in the niche) no one else can provide.

Research!

How are the other Celebrity websites out there making bank? I normally like to check out the Sitepoint Marketplace to see actual revenue figures & where that revenue is coming from. I’ve seen some bloody ingenious revenue generating schemes/ideas on here so that’s my hot tip for the month.