Hey All,
I'm still working my way through the early info-overload stages of AM and am trying to think broadly about building a sustainable business alongside the feast/famine cashflow of AM. Broad thoughts are hugely appreciated!
I think that I've come up with a solid angle for a publishing content site that, if properly promoted, grow to a decent size while being largely autopilot. Thing is, being a noob, I'm not entirely sure how to monetize it or, importantly, if it's worth the while. Take something like this:
http://stuffonmycat.com (sorry if this is one of you... I literally grabbed the first content site that I ran into)
Low quality crap about cats with 22K FB likes, low traffic (14K/month), some adsense blocks. Tied to a "publisher group" that runs a number of other similar low-bar sites. I assume that it's making some pennies a day on adsense and maybe some direct placements. (sites: http://bcmediagroup.com/websites/) But I have no idea.
What is the *right* way to approach and think about something like this? My angle would be very appealing to a specific niche and daily article-based.
My thoughts are
1) Seed excellent content written by a *real* writer- 5-10, 300-500 word click-baity but not junk articles
2) Create FB page (the content should be Facebook TOS compatible) and season with smaller articles that point to the main site
3) Run some low-cost FB sponsored post advertising to start to build an audience (target via the known niche demo)
4) Do "something" outside of FB to build that audience further, ideally getting a giant publisher to pick up a trending story (yeah, noob...)
OK, so now I have xx,xxx uniques (if I've executed on the above) so now how to monetize?
The obvious- Ad sense, maybe a Taboola block? What does that actually yield on a small but well trafficed site?
The less obvious- if I've done the above, I'll have a pretty good demographic for a specific niche so:
-I could run offers tied to that niche (and build/control my own)
-I could market the site to AMs looking to lever that niche (how?)
-What else?
Is this worth the time/effort? There are 2-3 derivations of the site that I could use to lever the content (what's deadly serious to one demo is hilarious to a few others). At what sort of traffic level does it become a meaningful source of cashflow?
Cheers!
Guy