Ask HN: How to best monetize a website with 1M hits per year?

At $30 CPM, that sounds pretty amazing already. My guess is that you could only make more by selling things directly on the site. Baby products are quite a profitable niche, so you might be able to tie up as an affiliate with some online stores. Check out this Mixergy interview of Trevor Ginn, who started Hello Baby (http://www.hellobabydirect.co.uk/) and seems to be doing quite well - http://mixergy.com/trevor-ginn-interview.

What do you mean by "hits", it's not a well defined term. Are you talking about page views, visits, visitors, unique visitors, etc ?

I have to agree with revorad - $30 CPM is quite good. I assume that comes from the niche market plus the location - what percentage of hits are coming from Sweden/Scandinavia?

I would suggest trying to make some affiliate partnerships with companies selling baby products. Hopefully some of the moms visiting your site will buy their goods after reading your content (which will net you a % of their expenditures).

Best regards and if you need any help setting up affiliate partnerships, let me know. I am working with some larger companies on that basis as well.

Maybe you should also ask how you can grow traffic. If you're already seeing $30 eCPM, then there's a good chance that revenue would grow in line with traffic.

First of all as you are new to online business, I hope your numbers are more than just looking at screenshots & videos. You should actually have your own traffic statistics installed on the website to see if the stats add up as well as, verify the third party ads (if its a network then join that network and have the site let you run your ads on there for a while) although, this still can be faked via buying traffic & getting them to click ads so thats just a little warning/piece of advice for you.

With regards to monetizing the site, I would look at how the site is currently monetized. Why? Well in my opnion ads are one of the best indicator of monetization because, if they are converting well (for instance if the third party is a CPC network) then you could find a similar company/the same one and replace those adverts with CPA adverts - instead of getting paid per click you would get paid per action (generally via a purchase - although this tends to be much higher than CPC earnings - hence affiliates doing Adsense/Adwords Arbitrage etc).

Secondly, you could easily roll out a membership area (if the site doesn't have one) and offer paid memberships with certain upgrades. Theres loads of stuff you can do with the membership area to monetize your users.

This leads onto point 3, which if the site isn't already you should send a weekly/monthly newsletter to the members (if you implement a membership area) or to people who are subscribed to the mailing list (you don't even need a membership area to do this - just offer a newsletter on your site - which you can sell advertising in, as well as offering products to them again using CPA networks or your own suppliers).

Fourthly, you could roll out an iPhone/Android App (infact you could make a few "parenting" apps) and have them either as paid apps or free apps (which unless the apps provide real value added service, I would opt for the free app option which can be monetized via ads within the app although this isn't your only option).

Additionally, I saw that you said 80% of the traffic is from Google. This is a double-edged sword - you're willing to lie and die by Google - If one day Google decides to re-rank your site or changes its algorithms your site could easily lose 80% of its traffic overnight. In order to combat this, you need to diversify the traffic to the site as well as, at the same time you still need to take advantage of the traffic Google commands which means, quite simply adding more content, doing on-page seo and then focusing on off-page seo. However, if you are focusing on diversifying your traffic streams via link exchanges/content exchanges etc this will already be helping your off-page seo strategy (to some extent) so you can rank for more long-tail keywords, as well as increase the rankings of your current positions which means more traffic to the site.

With all things considered, you have a lot of potential advertising/monetization options and I haven't even touched most of the options you could implement but you should focus on growing the revenue streams as well as, diversifying your traffic stream so that your site will continue to grow and provide a nice return from your investment.

You've got some good advice already. After you do your due diligence and varify all the stats and make sure they're accurate, there's different revenue models you can add to your site.

You need to make sure the visitors stay around longer though, so more interaction. Membership, newsletter, capture email, quizes and surveys, and improve your content on the website. Without really seeing the website, the advice here will be a bit general.

So if it were me, and since I don't think I know everything and I believe that there are smarter people out there and experts, if I bought the site, I'd find a really successful internet marketer and pay him a fee to review the website and offer advice/consultation. That would pay for itself quickly once the ideas and strategies are implemented. Or you can pay a percentage of the extra profits generated from their advice and help that you wouldn't have gotten otherwise.

Read up more on online marketing. Join a few online marketing forums. Split tests and tweak things. Good luck.