Earning from Advertising Online

So... my earnings from advertising are linearly related to the number of ads available to be seen on the site, which = number of pages x number of ads per page.

I have done most of what I can to maximize the number of ads per page; the next step would be to find more advertising partners, but at the moment I don't have any new ideas on how to do that, and the desirable real estate above the fold on my pages is already occupied.

So I need to take steps to increase the number of pages on my site.

Adding Content

The obvious way is to add new content, which I do practically every day. I'm a fast and prolific writer, which certainly helps, but I've also got a large stock of photos taken throughout a busy life all over the world. Italy is the biggest draw on my site, so lately I've been putting up more of the thousands of photos I've taken all over Italy. There's always something new to photograph in Italy (and I can do so anytime, thanks to the digital camera I fixed myself) - and I have not yet even begun to exploit my old albums of photos taken in 30 years of travel to all corners of the world.

Splitting Pages

When adding material to the site in the past, I have sometimes been lazy, simply piling a new article onto an existing, related page rather than creating a new page: this was mostly to avoid the hassle of figuring out where in the site's navigation to fit a new page. The result has been some very long pages, and a waste of advertising opportunities. So I must be more disciplined about that.

I've even gone back to split up a few pages, especially the Italian slang page which has been one of the most popular on my site since I started it a few months ago (it grows whenever I think of something to add - Italian slang is a never-ending goldmine of material!). Having split this page into two (so far) more or less equal parts also yields a useful statistic: I know how many people actually read to the end of page 1, because the only way to get to page 2 is a link from the bottom of page 1.

later: As you can see, I later split the slang section into one page per letter of the alphabet.

Adding Comments Pages

Some months ago I added blogging software (WordPress) to a subsection of my site as a way to enable people to leave comments publicly instead of via email. This isn't as effective in driving "conversation" as having comments on the pages themselves, as on a fully bloggy site, but we'll just have to live with that - for many reasons, I am not going to put my entire site into blog format at this stage of the game.

Adding comments does, however, potentially double the number of pages on my site (whenever I get around to actually creating a comments page for every page on the site) - and I know from my site logs that those pages are getting visitors, although not many of them actually comment. The few who do are in effect adding to my content, and/or giving me new ideas about what I should add to the site - help that's always welcome!

And, last but not least, the comments pages are a venue for more advertising. Just a few weeks ago I finally figured out how to get AdSense advertising into WordPress, thanks in part to a tip from John Chow.