Monetizing my site with ads?

drode

I have a site that attracts is useful for displaying my portfolio and is great for interacting with portrait customers. The real traffic though, comes in for the sports shots. Of the 250k images views in the last year, the vast majority were parents and kids looking at game photos. Marketing high school sports images takes time and effort. I have a demanding (but fun) job and just don't have enough time, so sales are low. The reality is that I shoot sports for the love of it and to provide pictures to the kids and their family. It does draw in other work, like senior portraits but my time for those is limited as well. I cover the cost of the site but not a whole lot more.

What I'd like to do is market my site and a semi-related blog to drive more traffic. I have some ideas about how to get traffic up on both sites. Yeah, it's more work but the timing doesn't compete with my job or shooting sports.

What I'm less sure of is how to monetize that traffic. I'm not looking to make a killing, just a little site income to help defer the costs of shooting sports. I have an Amazon Associate account and I'll setup a similar account with Google or others.

Anyone doing this on smugmug? How are you adding the banners and who are you working with (Amazon, Google, etc)?

Is it worth the effort?

Thanks in advance,
-Dan

SamirD

To give you some idea what type of revenue you can make it's in pennies, literally. A high revenue rate is $0.20 CPM. That's 20 cents for each thousand times something is viewed.

So based on your image views of 250k, that would amount to a whopping 250*.2=$50 for the year. There's other ways to monetize the traffic, but you're not going to get above the 20 cent CPM mark until you have 250k view a day.

To give you some numbers for comparison, I get 350k view a month in my peak seasons and it doesn't even pay for my hosting account for my main site. I use a combination of three different monetization methods and it still doesn't. It's harder than it looks.

jasonscottphoto

Amazon is pretty cool because if somebody clicks an ad on your site then everything they put in their cart that day (24 hrs) following that click goes towards your earnings.

(We don't run these on our photography site, but on another site I have that is for teachers. I earn anywhere from $100-$400 a month on this without really trying...)

drode

Thanks. That helps a lot. My sites are small, my costs are small. While I will increase traffic, I'll remain small (< 3k/day). Amazon is a good fit for one site, I'm not sure about the HS Sports site though.

SamirD

affdigphotos wrote: »

Amazon is pretty cool because if somebody clicks an ad on your site then everything they put in their cart that day (24 hrs) following that click goes towards your earnings.

(We don't run these on our photography site, but on another site I have that is for teachers. I earn anywhere from $100-$400 a month on this without really trying...)

Yep, but they have to actually buy something. If photo sales are few and far between, nearline product sales will probably be just as bleak. I've run thousands of banners this year from several affiliate programs that are nearline to my site subject without a single sale. Like I said, easier said than done.

drode wrote: »

Thanks. That helps a lot. My sites are small, my costs are small. While I will increase traffic, I'll remain small (< 3k/day). Amazon is a good fit for one site, I'm not sure about the HS Sports site though.

My site costs aren't huge. I spend only $35/month. And even with a million hits a month this cost isn't covered.

You may be one of the lucky ones that just start making money from day one. But there's a lot that try, and few that have that luck, so I'm just preparing you for the possible disappointment.

The only real profit center is direct ad sales, but this is difficult as you have to be bringing real advertising value to the table and the stats to back it up. I've had some success with this, but not as much as I need.

Maybe instead of attempting to monetize your site, focus on profitability in the photography itself. Don't give it away and see what happens. Market yourself stronger at events. If you've already got an established name, make it the premiere name in the space. This should bring in more money than any site traffic revenue. <img src="https://us.v-cdn.net/6029383/emoji/thumb.gif&quot; border="0" alt="" >

drode

Clearly, the real value is in the images and related sales. I don't give anything away except the ability to view small versions online. However, prints don't sell themselves. It takes time and effort to market and make sales. I've talked to many photogs who shoot youth and HS sports full time. Even those who are relatively successful and doing it full time aren't typically making much. So my "day job" will continue to be the fist priority.

I think I need to find ways to get more print and product sales.

jasonscottphoto

SamirD wrote: »

Yep, but they have to actually buy something.

The good news is, they just have to buy ANYTHING. And on Amazon, that equals a lot of stuff.

SamirD

drode wrote: »

Clearly, the real value is in the images and related sales. I don't give anything away except the ability to view small versions online. However, prints don't sell themselves. It takes time and effort to market and make sales. I've talked to many photogs who shoot youth and HS sports full time. Even those who are relatively successful and doing it full time aren't typically making much. So my "day job" will continue to be the fist priority.

I think I need to find ways to get more print and product sales.

Yep, and that's the problem with event photography. It's ultra-competitive and there's not much money in it. If you make enough to cover your expenses and pay for equipment, then you're doing great.

Most event photographers these days are leveraging their business with the income of a day job or some other financial resource. If event photographers had to build a profit and work their way up to buying good equipment, it would decades to get even second hand equipment.

affdigphotos wrote: »

The good news is, they just have to buy ANYTHING. And on Amazon, that equals a lot of stuff.

I understand that, but when people won't buy what's right in front of them when they're looking for that item, it's a hard sell for them to buy something else.

What's the number of amazon impressions you're running per day and the CTR?

jasonscottphoto

SamirD wrote: »

What's the number of amazon impressions you're running per day and the CTR?

I don't pay much attention to it, so when I jsut went to try to figure out the answer to your question I discovered that apparently I have some weird links that don't count impressions. ?? So I need to update that code apparently. On the ones I have that count impressions, I have a CTR of 6%. The conversion rate on both kinds of links is about 8%.



The site I run the amazon ads on averages about 1500 unique visitors a day.

I'm not saying amazon ads are the answer for the OP, I am just saying they are better and more profitable than google ads in my experience.

SamirD

1500 uniques is quite a bit. I struggle to break 500 a day and I market like crazy. 6-8% CTR is also extremely good. The highest CTR I see is about 1%, and that's with my direct sold ads on my sponsors page. Most of the other areas, if it's above 0.2% that's really high.

So is this the Amazon affiliate program you're participating in? Because those numbers are nice!

jasonscottphoto

Amazon Associates https://affiliate-program.amazon.com/

jasonscottphoto

What's sad is, right now the site is hosted on MobileMe... built on iWeb. Apple is getting rid of both, and I have to rehost it somewhere else AND rebuild it (can't get my old version of iWeb to "publish to folder" correctly so I can change hosts so trying to completely rebuild with a different program) which will break all the links. So right now I am trying to inform visitors of the impending change so that I don't lose traffic come June when MobileMe goes off line. The site is huge so it will take me until then to get it all rebuilt (copy, paste, copy, paste). I do all this not because I worry about people losing access to the info on the site (the high unique visitor count is due to the content of the site itself), but because I don't want to lose my Amazon revenue!!!

SamirD

affdigphotos wrote: »

What's sad is, right now the site is hosted on MobileMe... built on iWeb. Apple is getting rid of both, and I have to rehost it somewhere else AND rebuild it (can't get my old version of iWeb to "publish to folder" correctly so I can change hosts so trying to completely rebuild with a different program) which will break all the links. So right now I am trying to inform visitors of the impending change so that I don't lose traffic come June when MobileMe goes off line. The site is huge so it will take me until then to get it all rebuilt (copy, paste, copy, paste). I do all this not because I worry about people losing access to the info on the site (the high unique visitor count is due to the content of the site itself), but because I don't want to lose my Amazon revenue!!!

With the type of revenue you make, you can afford to just outsource the process for $1500-$2000. An experience firm should be able to not only do this painlessly, but without any loss in revenue as the transition can be done before the shutdown.

Thank you for the link. I'm going to research it.

NorthernBuck

I've been trying to figure this out as well. I have two different sites and one is for a local college's athletics in a decent size city. The potential is there to make money from local businesses who want to drive business their way I'm just not sure how to take advantage of it. I'd like to be able to place banners and clickable coupons all over my site I just have no idea how.

SamirD

NorthernBuck wrote: »

I've been trying to figure this out as well. I have two different sites and one is for a local college's athletics in a decent size city. The potential is there to make money from local businesses who want to drive business their way I'm just not sure how to take advantage of it. I'd like to be able to place banners and clickable coupons all over my site I just have no idea how.

I know how to do this, but a lot of times it's more work than the payoff. Unless they're already coming to you, you'd have trouble getting them online.

NorthernBuck

SamirD wrote: »

I know how to do this, but a lot of times it's more work than the payoff. Unless they're already coming to you, you'd have trouble getting them online.

Samir, I do have them coming to me and it has huge potential if I can make it work. At this college hockey is huge. They have businesses with their names on the boards all around the rink but there is only one business they announce over the loud speaker every time their is a break in the action and that's me. My business name is announced 6-10 times during a game. Imagine you are a local pizza place who wants to improve your sales. All I would have to do is add a coupon to a gallery so that the kids visiting will be able to get cheaper pizza and it will drive visitors to the galleries as well as customers to that pizza place. That's just one example but the potential is there for this to work quite well for me as well as the vendors who advertise with me.

SamirD

NorthernBuck wrote: »

Samir, I do have them coming to me and it has huge potential if I can make it work. At this college hockey is huge. They have businesses with their names on the boards all around the rink but there is only one business they announce over the loud speaker every time their is a break in the action and that's me. My business name is announced 6-10 times during a game. Imagine you are a local pizza place who wants to improve your sales. All I would have to do is add a coupon to a gallery so that the kids visiting will be able to get cheaper pizza and it will drive visitors to the galleries as well as customers to that pizza place. That's just one example but the potential is there for this to work quite well for me as well as the vendors who advertise with me.

I agree that there is potential, but you're going to have to show numbers.

I have over 10,000 people a month visiting my site, which is about 3% of the population of our area. If enthusiasts spend an average of $1000 a year in the market, that's 10 million dollars of consumer spending represented by my site visitors every month. And yet, local businesses will spend more for print than online advertising because it's proven. This is the hurdle you can bump into, and it's a big one.