— Musings —09.08.2014 10:34 AM
wk.com: 2.2 million page views a year! 13 million since 2008!
A friendly inquiry this morning about how many people come to my web site elicited this response: “I don’t know.” So I decided ask the guy who would, from Team Propellerhead.
His response:
“In the last year you had 2.2 million page views– spread over 1.3 million sessions, and 355,000 individual users.
Since we’ve been keeping records (2008) there have been 13 million page views, 8.3 million sessions, 1.7 million users. Though number of users over such a long period can’t be very accurate given how many IPs circulate dynamically.”
In other words, the numbers really aren’t that big, given that many are repeat customers. But, overall, encouraging.
I really should get around to accepting advertising, eh? Maybe I could actually retire or something.
If you do start to accept advertising, please do it right. Don’t go plastering ads all over the place. Think of daringfireball.net as an example of how to proceed. He puts one (1) strategically placed but generally unobtrusive ad on his site every week, and charges that one advertiser a lot of money for the privilege.
And for that he is said to make ~$500K/year. Mind you his numbers are bigger than yours (insert “it’s not the size of the number” joke here), but even if you managed to pull in a something in the low five figures from this little site, that wouldn’t be a bad side business.
I run Google Adsense on a couple of my sites. There are other options out there, but Adsense is the gold standard, especially for “smaller” sites. With Adsense you are likely looking at a fairly good cost per click as your readers come largely from Canada. In my case, site visitors come from all over the world, and advertisers in poorer countries naturally pay less per click. You would like earn over $1.00 per click, maybe even $2 – $4 per click. Expect a click through ratio of around 1.5% of site visitors, maybe even higher depending on the number of page views from each visitor. You are likely getting several hundred visitors per day, hence you are probably looking at anywhere up to $30+ per day, maybe as much as $100 per day.
There are a few other options out there, I’m pretty much up to speed on all of them. If you need free help/advice contact me, you know where I live. Turn Right on Easy Street, first house on the left.
Easy street baby, it’s called Easy Street!
You can ask yourself how many sales of your book Fight the Right have happened because of it being here on the website.
All I would ask is to have a little mercy and not allow the embedding of videos by advertisers, which I find to be annoying.
If all of your archives are spiderable from your main domain name (which I think they are through musings) you are going to have an incredible amount of search bait on a huge variety of subjects. Because it is old content, it is not content spamming, and it could give you a very nice ranking on Google when people’s names are brought up.
I think Kaiser Helmets ‘n Motorbikes has the best suggestion. Adwords makes the most sense because it is integrated into Google search.
The other thing we would love to see is a Warren Kinsella Book Club where you become an Amazon dealer. You’d write a small paragraph on why we should buy the book. Some people who are way less famous than you are making bank on book clubs.
The other thing about the book club is that if people make spurious claims you can say “read the book” and make a few bob on it at the same time.