Remember that little hobby site of mine that I was going to fool around with in May?

Monetizing A Hobby Site – Without Adsense

Update On The Hobby Site

Well I accomplished a little bit of smoke, but no fire yet. Here are the stats for May:

Rules:

No Adsense
No Popups
No Flashing/Strobing Banners
*And of course no download spyware crap either

May Commissions:
$90.36

Traffic:

3134 Uniques
5089 Visits

Search Engines:

1402 Yahoo
244 MSN
234 Google (haha)
200 Various other engines

Bookmarked

549 (17.5% Bookmark Rate)

Bit of a jump from the $7 I earned in April huh! . But the site still has a far way to go before I can retire. Here is what I’m doing for June:

Moving one affiliate program from the sidebar into the text strip within the content. This little indie program is giving me close to a 30% conversion rate, so let’s see what happens if I put it better into the spotlight.

Trading spaces: One affiliate program has twice the commission as the other. But the 2nd program is converting *much* better, it was in the sidebar. For June I’m going to switch these two – put the higher commission (and lower conversion) into the sidebar and the lower commission (with the higher conversion) into the text strip within the content. Now did ya catch all that? lol. Let’s see what happens.

Currently two programs are giving me the most bang, one an indie program – the other a small network. They earned $75.80 out of the total. Obviously the other stuff I’m trying just isn’t doing that hot.

The subject or theme of the site is a tricky one in that it’s not a money theme. No shoppers coming, no one looking to spend, topic isn’t high $ for affiliate products, just everyday info seekers. The creatives I’m currently using bring about $1.00 – $2.50 per for commission.

The tricky part is finding a money interest for this reference type of website. I’ve checked out many of my competitors to see what they’re up to and nothing new that I can see. Many are just popping all over the place, adsense and the banners. I’ll have to really put my thinking cap on and see what I can come up with.

I’ve also worked out a bartering deal with an online pal, she’s going to do some promoting for me (small scale). May or may not bring much traffic, but it will help some with link building. Obviously the search engines aren’t pushing (well can’t complain about Yahoo really).

Nothing much in return yet, but I love the site and am proud of it. Not all sites can bring millionaire numbers . But maybe some good Tim Horton’s mad money. I could live with that.

Let’s see what June brings.