Starting to really doubt the monetization of my website
Greetings!
Im Erik, creator of https://papersbytopic.com/
It's a site which offers some really valuable study resources for CIE students.
Problem is the following.
I got recommended to monetize my page through google adsense. After a few days of running it, I get a CPM of 0,86€
I've totalled a view count of 346 even with google ads!
I've got google ads with a CPC of 0,05€ average. And I've anounced myself on multiple subreddits. Right now I'm not breaking even. Have I made the right choice?
I've also worked on the SEO of mi site a lot, all of the tools I've got say I have a very good SEO but nevertheless, I don't seem to appear on search engines!
Any advice is really appreciated. I've worked really hard on this, and I don't want to abandon it.
I took a look at your site... some quick feedback:
It's a bit aggressive on the ads already with the popups, etc. Honestly, it would turn me away. I think you are monetizing too soon. Generally, you want to make sure you have a great product / get traffic, and THEN monetize.
I don't actually know what I am looking at quite frankly. Explain what's on the site... these are past papers from Cambridge (?) regarding different Computer Science majors/topics? There are so many abbreviations that an average person wouldn't find this useful unless you can explain more clearly what it is. (AS / A-Level / GSCE? - I have no idea what these are)
You can benefit by writing an abstract or summary of each of the sections. Your page might load fast (which is why different sites are giving you positive SEO ratings), but you don't have enough content (consumable by Google) to come up on search results.
Your audience might just be very small. These are papers for a specific school and they don't seem to teach people anything. If I am a random person searching for this... I don't think I would find this very valuable. What's valuable is if you could teach me about those topics... not just provide questions and answers.
Is this even ethical? You are publishing university created documents and trying to monetize without really adding value on your own. If you provided some training/lessons, now that's a different story. But at the end of the day, you are just taking PDFs and hosting them elsewhere and slapping ads on it. Be careful as this could also be considered some form of academic misconduct depending on your school's code.
Hi! Thank you very much for the feedback.
I think I missed some explanation.
CAIE (Cambridge Assessment International Education) are some exams nearly 3/4 of Europe takes. These exams have different subjects: Computer Science, Maths, Statistics, Physics etc
Every year, they do 2 different exams for each subject (one for winter another one released on summer). The day after the exam has been done, the pdf for it, along the markscheme is posted on the Cambridge official website. These are called "past papers".
Each subject is divided into topics (following a syllabus). Example: Computer Science is divided in computer architecture, programming, security etc.
Cambridge makes random questions about different topics and put them into the exam (as any exam does).
So what I've done, with the help of AI, is scowered through all existing "past papers" and organize each question into it's corresponding topic. This is a task which some students will even do manually, for this helps them inmensely on their exams. So this model that I've created will save time for the students and offer them the best possible revision questions (ones taken from the actual exams).
Amongst posting it on reddit, I've received an enourmous feedback, with plenty of upvotes and comments praising the site. So that proves it is actually something of worth that I'm offering.
I hope I've explained myself correctly. Any doubt feel free to ask.
With this being said, how do you think I should proceed?
Regards,
Erik
Awesome - thanks for responding. That makes more sense. Here are some recommendations with an SEO hat on.
You should write out all of the abbreviations. Like you wrote out up above, you should write it out like this: CAIE (Cambridge Assessment International Education) ... which includes both the abbreviation and what it stands for.
PDFs are indexed by Google, but that's not very helpful for you. You want people to go to your site... and click around your site. If your PDF shows up on Google, your target audience will just visit the PDF and there's no way for them to return to the site. This will be more work, but if you are able to extract the questions and answers on a webpage (make sure the text is available on the HTML), you will have more success with Google.
Figure out some keywords you want to target... I am guessing you would want to rank for "Cambridge Assessment International Education tests" or "CAIE topics." With that in mind, you should create useful blog posts with those phrases in the title.
In general, the site could use more explanatory words. Again, it goes back to understanding how Google crawls your site... it reads anything available in the "page source" - so the site isn't giving it a lot to work with at the moment.
I am guessing you could benefit from some localization... i.e. have these available in different languages. Just a guess, but obviously your site is only going to come up in english searches at the moment.
GL - Feel free to pm me on Twitter (@robjiang) if you want any more specific advice.