It's a 2 word domain that has good monetisation potential, but not so much for random people. I put a offer in at around $5k to see if there was any interest but it was shot down and was told they've rejected 5 figure sums early (probably BS). It's 100k on exact match.

Then yes I think you are way off, probably worth $40k+ strictly based on the traffic it generates.

Ah ok thanks Oh well

Wow, really? I obviously have absolutely no idea what I'm talking about but paying 5k for a 2 word domain name seemed crazy, let alone 40k.

Is it really possible to be worth that much, unless it's some crazy, unique memorable catch phrase?

I just find it hard to believe that you couldn't create whatever business you're trying to create and brand yourself with a shorter name and use the 40k to create a better product and brand recognition that'd be more valuable?

I thought a lot of the value of key word names had been negated and the value of brand recognition had increased to the point keyword domains weren't THAT valuable?

If you can attain a top ranking with the help of the domain and the traffic is there and can be monetized effectively, you can pay whatever the math dictates.

Sure, but do you really think there's any name worth paying 40k for to dominate a niche with 100k exact searches, or that you couldn't build out a site with any name and throw 40k at seo work and get to #1( in a 100k search niche)?

Maybe that isn;t stating it quite right but do you really think spending 40k on a 2 word domain name is ever going to be the difference? Or that you couldn't spend 40k more profitably than buying a domain name?

I have to think I cold come up with a 1 word brandable name for $10 and throw considerably less than 40k ( assuming I'm building out the same site) at getting the same traffic you'd get with that name?

Yes. If you're guaranteed to go #1 for the main term and the related keywords, 100k+ searches a month is more than enough to justify that much money in certain scenarios.

If you got 100k unique visitors a month and a CTR of 8% with a $.55 CPC, that works out to $4400 a month. And things with 100k searches a month can probably be monetized a lot more profitably than AdSense if you're willing to spend time on it.

People buy 10-15x monthly earnings for sites as a standard, and I've heard of sites going for WAY more than that because of additional growth/monetization opportunities.

If you have $40k to spend and a plan for a site, there's lots of sites you can spend that money on.

8% CTR? isn't that astronomical? googling shows me that the average is below 0.1%

Lol, no. It depends on the niche, but the average is nowhere near below .1%. You're looking at something other than an AdSense CTR. I have a site which is 10% long term. I'd say 2-5% are average for a successful site. Like I said, it depends on the niche, and 8% is definitely above average, but not astronomical or impossible. A huge lyrics site probably gets a bajillion hits a day and has a TINY CTR because the ads aren't targeted. A site about furniture or something with older searchers perhaps will have many more clickers. Many niches have much higher CPCs so the CTR doesn't have to be huge to make a good stream of revenue.

I'm just listing a favorable set of conditions that'd make buying that site +EV. And like I said, there's likely many more profitable monetization methods than AdSense. If you can make good money with AdSense ads, you can likely contact the advertisers directly and set something more profitable up.

ohh i see. i googled niche and CTR and the articles are giving percentages like in your post.

#1 spot is said to have an 18% CTR on Google based on some study I can't find at the moment.

I was talking about something else, but I thought it was a lot higher, like 40% or something similar. 18% seems way, way too low.

40% of organic clicks perhaps? 18% of all clicks (including PPC clicks, map clicks etc). Off the top of my head the break down was something like:
#1 18%
#2 10%
#3 7%
#4 5%

If i have a site with 2000 posts published and I have an additional 1000 posts to add (timeless content - meaning not related to current affairs or news) am I better off just adding all the content right away and then not adding any new content for 90 days or is it better to schedule 11 posts per day for 90 days?

Fwiw the posts are short but actual content not advertising or products and contain no links or other garbage

I'd just add it all at once, wouldn't worry too much if your worried about SEO. If it's for visitors you might want to trickle them out.

In Adwords could someone tell me why some ads for search are really expensive to run even though there apparently is no competition? I would have thought these would be cheap but I'm seeing ~50p per click. Ad is very relevant

No, definitely trickle them out. A site that is constantly updating itself with fresh content is liked better by Google than something stagnant. It's also way, way more natural than just dumping a ****load of content at once.


You sure there is no competition? Do you have ad blocker on? Perhaps the competition is targeting a different area than you (USA?).

cwar,

I thought #1 got 40% of all organic clicks.

Competition factor doesn't mean much IMO (or at least I've never payed attention to it ). Perhaps are 3 spots and 3 advertisers offering big money for each spot. Google could be giving a biased recommendation or a random setting. If you have time there is a cool trick you could use. Write a Google scraper that will regularly check the search term once every 30 mins and track a few aspects of the page (number of advertisers in particular, which advertisers). You might be able to figure a time of day where some advertisers budgets are used up and bidding is super cheap.

Agree with Phresh and trickle. Mark me as skeptical about your 1000 posts that all of a sudden stop being a good traffic strategy tho

We are currently trying to monetize a world of warcraft guild (yes I know wow lol) website, youtube channel and possibly facebook fanpage which I'm all working on and I was hoping you guys could give me some advice...

The site had over 580k uniques and almost 1.1mio visitors last year (with basically no content on the page at all);

yt channel has soon 1.8mio video views but only 3k subs (again no work had been done here in the past besides uploading videos);

and the fb fanpage has over 2.5k fans, I expect that number to rise meteorically this year because of giveaways tho.

I want to add that at least on the website and fb page we have recently started providing quality content on a regular basis and we are already able to see small results in regards to traffic.

Now for the options... we tried adsense for the website and the earnings were just laughable, even with 3 ad units on the frontpage above the fold.

Youtube partnership is close to impossible because every single video in the channel contains copyright protected material (mostly music). We thought about audioswapping or starting from scratch to meet partnership requirements, but among other things this would heavily decrease the quality of past and future video content.

We think that our best option right now would be to affiliate directly with someone who has a matching target audience and get an "advertising package" for our entire web presence. And we did actually find a site (mmoga . com) that might be right for this.

Now the question is, what are we worth to them? I have a couple of benchmarks that give me a vague answer to that, but I am hoping to get some numbers from people who are neutral and more experienced in this than I am (you guys)

Also if anyone knows different options on monetizing what we have or other advertising partners that we could affiliate with, please let me know!

Thanks!

Which quild out of interest?

Anyway, I think the best way to handle this is to look at what elitistjerks.com did when they started getting good trafffic - seek out a few specific advertisers and bill them directly rather than using adsense.

Other options:

1. Offer access to a guide that claims to let people play at the level your guild is at. $20 is right around the correct price. This is where a lot of high traffic wow sites make most of their money.

2. Offer access to videos etc. a week earlier for $5/month. Plus private forums for "members"

3. Sell physical goods like mice and controllers and things using Amazon affiliate links. You'll get about 4% of everything they buy from Amazon for the next 2 days which occasionally is awesome.

4. Contact the people you see with advertising deals on the major wow sites and offer your product to them.

5. Sell the site to someone for a fixed price then charge them monthly for new videos and make them figure out how to monetize.

I don't really get this? How would they stop being good traffic strategy? Not sure if my reading comprehension is bad?

I have a site that has 2000 posts and I want to add another 1000 posts of information. Basically I just want to increase the size of my content by 50%. Nothing has or will suddenly stop traffic or change as strategy.

Further info: the site is currently 5th as an exact match with 30k searches per month. I'd obviously like to get to #1. Getting to #5 took about 3 months from setting the site up and putting up 2k posts the first week to slowly get to #5 where I seem to be stuck.

My initial thought was that trickling the posts over the next 90 days would be best but I've really no experience to know if it'd really be better than increasing the site by 50% right away. Perhaps putting up like 900 posts this week and then adding 1 or 2 every day for 3 months would be even better?

If I publish the posts evenly over 3 months is it best to spread them out during the day or just do 10 all at once? Does any of this actually make any difference?

When you make changes to your site how long does it take google to recognize them and adjust accordingly? Example: removing all ads from above the fold as mentioned above? Or what about fixing old content, say 6 month old posts that needed some rewriting and better tags, etc.?

Standard is 2-3 weeks between updates. You can tweak this a bit if you set the importance in your sitemap.xml file that you upload to google webmaster tools.

If your pages change frequently however, google updates more quickly. For example: I have a site where the content changes daily and it seems to get re-crawled daily.

It's undetermined AFAIK. It's just when the spiders go back to your site and report back to Google. It's not a set time or anything.

de captain,

I'd probably just schedule them out normally, like a bit apart, so it looks as natural as possible. I don't have anything to backup this hunch, but it seems about right. With WP you can schedule them ahead of time really easily.

But yeah, definitely don't drop 900 posts in a day. That makes it much, much more unlikely that they'll all be indexed. You want them to spend as much time on your home page as possible (this is the highest PR/strongest page you have) so they all get indexed. 900 immediately, good luck.

I guess I'm wrong then (again lol, at least I'm learning a lot!) but I don't understand why Google would penalise you adding loads at the same time if they are original content?

Anyway, one creative way to trickle them would be to upload all of them and disallow Google via robots.txt, then slowly remove the restrictions. Probably the easiest way? (I think Google bots obey robots pretty religiously).

I didn't say they'd penalize you. I said it's not as beneficial as trickling them. And again, it's not natural to add 1000 posts at once to a web site. I also don't see how robots would be as easy as just adding them with a set post date in WP so they drop whenever you want them.