The operative word here is efficient. It’s not efficient to start a company like Yahoo or Amazon. That would take way too much time and energy! The sites you named primarily don’t even make their money from content. Amazon isn’t a content site; it’s an online store. Gambling sites aren’t content sites either; they are online bookies.
The money is not in content for small publishers. I have several quality content websites, but after hearing for a while how the successful publishers on here make much more money actually selling product, I’ve wised up to go down that route. Content sites are most efficiently used as a means to transmit PR to your stores, where you can really make money! I like my content sites and I’m not going to close them, but the most efficient way to make money is not by launching more time-consuming content sites.
Affiliate sites and E-commerce sites, IF you can get visitors to the site. Content sites are way easior to get visitors to, but per visitor, store/affiliate sites have the highes CPM.
Except for 2010, I’m surprised that pornography sites haven’t been mentioned. Porn sites really do rake in the money, but obviously are rather high-maintenence in terms of updates and content.
You are looking for a golden ticket here. What I suggest is to diversify your income and create all 3 different types of sites. The key is always visitors, what they do is not up too you.
Remember that the internet masses are fickle. Sometimes a site takes off, sometimes it doesn’t. Smart business moves, diversification, and perserverence are always what makes money.
i would say content sites that are the top site in their particular niche will do the best:
For example, I run a educational site for students taking US History. Some would say how can you make money off that? Well, the niche is amazing because my traffic will never stop coming/increasing as long as US History is still taught in schools. I have never seen a drop in traffic since the site opens because students tell other students, teachers find out the site and link to it on their web pages… word of mouth is key I’m also #1 for a lot of good key words so that helps too
I’m at the point where I’m getting 10000 uniques a day.
Theres one downside to this type of site that I’m at a bit loss of how to fix: summers and weekends (friday/saturday). How can I get students to come back to the site over the summer? I’m trying to build a community feel to the site so that students will come back even after they are done taking the class but thats still in progress
While I have not been at it very long, one thing that I’m still working on is a good concept for a network of content and ecommerce sites that are self run and updated using feeds of sorts. This way, you can run a site in a category that your not as interested in. Even if they bring in a small amount of profit, the low maintenance will allow you to build allot of sites. Then concentrate on the best converting ones, perfect it, raise profits and use it as a template to update the rest of your network. The network as a whole is more of an interest to me than any specific category. I take it as a game and try to raise the profits by $50 to $100 a month for the entire network by using different advertising techniques. This is what keeps me going and interested in the network as a whole without having to be interested in any specific category. But again, I’m still considered a noob in this industry, still trying to quit my day job. lol.
In short, Networks I think will bring in allot of money.
I’m of the fairly strong belief that the sites that make significant money on the web are among the ones that sell stuff (either tangliable or intangliable) to consumers, instead of advertising the products of others. The reasons I think this are:
You simply cannot make as much money advertising products as the person actually selling the product. Per definition, an advertiser is just paying you part of his profit. If you sell ads on your site, you are forwarding your visitors to a person who is smarter/more trained than you are in extracting money from your visitors. The reason you are selling your visitors at all is that you are bad at making money from them. If you were good at making money from them (like Sitepoint, for instance), you wouldn’t be selling them to others other than very expensively.
Of the larger sites online, pretty much all of them sell things to it’s visitors. For a majority of them, this is a larger revenue source than selling ads. Even MSN, which charges ENOURMOUS amounts of money for ads, and always has a filled inventory, operates at a loss, and has only just recently picked up, because of their paid services.
Selling your visitors is good when you start out, but when you get better and bigger, you should be considering extracting money from your visitor base yourself, instead of letting others do it.
My website - which I’m currently repairing and revising - was like that. Traffic was steady in the fall, doubling after the holidays, continiung to increase until it exploded in later April-early May, followed by the summer slump.
However, a more serious problem for me was the fact that so many students and teachers use the same computers. My advertising affiliate thought I was clicking on omy own ads and docked my revenue. How do you deal with that?
to be honest… I’ve never had to deal with that issue. I did warn google ahead of time that there might be multiple clicks coming from a .edu server because of this and ive never had a problem. However, I stopped using google in August so…
“Gambling sites aren’t content sites either; they are online bookies.”
Again, check out the Internet before making these blatantly false statements. The money is in destination sites, of which gambling sites are one of the best examples. You play poker, slots, blackjack, whatever. There is no where else to “go”. You are at the ultimate destination. Same with porn content sites. Same with pharm sites where you actually buy the limb enhancement pills.
The most efficient way to make money on the Internet is to be part of the income made by a destination site. The rest is just relative pennies, even if a person can live off it.
wondering what the take is for affiliate programs? are they worth implementing on the site or should they be considered as middle-path for the ultimate destination for visitors?
The further you are from the “first count” of the money, the worse it is.
You want to be the destination site
if you can be the destination, you want to do business with the destination directly
if you can’t do that, then the income dropoff is steep, but might still be worth it
Keep talking semantics all you want. My point is content sites where you rely on making money from advertising (CPM, CPC, CPA) is not one of the best ways to make money online.
My point is content sites where you rely on making money from advertising (CPM, CPC, CPA) is not one of the best ways to make money online.
I was just at an affiliate marketing event with some top Canadian affiliates that make LOTS of money doing exactly that. They build multiple content sites with affiliate links and many of them are making over 30K a month. It’s a matter of learning the secrets to success from the guru that teaches them all how to do it and then working hard at it.
He didn’t say that it was a bad way. It’s just not the best way. The affiliate marketers may make lots, but the people that sell the products the affiliates advertise simply makes more.
Not necessarily. What about operating costs, stock costs etc? By the time all these things are accounted for, there may not be all that much left. One thing content and affiliate sites have in their favour are their very low operating costs.
Excellent point. That is true. Affiliate/ad-network driven sites have very low operating costs, and that is simultaneously it’s greatest advantage and it’s greatest drawback.It is an advantage because you can enter the business very easily, with little investment in capital, both in the startup and growth phase.
Unfortunately, this also means that OTHERS can (and do) also get into the business just as easily, and it just becomes easier as months pass. Hosting costs go down, editors such as Contribute flourishes, etc. When you start an affiliate site, you are pretty much inevitably up against lots and lots of competition. This means that the only affiliate marketers that actually runs a proper business that grows (and therefore won’t die) are the ones that runs a lerger network of highly niched sites, because those niched segments are the only ones that are not saturated.
My eCommerce business sells a very special product in a very special manner, and was pretty much unique in Sweden when it launched. The entry level costs of my business are not that large (maybe $1500 tops), but in comparison to starting a content/affiliate marketing network, it’s huge. Even so, I have now, less than a year after my lauch, two competitors more or less cloning my service. More are sure to come. But in comparison to the horde of copycats that you are up against when you are doing affiliate sites, these conditions are pretty sweet.
I’m also 