We’re super happy about your feedback, guys. Thanks a lot for all your questions. Let’s get you some answers.
Q: As you said, this project has been running for eight years and you put hundreds of hours into it. But it is not enough. You need to create gut quality content and keep it up to date. That means more money. Last but not least: you have to pay for advertisement. The good texts, the original idea is not enough. You need to advertise your site in google, in Social Networks, grow your visitor’s basis to make them comeback.
A: Hey Rafael, Great comment. I definitely agree with you, your website needs to get significant traffic in order to be successfully monetized. I feel obligated to mention now that we’ve never run any ads to promote our website. The thing was that the content and niche of the website was so unique, nobody else was doing it – and supply vs. demand played in our favour, as we mentioned in parts 1 and 2. Google maps were just starting at that time and it was completely new thing for visitors. Also as we didn’t need to pay a 3rd party developer to do the programming, so yes, it was a certain value, but it was not that expensive to develop it either. After all, we consider being it a successful project. It was generating revenue for us but the most important part is that we’ve learned a lot of new things while running this portal.
Q: This continues to be a very interesting case study. Which of your themes would be best suited for a similar project nowadays?
A: Thanks a lot for your questions, Julien! This is, however, THE question of our case study. However, I invite you – and everyone else – to read our final part of our case study and you’ll get the idea 🙂
In previous blogposts, we talked about our side project that earned us passively more than $90.000. We’ve talked about Google AdSense being one of the best option to monetize your popular websites. But lets provide you with some rock-solid examples.
Check out some of our Google Analytics and AdSense examples below. Who knows, maybe you’ll get inspired.
Google Analytics and AdSense over years
Google Analytics and AdSense details
However, there’s one catch: you need to build a website that will attract people, a website that generates enough traffic. How to do that? Well, the best way of doing that is to find a weak spot on the market and make use of it, just like we did it with our camping portal. We admit, this is not so easy anymore thanks to a massive competition driven market.
Nowadays, it’s far more easier to create various product websites. Although the competition is high, you don’t have to spent unimaginable amount of hours creating a complex website that provides users with pin-point information about camps in your county – or about anything else.
“Nowadays, it’s far more easier to create various product websites.”
We’ve already talked about how we’ve managed to utilize the brand new technology blooming years ago, Google Maps, to create a unique product on a non-existent market. To survive the competition, to strive and to prosper for years you must find something that’s totally unique. Something that brings new dimensions to the market you’re in.
You need to look for various ways to distinguish yourself from your competition. Maybe you can provide new and critical added value for your users, just like we’ve done it, by making our website multilingual over the years. Would you like to have your local business’ website in 12 languages? Well, that’s not such a big deal anymore. You can thank us later 🙂
“How to distinguish? Maybe you can provide a new and critical added value for your users, just like we’ve made our website multilingual over the years.”
Today you don’t have to spend insane hours developing new and interesting features in order to be able to distinguish yourself from the competition. And just one such feature won’t be enough. That’s why we’ve created our Full Membership that includes all our portal themes and plugins. You can choose which one suits your business idea the most or even create multiple portals.
This is your opportunity to create your very own local or even global business. With our best WordPress directory themes, you have everything you need at your fingertips.
So, don’t waste your chance of making your very own business. If you wait too long, someone else might take it from you.
As always, don’t hesitate to leave your feedback and questions below. I’m ready to provide you with answers.
Best, Martin
Start your own online business today.
Related posts:
Case study Part 1: How we turned our side project into a business and earned passively more than $90.000
Case study Part 2: How to monetize your side project and turn it into a business
Hi, what about selling tickets? Is it possible for users to buy tickets directly from my website based on your EventGuide theme??? Jin
Hi Jin!
Thanks a lot for question! Of course, there’s an option to redirect your users to your payment gateway.
Have a great day,
Martin
So guys, I wanna ask you one thing before buying this thing: does Event Guide have an option to set recurring events? It’s vital to my business! Thanks, Joel.
Hey Joel.
Thanks a lot for your question! Yes, this is one of the features we’ve felt was key in making a supreme WordPress theme based around events. So, naturally, you can set recurring events for your event venue or your business.
Have a great day,
Martin
Bonjour Martin, bravo pour votre travail remarquable.
J’ai acheté CityGuide et j’ai annulé ma commande, maintenant je regrette et j’envisage de revenir vers vous pour Directory +
J’ai un problème, aujourd’hui, les entreprises peuvent s’inscrire gratuitement sur le site ou nous les inscrivons nous mêmes de manière très limitée (nom, adresse, 1 photo et téléphone) les entreprises peuvent ensuite payées pour une inscription “premium” qui est complète. C’est notre primer revenu.
Notre second revenu est de permettre à ces entreprises de payer un supplément pour être en “vedette” soit sur la page de leur catégorie (en restaurant en vedette sur le choix restaurant par exemple) , soit en vedette, pour une somme plus importante, sur la page d’accueil du site.
Peut on faire cela avec Directory + ?
Merci de votre réponse que j’attends avec impatience.
Pascal
Hello Pascal,
thanks for your compliments. Yes, you can set up packages in a way as you have described. Here is the link how to: http://www.ait-themes.com/doc/users-registration-and-packages-options/?theme=directory2-wordpress-theme
Best regards,
Zlatko
Dear Martin,
Thank you for sharing your great experience. I was fascinated reading your posts and I have this question on my mind. I understand AdSence was not the only revenue generating model, but the main one. Would it really still work today? What might be different from 5 years ago is that ads overload and tracking abuse has led to the development of popular browser extensions like AdBlock, Ghostery, etc. that prevent ads from showing up. My feeling is that relying on AdSense would not generate as much revenue today because of that. What do you think? Is there a way to include this concern into my business idea?
Thanks,
Christophe
Hi Christophe,
Thanks for your comment. I think it really depends on niche. If you focus your business on IT sector, people might have Adblock installed. I think that majority of people don’t even know something like that exists. Let’s not forget that Adwords are still the most revenue generating stream for Google 🙂
With our directory themes you can not only earn with adsense, you can sell access to your website for business owners. It’s all up to your imagination. We’re also putting together some analysis regarding mobile app that will be connected to our directory themes. If you have a minute please fill in the following quick survey. We’d like to hear what you think about it – https://aitthemes.typeform.com/to/hta3No
Thanks,
Martin
Thanks Martin! I’ve answered the questionnaire and ideas are pouring out 🙂 Looking forward!
Hi Martin
Do you need to launch the website before getting approved for Google Adsense?
We submitted sometimes for different projects, but all the time get refused.
What do we need to do to get approved?
Also, is it recommended to replace with another independent ad network?
Hey there,
obviously there shouldn’t be a reason for such an issue – anyhow, please contact directly google service support.
There are plenty of available pay-per-click platforms like:
Google AdWords, Yahoo! Bing Network, Facebook, Advertising.com, …
From the beginning we would definitely advice start with some traffic sources.
Best, Zlatko
In the meantime, Google maps have become quite expensive and you won’t get your directory site up and running without a credit card.
So for this reason, I just dropped some sites because you don’t have support for other map sources, such as mapbox.com, which has started to be used by STRAVA and many others sites.
Hi Milan,
I’m aware of that. We have just released an update to Directory+ theme with OpenstreetMaps support. Citadela Directory plugin also supports OpenstreetMaps. You can work on your projects again if you like.
Regards,
Martin