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Chris, A lot of people have suggested an Amazon affiliate situation, and unless my assumptions are wrong it just won't pay. The following is a copy/paste from

Chris, A lot of people have suggested an Amazon affiliate situation, and unless my assumptions are wrong it just won't pay. The following is a copy/paste from a quick spreadsheet assuming some basic information. Amazon gives affiliates 4% of a standard sale, I assumed a CTR of 1% (which I think is very generous), I guessed a 2% conversion rate, and an average sale of $45. You can see that your monthly take will still be quite low. Traffic 1300000 CTR 1% Delivered 13000 Conversion rate 2% Converted 260 Avg Sale $45 Your cut/sale $1.8 Your take $468 It is entirely possible that your CTR would be higher, but I tend to think not. You said that with Adsense you only earned $400 in a month, which means you were getting a $0.30 CPM. This is pretty low, and even in this ad market I think you should be able to pull off $1.50 or more. An Ad network would help you do that, and your traffic is high enough that they would be willing to talk to you. Of course this means ads on the site. This is what I would do: * Add a forum; with your traffic I think you could have a community discussing issues pretty quickly. I would probably do this as a sister site given your niche name. Of course this 'only' increases your pageviews. * Optimize the site for ads, forget Adsense, and work with the ad networks. Better still, try to beat down doors of people who might want to advertise directly. * Despite the small payoff I do like the idea of selling books related to the topic and would try it. I tend to like the idea of dealing directly with a specific publisher however; your cut will likely be better. * I like the idea of premium content as well. I despise sites that show you only part of a solution, but your site shows that you have enough taste to do this in a way that users would embrace. Good luck, Jer

charuhas 18y ago
Good thoughts, Jer. Funny you should mention ad networks. I approached Federated Media a while back. They loved the traffic, but couldn't deal with the fact that it was a tutorial site. They seemed to think of themselves as Builders of A Great Online Editorial Empire, instead of what they are: ad brokers. "We work with blogs. This isn't a blog." "It's better than a blog. The content is more targeted." "Uh, you're not a blog." Maybe I'll hit up No Starch Press or somebody like that. Thanks!
cschneid 18y ago
Amazon ups their percentage as you sell more items, you go to 6% after less than 10, and keep going up another step or two past that. Makes the numbers a bit more appealing, but still not as good as they could be via a more targeted method.
grokcode 18y ago
I think Amazon could work pretty well. Using Jeremey's numbers, but taking into account Amazon's tiered affiliate percentages, you would actually get 7% assuming you make 260 sales / month. This gives $819 / month. I run a tutorials site for programmers (its much more loosely focused than your site though, with code tutorials, career advice, a few open source projects I've built, etc.), and my Adwords CPC is similar but Amazon earnings are historically 5-6 times better than Adwords. The key is to link to relevant books within the text of an article. In your case what might work is add references section to each category page that contains links to reviews on books on the subject. Review the book well, describing what type of user the book is geared toward, and only recommend books that you personally stand behind. This problogger article contains some nice tips for getting free review copies of books: http://www.problogger.net/archives/2009/02/14/how-to-get-free-books-to-review-on-your-blog/ http://www.problogger.net/archives/2009/02/14/how-to-get-fre... Good luck to you.

charuhas 18y ago

Good thoughts, Jer. Funny you should mention ad networks. I approached Federated Media a while back. They loved the traffic, but couldn't deal with the fact that it was a tutorial site. They seemed to think of themselves as Builders of A Great Online Editorial Empire, instead of what they are: ad brokers. "We work with blogs. This isn't a blog." "It's better than a blog. The content is more targeted." "Uh, you're not a blog." Maybe I'll hit up No Starch Press or somebody like that. Thanks!

cschneid 18y ago

Amazon ups their percentage as you sell more items, you go to 6% after less than 10, and keep going up another step or two past that. Makes the numbers a bit more appealing, but still not as good as they could be via a more targeted method.

grokcode 18y ago

I think Amazon could work pretty well. Using Jeremey's numbers, but taking into account Amazon's tiered affiliate percentages, you would actually get 7% assuming you make 260 sales / month. This gives $819 / month. I run a tutorials site for programmers (its much more loosely focused than your site though, with code tutorials, career advice, a few open source projects I've built, etc.), and my Adwords CPC is similar but Amazon earnings are historically 5-6 times better than Adwords. The key is to link to relevant books within the text of an article. In your case what might work is add references section to each category page that contains links to reviews on books on the subject. Review the book well, describing what type of user the book is geared toward, and only recommend books that you personally stand behind. This problogger article contains some nice tips for getting free review copies of books: http://www.problogger.net/archives/2009/02/14/how-to-get-free-books-to-review-on-your-blog/ http://www.problogger.net/archives/2009/02/14/how-to-get-fre... Good luck to you.