How to monetize a successful site?

[jhansle1]

Hi all,

Currently I run a very popular Pittsburgh Steelers website called Planet Steelers (i.e. http://www.planetsteelers.com).

I am attempting to monetize this site or leverage this site to monetize another site. I also own the sites:

SteelersApparel.com - Points/Directs to my http://www.planetsteelers.com/shop/ site. This is a shopping area (i.e. BANS) of my site that pulls in 100-125/month during football season, at the MOST)

SteelersCentral.com - A very basic "top sites" listing that doesn't generate any income but I want keep the domain and site available.

I don't think BANS is doing a great job but at least I get some income from it. But with the domain SteelersApparel.com (yes, i can't believe that domain was still available) I feel like I should have an online store generating much more money than what I am. Adsense also generates little money $2/day probably on average. I was thinking about trying to use Yahoo Shopping.

I don't have the time or money to carry inventory and I feel many of the sites that offer affiliations, the commission is too low such as 10%.

Below is a list of my stats thus far for the month of September:

Overall Monthly Statistics for September 2009
Total Hits 2244744
Total Files 1322840
Total Pages 233997
Total Visits 26456

NOTE: A lot of these hits are due to a very popular and active forum.

Your help would be greatly appreciated!

Regards,

John

[JamesColin]

On forum with some traffic I only see CPM ads, because PPC ads will not be clicked (your $2 yahoo money)
So find an ad company with CPM ads.

As for selling products online, I don't know what is the market size, but you'd need to use your SteelersApparel.com not as a redirection but as a blog about products, every day or so you'd add a blog post about a certain product and have a link to your BANS shop at the exact product page.

This is so that your blog will generate traffic overtime by interested people, coming from search engines. At the moment, the search engines would need to send you traffic directly to your shop area on your main domain which they probably don't do because of duplicate content (ie. all pages are available on lots of different domain names)

So by having a simple shoppingblog and generating original (not too much originality you need just to talk a bit about each product in your own words) you'll be able to get targeted traffic from search engines.

But this needs to be done over time, slowly but constantly, in a few months you'd see good results.

[jhansle1]

All,

The problem statement is that I have a successful website and I'm having trouble generating hits & visits to sales. I feel that my storefront is solid compared to other competitors. It consists of two affiliations: 1 with BANS and 1 with FootballFanatics. Historically, I've been more successful with BANS.

Below is information regarding my site:

Main Page: www.planetsteelers.com

Description: The homepage isn't as popular as I would like but the forum is extremely popular (notice the large hit count). I also have a coppermine gallery and content pages. PlanetSteelers.com is ranked high on google for the term "steelers forum".

Stats for October 2010:

Total Hits 3447221
Total Files 2417089
Total Pages 469223
Total Visits 53426
Total KBytes 30717390
Total Unique Sites 43889
Total Unique URLs 2531
Total Unique Referrers 2743
Total Unique Usernames 1
Total Unique User Agents 1815

Store Front Page: www.steelersapparel.com

Description: This site has been completely redesigned this year by myself. This site leverages RSS Feeds via Football Fanatics. This also links to a BANS store. As indicated above, the eBay affiliation has historically been more effective. SteelersApparel.com is ranked high on google for "steelers apparel"

Stats for October 2010:

Total Hits 7098
Total Files 6756
Total Pages 1159
Total Visits 874
Total KBytes 177548
Total Unique Sites 567
Total Unique URLs 468
Total Unique Referrers 92
Total Unique User Agents 186


Top Sites Store: www.steelerscentral.com

Description: This is an old school "top site" page. It's basically a placeholder because I want to keep the domain name. However, even though it's sooo 1990's, this does provided valuable link exchanges for me.

I would greatly appreciate any assistance you all could offer. Thanks for your time.

Regards,

John