Ask HN: Have high traffic med site, what to do?
For over a year and a half, I have been blogging on medical topics at healthlifeandstuff.com. The articles, which are written to be friendly and accesible, with the help of SEO, now reach 60-70,000 visitors a month.
I was running Adsense on it, and making up to $1,000 a month, but was removed from the program with no explanation. I was in full compliance, of course.
Now I have the site but don't know what to do with it. I tried other ad programs, but they were either poor quality or had ads for online drugstores which I could not remove and was not comfortable with.
What should I do with the site? I'd love to sell it or something but don't know how/what is normal in these situations.
9 comments
[ 2.7 ms ] story [ 35.2 ms ] threadYou can do more or less of this depending on how comfortable you are with slinging snake oil. For example, I note you have content like http://healthlifeandstuff.com/2010/07/acai-berry-and-weight-... Presumably if you've looked into that you understand, yep, snake oil. Now previously, what was happening with your AdWords ads was you were a) ranking for snake oil and b) referring people to advertisers of snake oil who then c) did rebill fraud on them.
Another option is to use one of the numerous Wordpress plugins to do your own self-hosted ad system, and either a) let people buy ads on your site (they'll mostly be affiliates) at whatever rates you specify or b) either use provided creatives or make your own for affiliate products which you are comfortable selling.
Just as an FYI, the seedier side of Internet marketing is very well acquainted with the notion of selling a scam by calling it a scam. Pretend, for example, that you understand your business model is stealing from unsavvy customers. You know it is vastly easier to attract links to "Scam is a scam" than "Non-existed research suggests that scam might have some merits!", and hence to rank for the first article.
But do people read on the Internet? Suffice it to say that is not a universal habit! So, if you can rank for [acai berry] or even [acai berry scam] with an article that the average 10th grader can tell you concludes "Yeah, probably a scam", you can still get clicks and conversions to the acai berry offers on the same page, presumably from people who didn't or couldn't read and comprehend the page content.
Thanks.
One thing I like about that approach is that in addition to the money, I get to promote books that I actually think people should read, which I consider a non-monetary benefit of having a site with some traffic. Unfortunately the two benefits aren't in perfect harmony, since snake-oil is often the easiest to sell--- you may want to link people to a serious medical book, but your most profitable approach may be to link fad-dieting books. I suppose the right balance depends on how much you value the money v. soapbox aspects of having readers.