I have to re-think my web presence

[voxwoman]

I broke 1 million hits last year on my website that hosts my band and the pagan parenting stuff. I think I am going to sell out and sell ad space there. And this is the site that I keep thinking is "dead"...

UPDATE: More research has uncovered a lot of image scraping. This means that I will be turning that "feature" off, and I think some images here will go away, to be replaced with the snarky "This image stolen from www.musicforthegoddess.com" image I'm going to create today. Because, yes, I'm also guilty of scraping images, but if they're from my own website, I didn't think it mattered.

Well, at least I know my cookie photo is well received. People are giving out my Yule cookies all over the place to calm ranters down in blogs and such. How utterly annoying.

I'm trying to decide in what format I want to resurrect the parenting site - turn it into a blog or a Joomla site... something that's much easier to update, where I don't have to hand-code links for easy navigation, but one that still keeps the look I created, and something that can also host any podcasting that I may decide to do.

Comments

[ozarque.livejournal.com]

Wow. That's an impressive record. Congratulations!

[voxwoman.livejournal.com]

Thank you. It breaks down to 74,000 unique visitors (for the entire year), according to the web statistics program on my site.

This translates into about 40 CDs sold online last year.

It's not as impressive as it seems at first - I believe a lot of it was spammers hitting my forum and photo gallery (which I expunged and turned off commenting features over the summer).

But, if it *is* actual people traffic, and I was selling pageview ad space, that's a significant amount of revenue that I passed up last year.

I used to pride myself in keeping my web space ad-free. I think it's time to swallow that pride and exploit that revenue stream.

*off to do some research*

I don't even have a hit counter

[flat-lander.livejournal.com]

but mine only has genealogy, pictures I share, and some mp3 files.
Do you think you could sell advertising enough to pay the bandwidth bill?

Re: I don't even have a hit counter

[voxwoman.livejournal.com]

My web host has extensive statistics reporting packages. I used to look at them weekly, and last year ignored them completely except once or twice.

I let things sit over there for too long. I looked at my image gallery (for instance) after letting it stew for 6 months or so, and there were 10,000 spam comments or more (I can't remember the entire amount) all over the gallery.

If I can get a "pay per view" ad stream going, there is potential for some actual money coming in, which would certainly help offset the lack of freelance work I've been experiencing.