Adsense working poorly for my guitar website

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dolphinstreet

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Jan 27, 2010
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Canada
Hi, I have a website with a section with free guitar video lessons, over 100 pages of lessons actually. I have been using a 336x280 Adsense ad above the video lesson for quite a while. In the past, it's been working great. However, lately, the earnings have dropped - the payouts per click are ridiculously low. The location of the ad is really good, people are clicking it, but the $$ ain't happening.

Any recommendations for finding a better way to monetize this?

I was thinking I could try Amazon affiliate marketing tools, like slideshow ads for products related to my lessons.

Perhaps eBay might work to some degree too, since I believe many of the visitors buy guitar equipment often, but they mainly come for the free lessons.

I don't know, let me know what you guys think.
 


This may be a crazy, mind blowing idea... but have you ever thought about partnering with guitar/music stores? I am not sure if this may work, but it's better than nothing. I mean why would people want to go to a guitar/music store that visit your site. Good luck.

Affiliate Program - Guitar Center
 
A couple of questions...

1. You mentioned your EPC has dropped lately. Have the clicks gone to low-paying topics? For example, "guitar lessons" versus "buy Martin guitars?"

2. Have you tried to pull ads that are focused on products (you may already be doing this)? For example, instead of the content on your pages hitting these phrases...

- guitar lessons
- guitar video lessons
- how to play guitar

... have you tried to hit...

- buy a Martin guitar
- buy a Marshall JVM Tube Combo
- buy [whatever]

For example, "the lesson above is geared for a softer sound. So, put away your Randy Rhoads Jackson RR-1 electric and pick up your Martin acoustic."

It's been a long time since I've done Adsense, so maybe the above is irrelevant these days.
 
here's what you do, go to Affbuzz.com: Offerbuzz - Affiliate Marketing Offer Aggregator and search for things like "guitar" or "music", or "recording" or "equipment", anything you think would work, then apply to the networks that have the offers you want. simple! adsense is certainly not ideal for this type of site. you could even run submits that might work toward your target demo like gift cards or freeshit but there are music related offers...

daily traffic stats?
any demographic data? (let me guess, 13-24 males... so target to that based on how they're finding the site)
where does the traffic come from?
 
dubbyah said:
here's what you do, go to Affbuzz.com: Offerbuzz - Affiliate Marketing Offer Aggregator and search for things like "guitar" or "music", or "recording" or "equipment", anything you think would work, then apply to the networks that have the offers you want. simple! adsense is certainly not ideal for this type of site. you could even run submits that might work toward your target demo like gift cards or freeshit but there are music related offers...

daily traffic stats?
any demographic data?
where does the traffic come from?
Click to expand...
This is exactly what you need to do. There's so much free information being given out on these forums to noobs it's ridiculous.
Anyways, the best thing you can do is pick a few offers from affbuzz . com / offerbuzz (still a new member and cant link) and try them out see how the CTR is until you find something that works. Good luck
 
Trademark,
1) I had better payout when I had really ugly guitar lesson ads from Google, but I took them out, since I thought my own lesson videos are so much better.

2) I have other pages on my site, where I promote certain guitars, etc, and those Adsense ads pay much better. I use online guitar stores affiliate product links for this too, and those sometimes work quite well.

Partnering with music stores likely won't work. They wouldn't be interested.

Since my website is getting over 3,000 visitors per day (8,000-9,000 pageviews per day), I am sure there must be some good way to monetize this better. I'm thinking I could try selling ads by going to some high traffic forums, dedicated to buying and selling website ads?

The majority of the website traffic is from my youtube videos and from stumbleupon. These two bring me over 50% of the traffic. Google search brings me most of the rest, mixed in with referring traffic from forums and blogs, etc.

I use Google Analytics for stats, and I don't see a demographics variable in there, but from the youtube stats, my videos are viewed by 91% male, age 45-54 (37%), 55-64 (21%), 35-44 (18%)

Dubbyah, I'll have a look at the website you are mentioning. Thanks.
 
music stores are VERY interested (unless you mean not interested in terms of a direct contact partnership), but they're mostly brokered through networks. apply to Commission Junction - A Global Leader in Affiliate Marketing, Online Advertising and Search Engine Marketing, and search for music. musicians friend, and plenty of other music stores have deals on there! another network that is very easy to get into is shareasale, and they have a good amount of music related offers as well. you have somewhat of a goldmine here with 3k visitors a day mostly OLD PEOPLE who don't know how to use the internet and who love to click ads... (being somewhat facetious on this one), but i guess overall what i'm saying is with this traffic there are definitely better alternatives to adsense out there, especially if you've seen adsense clicks/conversions fall recently.
 
also, the location of your adsense ads is quite good in the above the fold, so i'm sure you could do a fair amount of testing different ads to see what happened. if you have 6 different offers, let's say 1 adsense, 1 amazon offer, 1 ebay offer, and 3 affiliate offers from a music store, a recording place, and a guitar place, you can set each of these to display with equal probability to their share of the traffic. then you find out what's working well over a period of about a week's worth of data. then you continually test out new ads and new offers and new locations and new targeting methods (display different ads based on what page is open, stuff like that). a process of continual refinement, basically, is the key to optimization, and you have enough traffic to easily test out a number of different ads at once. look into OpenX. Build your business here. | OpenX, it's a free open source ad server that will allow you to do testing/optimizing/specific targeting quite easily with a lot of depth and optionality. so yeah, if i were in your shoes i'd start split testing to find out what works, you could even split test different adsense kw displays.

maybe run 3 ad groups with 3-5 different ads in them each rotating equal weight, then after some datamining pit each highest performing ad out of a group up against each other in more testing scenarios, and keep doing this over a month, and i guarantee you'll find some winners that work really well. (darwinian advertising, let natural selection of actual click trends determine what takes the top spot for placement... pretty essential principle)
 
Yeah, I use CJ and Musician's Friend, but I find it is cumbersome to go and select specific ads and create good ads, through the CJ interface. I do use those on my blog however, when I write about a new guitar product, for example. The CJ interface doesn't have a feature where you can easily select a bunch of, for example, rock guitar lesson ads, and the have them randomly display on the website pages where I do rock guitar lessons. I have to search and find each ad, and then build my own randomization code. If I'm wrong about this, please let me know - I'd like to be able to do something like that!

Good idea about testing different things like that - I shall try and see what gives.
 
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