How I Squeezed An Extra $3000/Month Out Of My Sites

For the past 6 months or so I had grown very complacent. I had been making decent money with my site(s), and thought I had reached a point where I had maximized my revenue for the traffic I was getting. I stopped reviewing the performance of my affiliate program, my PPC programs, my CPM programs. I grew too comfortable.

Then a few weeks back I read an interesting article (wish I could remember the name/link) where the author talked about always looking for new ways to monetize your sites. He was adamant on never growing too complacent. It kind of got me thinking about how I had grown so comfortable with my revenue streams and their performance. I had gotten to the point where I was turning away partners who wanted to run ads since I didn't want the headache and I thought everything was going so well, why mess up the mix.

I decided to make some changes.


Google Search Box
First order of business was to review what I already had. Was it doing the best it could? My first big find was with my site search. For years I had always had TWO search boxes. My own custom search script, and the Google Search box. I ran ads on my custom search results page, and so did Google. Looking at the stats, the Google search box was paying on average 4-5 times what my search script ads where paying. Looking at performance, the Google search box was finding things better on my site than my own search script. I decided to drop my search box.

This simple change boosted my Google search revenue by 4-5 times, adding an extra $1000/month to my bottom line. At the same time, it provided a better search tool for my site, and less confusion to my users on which search to use. And it took the load of search off my server and outsourced it to Google. A win-win.


In-Text Ads
Next up I re-visited some ad companies that had previously inquired about working with me. First up was Kontera. I had gone back and forth about them for a while last year. The program was kind of new, and the performance was subpar, so I passed on them. I decided it was time to give them another shot. I ran their ads for a few trial weeks. After the trial was over, I was not very impressed with the payouts. The ads were peforming decent, lots of clicks, but I wasn't making enough to make it worth it. Feedback from my users told me no one really minded them. My other revenue streams seemed unaffected by them. My only hold up was the payout. I felt for the clicks I was giving them, I should be making more. Well after pulling the ads, Kontera came back and offered a higher payout if we would reconsider. In the end we worked out a deal that made both parties happy, and I now had a new revenue steam tacking on an extra few thousand/month.


Low Impression Adsense Channels
I've always used Adsense channels to track performance of ads across my sites. But I never really paid much attention to most of my small, low impression channels. I spent most of my time optimizing the big hitting channels that produced most of my income. I finally decided to take a closer look at all my channels. By simply applying my same techniques used on my main channels, I found numerous opportunities to turn small revenue producing channels into medium revenue producing channels. After improving a few channels, I realized I was making an extra $10-$20/day. That equates to an extra $300-600 a month. Not bad. Kind of like finding money on the street... ;-)


Expenses
Next up I took a look at my expenses. I had been spending a lot of money on PPC ads with Adwords, Yahoo and Microsoft AdCenter, but I was not tracking the results very well. I was just assuming they were performing since I was getting the clicks. I built a tracking script and used it for all my ads. Come to find out, I was investing way too much in my ad campaigns for what I was getting in return! I ended up cutting my campaigns by 70%, saving me $500+/month. From my perspective that is like making an extra $500/month.


Newsletter
My last change involved my newsletter service. I was paying $50/month for a service that I barely used since I never had time to write-up newsletters. I decided to switch to Feedburner (free service) to host my newsletters, and I automated the newsletter process through RSS. Now I could send out interesting newsletters that aggregated news from around the web on a daily basis, and it was not costing me a dime! I cut $50/month off my expenses, and added a valuable newsletter service at the same time. Growing a newsletter subscriber list is an invaluable asset that can come in handy down the road when we need to diversify our traffic streams.


I hope you see from my examples above that it is worth re-evaluating your site's revenue streams and expenses on a regular basis. Just when I thought I couldn't do any better, I squeezed an extra $3,000+/month out of my site with no additional traffic.