Note: If you are unaware of The Project topic, please read the previous parts:
The project: In the beginning (pt1)
The project: ... there was Silence. (pt2)

Pretty often I hear people complaining about how hard it is to generate revenue from low traffic websites. In this part of the case study I'm going trough some methods to increase AdSense revenue for low traffic sites (yes, I'm not going to talk on how to increase traffic, but how to utilize limited assets more efficiently).

The project site (Ringtone-Search) has been online about 2 months, and it is slowly beginning to accumulate visibility, traffic and online revenue.  I'm  still talking peanut figures here,  as I have not  found enough time to do anything large scale besides content writing. Below are some figures from last month:  

• Visitors coming trough search engines: 150-200 unique visitors per month
• Visitors coming from other sources: 300-400 unique visitors per month
• Subscribers:  some
  

So how to generate some level of sensible revenue from such low figures?  Let's assume you are currently getting US10 / month, and you'd wanted to get US$40/month, how to do it?   The equation for revenue is simple:  clicks x price per click . 


Let's first  issue how to improve the price per click factor.

• Target your content for high-paying keywords
  
  In theory:  This is simple maths.  With 0.10 click payout, generating a 40 dollar income would require 400 clicks. With 0.50 click payout, generating a 40 dollar income would require only 80 clicks. 
  
  How this is done on project site: Most of the mobile related marketing is around paid premium content and cheap mobiles. I have nothing against these as they are a very good and profitable business as themselves. However, these have very limited  qualifications on bringing up decent payouts for AdSense advertiser. Ringtones etc. are low priced (bulk) products, hence the low payouts...   Instead I try to come up with topics from high paying services / industries and find out ways to embed these to site topic in an interesting and meaningful way. Sometimes it's hard work, sometimes it's easy... For example binding SEO and mobiles was easy catch with this article about  Mobile Adsense.
  
  
  
• Write your content for  high quality, niche markets
  
  In theory:  Niche markets are usually very mature and business oriented with selected interest of topics.  And when I say business users, it means users with money and power to make decisions; target audience most serious advertisers dream and target for.  Hence the payouts are good and it also shows in ad design (a relevant and good ad gets more clicks than a bad one)... As an added bonus, working with niche markets is easy and rewarding in SEO sense (so called long-tail keywords).
  
  How this is done on project site: A good example is this post about mobile digital rights management.  Topic is definitely niche (for the time being) and targeted for selected readers, but big business with some serious advertising. 
  

Improving click count is a lot harder, as a lot relies on ad relevancy, ad design, season etc. outside factors. I think the average CTR for Adsense moves somewhere around 1% (meaning that in order to generate 40US$ a site should have 40,000 impressions with 0.10  payout per click or  8,000 impressions with 0.50 payout per click). By improving CTR to 2% or higher, site can generate the same income with half the traffic.  So how to do this:

• Place focus on ad positioning
  
  In theory: Track and follow until you find the most efficient  ad positioning for your needs.
  
  How this is done on project site: Instead of relying 3rd party tools (like AdLogger, see my previous entry) I used the channels option available on Adsense site. It's simple and provides necessary statistics to analyze situation for this kind of low traffic site.
  
  So far I've tested 3  layouts and various ad sizes, and I think the current layout will stick for some time.  It has CTR about 3x higher than the earlier attempts.
  
  
• Write content that attracts users in buyer mode
  
  In theory: Users seeking information about a specific product are much more likely to click and buy something than those seeking for generic information. 
  
  How this is done on project site: Product reviews are a great example of this, for example take look at this Treo 650 review.
  

As always, feel free to share your comments and thoughts.