Friday Wrap: How much cash is been left on the table?

One of the things that has been continually on my mind the last few weeks in particular is “How much money am I  shorting myself off each month?”

Needless to say it’s a difficult question to answer and the truth probably is somewhere between a little and quite a lot, in this example I’m going to use one of my most trafficked sites that deals with goldfish I acquired this site back in April of 2007 as a small content site over at digital point forums what I’d bought was 10 unique articles for a price of $10 each, with a domain which was already loaded as a simple php site.

Straight out of the box without any extra work this site started making a few bucks each month about $15 each month after about 4 months I added a little content and revamped the site earnings jumped to around $65 a month and their they stayed for another year or so then I did a redesign added a little store in the back end and earnings crept up a little more finally last year I added heaps of content redesigned it totally and added more products to the store and earnings jumped to a little over $200 per month.

Not bad you might say for a site that cost $100 and I only invested another $200 or so in. In total this site has grossed a little over $5500 in the last 4 plus years.. the thing that keeps nagging me about this site is the amount of traffic it receives more than 1,000,000 page views per year which leads me to just how much more could /should this site be doing?

That’s what today’s wrap is about, here is a list of things that I know have produced results and some things that maybe i should be doing.

1. Content adding content has always increased the revenue on this site, I believe that adding content is not always a winner  I have found it only works on semi decently trafficked sites.
2. Decreasing the number of adsense ads also worked along with better positioning and blending the ads.
3. Incorporating google  search added a few dollars each month.
4. Selling e Books through Click bank added another few dollars.
5. Adding a small store increased my advertising revenue along with the odd sale.

These are things I know that work on a site with a decent amount of traffic, next up here are a few things that I also know could work!

1. Adding other products similar to Adsense, I’m testing info-links and it seems like it’s going to add another $100 that’s a lot to be leaving on the table each month 🙂
2. I got an email the other day offering to translate one of my sites in to other languages, now that’s an old idea I keep forgetting about, could that be worth an extra $25 per language per month?
3. A forum yep I know that kind of moves away from the whole hands off approach, with this site though I get a lot of questions that could help jump start a forum.
4. Develop the shop and add more products?
5. Look for individual advertisers.

I’m not sure just how much a million page views per year is worth? I’d hazard a guess and say its more than $300 a month though. Have you had a site that after the fact you have found you were leaving money on the table each month? what did you do?