New Site Purchase - Great Traffic - Looking to Optimize ROI

**Clinton** · March 18th, 2011, 9:48 AM

I hear what you're saying No Remorse, but given a choice of hiring someone with a "entry level" of monetising skills or developing those skills yourself through trial and error, the latter would seem the better long term option.

**christopheravell** · March 21st, 2011, 1:23 PM

Originally Posted by Clinton

I hear what you're saying No Remorse, but given a choice of hiring someone with a "entry level" of monetising skills or developing those skills yourself through trial and error, the latter would seem the better long term option.

I agree with Clinton. If you are going to hire someone, hire someone to educate you, not do the work for you.

I would also warn you that although moving to WP is a great idea, be careful. It can greatly affect your SE positioning. Make sure whomever you having doing it has plenty of experience in getting it all optimized and running effectively.

As far as monitization goes, it is hard to say what to suggest without seeing the actual site. If you want, PM me with the URL and I can give you some pointers. It is important to know the driving force behind the site to monitize it properly.

**Andy** · March 22nd, 2011, 2:56 PM

Hi NoRemorse,

Your demographics reminds me of Ashley Qualls - the girl who made a million on myspace before she turned 18. She did it by giving away free backgrounds to other myspace kids (girls and dog-ugly stuff too!) and selling - mostly advertising I believe - to monetize the traffic. You might want to consider modeling her monetization techniques. Whateverlife.com is her site. I'm not sure if this is the site she started out with but I'm guess she still depends on the same age groups.

Andy

**No Remorse** · March 23rd, 2011, 9:14 PM

Things keep getting better with the new site (sarcasm). I learned that the site's main driver of revenue, an MP3 music download site, has been discontinued. So here I am less than one month as the new owner and I find that the component that represented 60% of the revenue is now gone. These things happen and I'll figure something out.

I've been looking around for alternatives to Adsense. But I've found that the site doesn't have enough pageviews (About 120K per month) to join some of these banner advertising companies. I've experimented a little with the Adsense on some pages and only used one block, but the EPC hasn't changed (still less than 10 cents). There's not any money in music lyrics since this is all free so there's not much bidding competition.

I did look at Adsense targeting, but have not tried that yet.

I think my best option is to keep building content and links and increase the site's authority. Build a professional theme and eventually sell a few link ads.

Oh well, the site was advertised as making $1K per month with no work. Right now it's on track to do about half of that

**Clinton** · March 24th, 2011, 6:21 AM

What multiple of net profits did you originally pay, No Remorse? And, based on current level of profits, what multiple would that purchase price work out to?

The site is almost 7 years old and has roughly 12,000 back links.

You've got a good base there. Concentrate on the site's strengths and the opportunities for the future. What happened with your plan of taking someone on to assist with the monetising?

**grynge** · March 24th, 2011, 7:33 AM

Originally Posted by No Remorse

Things keep getting better with the new site (sarcasm). I learned that the site's main driver of revenue, an MP3 music download site, has been discontinued. So here I am less than one month as the new owner and I find that the component that represented 60% of the revenue is now gone. These things happen and I'll figure something out.

There are plenty of music affill programs just try another or do some split testing try several and work out which ones pay.

**No Remorse** · March 24th, 2011, 12:47 PM

Originally Posted by Clinton

What multiple of net profits did you originally pay, No Remorse? And, based on current level of profits, what multiple would that purchase price work out to?

You've got a good base there. Concentrate on the site's strengths and the opportunities for the future. What happened with your plan of taking someone on to assist with the monetising?

Actually the site is almost 8 years old - not sure what I was thinking there.
I originally paid 10 times monthly net revenue. I thought this was a bargain because the seller said he hadn't updated the site in a few years and it continues to churn out this consistent revenue (I'm a sucker for consistency).

I've only owned the site for less than one month, but using the current month's net revenue the multiple, based on the original purchase price, is 20 times

But I did 'negotiate' with the seller when I carefully outlined how he exaggerated the site's revenue by at least 33% - so he refunded 10% of the sale price (it's amazing how carefully worded phrases can spark a seller to rethink their position) - so in reality the site was earning $750 per month so the multiple was 12 times. So if I can find a replacement for 60% of this lost revenue (from the MP3 site) I am still happy with the deal. Based on what the site has made this month and what I paid for it, the multiple is 18. Not so great at the moment and my intention with this purchase was not to jump in headfirst and have to learn this 'passive' form of marketing overnight. But these things happen and at least it wasn't with a site price many times greater.

I've spent some time on the Warrior Forum looking at affiliate programs and CPA offers and basically trying to educate myself on the subject. I applied to a few networks and they all declined me. They never provide a reason why the application is declined. I suspect it's because the site was built on the decade old technology of SBI! and doesn't have today's look and feel. I even provided notes about my intentions throughout the application process, but that didn't seem to help. So I won't be applying to any new networks until the site's migration is complete and the new theme is in place. I have to keep reminding myself that I'm not dealing with compassionate, thinking people. This is a numbers game and if my site doesn't appeal to the person who's reviewing the application one click of the mouse and I'm sent the declined form.

It's discouraging because now I've disclosed all of my personal information to these companies and that's something I don't like to do unless I'm actually doing business with them.

One final note that may help illustrate how weird this industry is: The #1 revenue driver of the site was an MP3 affiliate program. This was in place for at least 22 months (that's the data I have) and it generated about $12,000 over that period. I applied for a network that pays $0.95 each time someone submits their email address and confirms it to join a free MP3 site. My site is about country music lyrics so the visitors are into this 'stuff'. And my application was denied

I have to laugh about it because I've seen so many weird things over the years and this response is expected I guess.

**Clinton** · March 24th, 2011, 1:57 PM

18 - 20x is still not too bad you know!

Eventually what matters is whether it makes you a profit and if you can ramp up the earnings then it's your hands to shrink that multiple.

Yes, the closer you are to the low click value end of the market the more likely you are to hit automated appraisals of your application. However, all is not lost. You could always reapply to those networks. It may be worth first identifying the reason they didn't approve you. I wouldn't presume it's just because of SBI.

I like country music myself so feel free to send over any complimentary music you get given

**MrP** · March 24th, 2011, 8:32 PM

Originally Posted by Clinton

I hear what you're saying No Remorse, but given a choice of hiring someone with a "entry level" of monetising skills or developing those skills yourself through trial and error, the latter would seem the better long term option.

Not that I know much, if anything really about monetising web sites, but I would also agree with Clinton on this point. Partly due to trust issues (how do I know there not slipping in a few of their aff codes - if that's even possible), but mainly because I believe that if you develop the skills yourself it should be easier to spot the things that aren't working as well as they could, and know what to do about it.

That said - I've just started treading the waters myself and understand how steep the learning curve is when you really want, is decent results.

J

**No Remorse** · April 7th, 2011, 12:15 PM

Here's an update on this discussion of the site I purchased 6 weeks ago.
I've tried the section targeting filter in AdSense


CONTENT


I haven't seen any improvement in CPC.

I found a thread where a guy recommended a large list of URLs to include in your AdSense account to block them as publishers. I tried that for about 24 hours and my revenue dropped 90%. I guess locking out the big publishers really does hurt since my CPC dropped from $0.09 to $0.02 overnight.

My last thought on this is about turning on and off the personalized preference in AdSense. Basically if you visit a site about buying a BMW car and then you go to a site about Music, some of the % of ads displayed will be about BMWs and the car niche in addition to the current site's content because Google is using your viewing habits to display ads.

So I'm wondering if anyone has ever seen an improvement by turning this feature off so that all ads displayed are based on the site's content?