Trying to make some moolah

Aren't we all, right?

Having just found myself unemployed and with enough money in the bank to see me through the next few months or so before I have to go find another one, I want to try to make some money from my sites, www.randomrant.co.uk and www.glenlachart.com in whatever way I can.

At the minute I'm running AdSense on both, although making $10 a day at best between the two.

I am considering getting some merchandise done for both sites, which some of the regular forum users have agreed is a good idea. That's still a very limited market, though, so I don't know if it's worth pursuing quite yet until I can become more confident that it won't just be the diehard forum users buying the stuff.

Other than upping my visitor numbers to get more AdSense revenue, does anyone have any other suggestions on how to profit from a humour site with all original content? Should I be contacting potential advertisers directly and trying to get them to pay a flat fee for monthly advertising? I don't even know how much I should be charging for that sort of thing. The Glen Lachart site has only recently been stuck up at that URL, so it's not very established (although it did exist in a previous incarnation for several years, but I lost the domain name).

Any advice much appreciated!

 

Get your visitors to fill out a survey of sorts and push them to opt-in on a newsletter.

You can rent out your newsletter at

 

Hmm, interesting. Thanks for that. I have a newsletter at the moment which has about 300 subscribers, but it's tucked away and not easy to find. No survey before it, though. Who would pay for the list?

 

Comedians or Comedy clubs, most likely

 

Depends on your survey. If you ask like 'How much did you spend on goods online in the last 3 months?' and then let them select the main theme (Health & Beauty / Toys) they buy you can sell the list based on this data.

 

Nice sites BTW Baz@rr, did you design them yourself?

I would suggest adding some RSS feeds to your site, RSS feeds are easier to maintain than email newsletters. You could then submit your RSS feeds to Feed directories.

Again, nice sites. It looks like you have put lots of effort in them, I am not expert but I imagine you will do well.

 

What do you do with your charity purchases after the reviews, maybe offer them as competition prizes/auction them to your members as they could be pretty novelty/fun promotions to bring people back.

Most comedy/humour sites that I have seen tend to benefit from advertising for income so your advertising page should have at the very least some recent stats as regards visitors/page views possibly time spent on the site and popular pages.

Once you have decent traffic and an informative advertising page you can go look at other successful humour websites and look at the advertising they get to possibly be more pro-active and seek out advertisers.

As mentioned before a good mailing list can be an income source and a valuable addition to the website that can help you further inform your possible advertisers as to your demographics.

http://www.splut.com/007/012.htm
The link above gives you some other UK humour websites and may be of interest to you for inspiration. I would also look into affiliate humour products that you could promote and benefit from, ie wind up phone calls, practical joke products etc etc

Pre-recorded ranting phone calls that people could use to wind up their friends, like BA ranting at some crazy fool, that would be worth £1.50

 

You could add an affiliate store - Try the FREEBS thread here or go direct: http://www.cpurigs.com/forums/showthread.php?p=7648 for books.

Maybe sell a few text links, move adsense up the page. Get more traffic. Sell your mailing list, advertise on it etc.

 

Thanks for the advice everyone. Some really interesting ideas there worth me looking into. I actually started work on an online store recently for RR at www.randomrant.co.uk/shop where I intended to sell the charity shop purchases and other things I reviewed, as well as t-shirts. It's not live yet or anything, just playing around with it at the minute. I also thought about putting the charity shop tat bag items on ebay, along with an excerpt from the review and links to the site. Thought this could be a good way of building some more incoming traffic too.

Oh, and I designed RR myself, but Glen Lachart is really just a free mambo template I customised a bit It was my first time using Mambo and thought the format of Glen Lachart was ideal for a content management system.

 

Ebay would definitely be a good idea for some of that niche stuff and like you say a good pull to attract folk at the some time, you could always feature your ebay ads on the site so cover both bases, maybe use an adsense cheque for a featured item on ebay if the intention is more traffic related than selling price.

 

Well as I think I'll just scrape the $100 this month to be paid by Adsense I may just do that I think traffic is the important thing. I've had a lot of good comments on Random Rant, and those who find it seem to like it - it's just getting them to find it which is the problem. That said, traffic is growing by the month, so I shouldn't complain too much.

Incidentally, I have also just started work on www.highlandweddings.net which I hope might be a good AdSense earner in time. Also since I do a bit of wedding videography I know a lot of the local wedding suppliers, so I'm hoping to be able to charge some of them for advertising once the site is up and running.