Website Revenue Basics

[Tickner]

Hello,

I am a PHP/MySQL programmer and have a good level of experience developing semi-complex websites and web applications.

I can make pretty much anything and everything web related.

However, I am a bit dumb in the general sense of generating revenue out of what I do develop.

I have a few questions for you guys that have experience in turning websites into money makers.

Assuming I have a poker related websites, geared towards online poker players, that offers free tools and training materials and etc...

1. How many unique visitors per day is considered big enough to make advertising dollars?

2. How would I go about offering businesses the opportunity to advertise on said website? Do I sit and wait for offers or go looking?

3. How much money does advertising go for? I know this is a general question and probably not a good one but I really am lost with respect to the price companies are willing to pay for targeting advertising.

4. How else can said website generate revenue?

5. How much money do you figure (ball park) big websites such as poketfives.com, pokerhand.org, and stoxpoker.com generate?

Basically I want the basics and more so some general information on this.

Thanks guys.

[Evan]

1) You can put ads on your site with no visitors. What you consider to be enough is really up to you.

2) You'd be best off using a distributed ad network like Adsense/Adbrite.

3) It could be anywhere from 5 cents to $10 per thousand impressions. If you're talking about a new, small, unrefined website you should probably be thinking about the lower end of that range.

4) Premium services, subscriptions, etc. Anything you can sell to someone will make you money.

5) I have an idea of what those sites make but I don't know how muc they want it discussed. You can look up stats about visitors and other metrics at compete.com or alexa.com.

[Evan]

Also, if you can write actual useful PHP and MySQL code I think there's much more useful ways for you to spend your time than on a poker app.

[maxtower]

Poker is a very high paying niche in online advertising. Go to www.tylercruz.com. This guy makes the bulk of his salary selling ads on his poker related forums website. He made a post detailing his traffic, and he only gets less than 1000 unique visitors per day to that site. You can't expect to do that well with other niches.

[john voight]

[ QUOTE ]
Poker is a very high paying niche in online advertising. Go to www.tylercruz.com. This guy makes the bulk of his salary selling ads on his poker related forums website. He made a post detailing his traffic, and he only gets less than 1000 unique visitors per day to that site. You can't expect to do that well with other niches.

[/ QUOTE ]

Yeah I post on his forum, and he seems to be doing quite well considering he spends very little time on PFO.

Also, if this is you tyler, you the man!

[Shoe]

[ QUOTE ]
1) You can put ads on your site with no visitors. What you consider to be enough is really up to you.

2) You'd be best off using a distributed ad network like Adsense/Adbrite.

3) It could be anywhere from 5 cents to $10 per thousand impressions. If you're talking about a new, small, unrefined website you should probably be thinking about the lower end of that range.

4) Premium services, subscriptions, etc. Anything you can sell to someone will make you money.

5) I have an idea of what those sites make but I don't know how muc they want it discussed. You can look up stats about visitors and other metrics at compete.com or alexa.com.

[/ QUOTE ]

Is there anyway to estimate the amount of traffic a site gets based on their alexa ranking? For example, pokerhand.org is currently ranked as approximate the 50,000th most popular site on the internet. Is there anyway to get a general idea of how many thousands of impressions they are getting per day?

[Tupacia]

For poker-related sites, I'd imagine you could make more money with affiliate programs for the major sites as opposed to Adsense ads.

[Shoe]

[ QUOTE ]
For poker-related sites, I'd imagine you could make more money with affiliate programs for the major sites as opposed to Adsense ads.

[/ QUOTE ]

I agree.

[Tickner]

[ QUOTE ]
[ QUOTE ]
For poker-related sites, I'd imagine you could make more money with affiliate programs for the major sites as opposed to Adsense ads.

[/ QUOTE ]

I agree.

[/ QUOTE ]

So basically you would think that links to the major poker sites would make me the most money?

I believe that the bulk of my visitors already have an account on most of the major sites, and that even if they didn't they would rather seek a rakeback deal than register under me.

[Shoe]

[ QUOTE ]
[ QUOTE ]
[ QUOTE ]
For poker-related sites, I'd imagine you could make more money with affiliate programs for the major sites as opposed to Adsense ads.

[/ QUOTE ]

I agree.

[/ QUOTE ]

So basically you would think that links to the major poker sites would make me the most money?

I believe that the bulk of my visitors already have an account on most of the major sites, and that even if they didn't they would rather seek a rakeback deal than register under me.

[/ QUOTE ]

Good point. An affiliate sign up is worth way more than a click/page impression, so you would need to figure out what works best for you. I'd imagine the type of site and the exact type of visitors you are attracting to your site would make a big difference.

If you can get $1.00 per click (which I think is high) or $25 per direct referal to a poker site (which I think is low), I would think atleast 1 in 25 visitors that would click on of your ads would also sign up under you -- as the ads probably aren't much better than what your banners would look like.

Also, you can run ads plus your own affiliate banners on your site at the same time, and determine which is more profitable (displaying both could be the most profitable as well).