I have a fairly high volume site. It gets about 65,000 uniques and 220,000 page views a month, but it makes no money ($83 in click through ads in April). This site used to make 5 times this before the economy tanked.
I need to do a major redesign on the site. You can see it at HarpTab.com. The website design is at least 7 years old. Many of the layouts are broken or not displaying well. Google’s webmaster tools has lots of problems with the site.
Originally, I took a bunch of phone song snippets and converted them to harmonica tab. I then made a little flash thingy that plays the snippets. Harmonica players are a huge demographic.
The most popular part of the site is the area where I personally made some harmonica tab of riffs and songs. These hand crafted pages get the lion’s share of the hits.
I need to place ads on the pages in a way to maximize the clicks. I need alternatives to Google. The eBay ads pay about $50 a month and I need a way to make them pay better. My eBay income dropped by 2/3 when they changed the way they calculate earnings.
I am thinking of bringing some of the pages back to a higher page rank (JT30.com) site and leveraging the other sites higher place in the search engines.
Anyone have an idea how to monetize a very focused site with good traffic?