Is anyone making good money with SEO + ads?
Hey,
I've posted some of my projects here a few times. I notice that my monetization method (ads + SEO) is quite different from most of you (selling something using stripe). Is there anyone that's monetizing through ads? Would love to chat and talk about strategy and share tactics.
Back when I was monetizing Indie Hackers, I monetized through ads. But IH has always had more of a loyal, high-value, niche audience compared to most sites that derive their traffic via search.
(IH traffic came from content that did well in niche communities, whereas search traffic tends to consist of people with only a transient interest in the target site.)
So I'm not sure how helpful my experiences would be to you. For example, I didn't bother with most ad platforms and did my own ad sales ("sponsorships") instead, as they were much more lucrative and not too challenging to find.
Thanks for the response. IH is the type of site that I imagine would have very good RPMs for ads. Certainly online business is a a niche that advertisers bid quite high on.
That being said, with such a strong community, there are many other ways to monetize other than ads as well.
From what I'm reading in this post and from what I've spoken about with others. It seems like it may be time for me to start going towards a new model. Maybe affiliate or just sell a product or service.
I was a #1 Adsense publisher in my country about 7 years ago. The situation changed drastically from that time. CPC, CTR, CPM ... everything changed (much lower).
Now only top-notch content is able to rank well (I assume you don't want to use black hat tactics.) Quality content requires good knowledge of the topic and a lot of time as today the recommended size of the article is somewhere around 2000 words.
I don't know what type of ads you want to implement. If you can sell your ad space directly you can earn more in comparison with Adsense. In early stages, it's usually impossible.
My advice is: If you want to monetize through ads, diversify, diversify, diversify. Especially if all your SEO projects uses the same ad provider.
Thanks for the tip Csaba. When and why did RPMs drop so much?
because the CTR is much lower, people are smarter than years ago, more ad blockers and so on. Maybe the competition is lower because of FB ads. Hard to say.
I have a few experiences with ads :
During the peak of cryptocurrencies popularity back in december-january 2017, I was making 500€/month with 3K unique visitors/day. Now the same website is receiving 1/100 of the traffic from the peak
I have a old domain, tech niche, 8 years old, with 700 unique visitors/day, that make pretty much nothing with ads
Pretty good RPMs on the crypto site. I also whipped up a crypto site (https://cryptocactucs.com) which does exchange rate calculations. It got much more traffic back in the boom. Hopefully that occurs again.