Go to a startup meetup and hook up with someone you think will be great at marketing or knows something about the chat space that you don't.
Partner with them on making this more profitable.
Ask HN: What to do with 3K visitors a month?
21–30 of 42 posts
Re: Ask HN: What to do with 3K visitors a month?
#22>"...but I dont have any clue on how to make it more profitable."
You probably won't fix that in this thread if you don't share the URL or even enough information about your chat site for people to give educated feedback.
What kind of users are they? Do they chat about everything or is there a theme or geographical niche? What kinds of ads are displaying through adsense? How long did it take you to get to 3k users? Do you feel like it will be hard to get more? Why did you throw up adsense at such low traffic?
Re: Ask HN: What to do with 3K visitors a month?
#23It's a great feeling knowing that you've built something which is used by thousands of people, but even better when it's generating revenue to cover the costs (your time, hosting, etc). However, to put things in perspective you're really only talking about 100 visitors per day and $1 in revenue. Factoring that, I suggest focusing more on improving the site, growing it's traffic and then when it passes 500 visitors per day start focusing on revenue. If you prefer the AdSense route, make sure you've optimized your ad placements and the type of ads you're serving.
This advice is coming from someone who has a site doing roughly $5k month from AdSense via 275k+ visitors / 1.3M+ pageviews and it makes up about 30% of the site's revenue. Rest is from paid plans & affiliate marketing.
Re: Ask HN: What to do with 3K visitors a month?
#24Does your community share some set of problems in common? If so, look for sponsorship by an organization that makes money solving those problems.
Re: Ask HN: What to do with 3K visitors a month?
#25"Actors are cattle." - Alfred Hitchcock
Please don't make unsubstantive comments like this here.
Re: Ask HN: What to do with 3K visitors a month?
#26It's a great feeling knowing that you've built something which is used by thousands of people, but even better when it's generating revenue to cover the costs (your time, hosting, etc). However, to put things in perspective you're really only talking about 100 visitors per day and $1 in revenue. Factoring that, I suggest focusing more on improving the site, growing it's traffic and then when it passes 500 visitors pe…
Follow this advice! 3k users is awesome. It validates your product. Get more users to do more money.
It is a nice challenge and you'll learn a lot.
Re: Ask HN: What to do with 3K visitors a month?
#27Dont. We haven't monetized hackernoon.com at all and have instead focused on good content and we are now well into the millions of monthly uniques. Its not worth the time to monitize 3k visitors
This is highly anecdotal. You don't know how you would have done had you monetized it. Potentially just as well.
Re: Ask HN: What to do with 3K visitors a month?
#28Very nice, thanks for the feedback. To give it a bit more context.
The reason I'm not sharing the url is because the code is somewhat outdated and may be insecure. In my spare time I'm working on a new version which matches some of the recent security 'standards'. The website started as a project just for learning how to develop a basic website with interaction between users. So about seven years ago I tried becoming new instance of \Zuckerberg. I started chatting the website all over de chat-places. I added a twitter account, following (by hand :)) all those singles and lonely people out there hoping they follow back. Greeting them every day and helping other twitter addicts keeping their following list clean with new tools also presented within a backoffice on the same website.
My situation only allows me to work just a couple of hours a week on a side project. The reason I'm looking for some new ideas to monetize the project a bit more is because I want to buy a new house, like within a year or so. Just need a 100K in euros additionally to buy a nice place to give my son the full experience of life as much as possible in the way me and my wife dream about it. I can't just switch jobs, because the company I work for did alot for me. And I am a v ery loyal person when it comes to people/businesses helping me out with stuff.
Now, for the chat service, its more like a lonely-chat-service. About 100 visitors a day, saying "Hi, is there anyone around here?" or something like that. Then, the silence is killing them at which point they probably start clicking thos e ads :) So as I removed the usefull stuff from the website, people started clicking more on ads, to just get away.
When I read the feedback, I think I should just add some sort of feedback button or create a popup with a textarea in which they can add their dream they expected to get in by entering the website. And then start building them those dream s, for just a penny a day.
Re: Ask HN: What to do with 3K visitors a month?
#29$30/month is pretty good for 3k in visitors i think. I get about 10k visitors and only make $25 off adsense. What's your website address? I'd love to see where your ad placement is at. Maybe it has to do with the amount of time the users are on the site. In terms of getting more $, affiliate income makes lots of money. In the old days when we used to run sites with adsense and affiliates, the affiliate income account…
To bad, I have no idea what ads to target. Could be just anything. But I guess adult content would do pretty well. Most of the people really talk some nasty stuff.
Re: Ask HN: What to do with 3K visitors a month?
#30Very nice, thanks for the feedback. To give it a bit more context. The reason I'm not sharing the url is because the code is somewhat outdated and may be insecure. In my spare time I'm working on a new version which matches some of the recent security 'standards'. The website started as a project just for learning how to develop a basic website with interaction between users. So about seven years ago I tried becoming…
That's a great dream and a great goal. Unfortunate there isn't a magic way to make 100k from a website without building a good product. I wish there was a way.
As for the 100 visitors saying "Hi, is anyone around here?" The chicken and the egg problem is a very common problem with social sites. The most common way I've seen this solved is by the owners of the site "faking" responses or filling in their site with fake content to look like it is active. They do this just until the site takes off. But it sounds like your project is not that large yet and needs to be built up larger. I'd say for you to keep at it or start another project that you can get more traction in.
For what it's worth... In my experience, only working a couple hours a week on a side project won't get you anywhere fast. I usually spend around 15 on my side projects a week. Otherwise, nothing will get done on them. You just need to make the time. As Gary Vaynerchuk puts it... go to work, go home, kiss the dog, and between 9PM and 1AM you need to crush it.
I wish you the best and hope you can make something happen.
Edit: Here's that keynote where Gary talks about having a side project and working 9-5. https://youtu.be/EhqZ0RU95d4?t=11m50s