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I made a website here: http://textbookcentral.com.au/ http://textbookcentral.com.au/ Like yours it fails to solve the business problem. I managed to broker, so

by meric 15y ago

I made a website here: http://textbookcentral.com.au/ http://textbookcentral.com.au/ Like yours it fails to solve the business problem. I managed to broker, so far, dozens of textbook trades out of tens of thousands of visits and thousands of buy/sell interactions. Do you (or anyone else) think it's worth it for me to put Ads on my website? I have resisted so far because I thought the revenue would be insignificant. - 2000 - 4000 visits (higher during semester breaks, lower in mid-semester) - 2000 - 3000 visitors - 20000 pageviews - 6 page/visit - 1:20 visit duration - 8% bounce rate Once upon a time patio11 suggested I become a part-time person becoming the other side on any textbook sell or buy transaction. I didn't do it because I figured to make a loss of at least $5-$10 on each transaction to make it worth while for the other person to buy from me to make it worth it for them instead of from the store. I would've bankrupted myself doing that for the 1700 textbooks requested/offered. (Also got to know someone who had more headway into this same problem my website was solving; he owns a real book store near a university). Looking at your example I think maybe I can make income from ads instead... but I'm not sure if a quarter of visits can equate to a quarter as many ad conversions.

toumhi 15y ago
Your book listings seem to be missing big time on SEO potential, no? I think you should have individual pages for each textbook, with proper on-page optimization (title, H1, small paragraph of text...). That's probably a lot of work, but can you test it on a subset? Then you see if it's profitable and you could hire someone to write the remaining descriptions. That brings us to the monetization: you should do the math - traffic levels, CPC, CTR (for that you could try to have ads on a few pages). I don't have that much experience with ads but from my experiments with a few websites, ads might make sense in a situation and not in another... So you have to test.
- meric 15y ago
  Almost all my traffic comes from searches for "<coursecode> textbook", and heads to individual pages that look like http://textbookcentral.com.au/26/university-of-new-south-wales/buy/69897/acct1501/?query= http://textbookcentral.com.au/26/university-of-new-south-wal... That doesn't look like an individual page but it actually is; there's a unique link for every dialog. I'll definitely follow your advice and test some ads on small number of pages and see how that goes first.
lachyg 15y ago
It sounds like you could look into charging people for listings, but charging them a very small amount e.g. a 55c standard text message. I would also recommend Amazon affiliate linking, this is a big one because it doesn't matter if they buy the textbook, anything they buy over a 24 hour period on Amazon you get a cut of. It was a great day when someone bought a $24,000 watch on one of my links!
- meric 15y ago
  Oh wow so it's not just the while they're in the same session. That's pretty cool. I'll have to think about it though because a lot of the times Amazon is not willing to ship textbooks to Australia. re: Charging text message. Not enough volume yet, I've looked at many text message subscription vendors and all of them have fixed monthly fees of $1,000 and up.
  - whatusername 15y ago
    So there's a 6 year old post about selling a Bulldozer through Amazon here: http://www.problogger.net/archives/2006/12/12/whats-the-weirdest-thing-youve-sold-on-amazon/ http://www.problogger.net/archives/2006/12/12/whats-the-weir... (And it's obviously stuck with me -- because I posted a link to it on HN 3.7 years ago: http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=237779 http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=237779 )

by meric 15y ago

toumhi 15y ago

Your book listings seem to be missing big time on SEO potential, no? I think you should have individual pages for each textbook, with proper on-page optimization (title, H1, small paragraph of text...). That's probably a lot of work, but can you test it on a subset? Then you see if it's profitable and you could hire someone to write the remaining descriptions. That brings us to the monetization: you should do the math - traffic levels, CPC, CTR (for that you could try to have ads on a few pages). I don't have that much experience with ads but from my experiments with a few websites, ads might make sense in a situation and not in another... So you have to test.

meric 15y ago
Almost all my traffic comes from searches for "<coursecode> textbook", and heads to individual pages that look like http://textbookcentral.com.au/26/university-of-new-south-wales/buy/69897/acct1501/?query= http://textbookcentral.com.au/26/university-of-new-south-wal... That doesn't look like an individual page but it actually is; there's a unique link for every dialog. I'll definitely follow your advice and test some ads on small number of pages and see how that goes first.

lachyg 15y ago

It sounds like you could look into charging people for listings, but charging them a very small amount e.g. a 55c standard text message. I would also recommend Amazon affiliate linking, this is a big one because it doesn't matter if they buy the textbook, anything they buy over a 24 hour period on Amazon you get a cut of. It was a great day when someone bought a $24,000 watch on one of my links!

meric 15y ago
Oh wow so it's not just the while they're in the same session. That's pretty cool. I'll have to think about it though because a lot of the times Amazon is not willing to ship textbooks to Australia. re: Charging text message. Not enough volume yet, I've looked at many text message subscription vendors and all of them have fixed monthly fees of $1,000 and up.
- whatusername 15y ago
  So there's a 6 year old post about selling a Bulldozer through Amazon here: http://www.problogger.net/archives/2006/12/12/whats-the-weirdest-thing-youve-sold-on-amazon/ http://www.problogger.net/archives/2006/12/12/whats-the-weir... (And it's obviously stuck with me -- because I posted a link to it on HN 3.7 years ago: http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=237779 http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=237779 )