I had a very intriguing mail from Ray Theakston earlier today letting me know he has a bit of a question for me about how to monetise his increasingly popular site. Uniquely, he’s asked me the question by posting it publicly on his blog. However, I’ve reproduced his post below for your reading convenience.

Dear Kirsty,

I’ve just relaunched a site that was badly neglected. It regularly had thousands of visitors daily peaking at 125,000 and I didn’t think anything of it but only recently that figure dropped to a lowly 200.

I’ve removed all of the original content of the site and I have spent the first few weeks of August re-building up the pages based around my previous most popular keywords and images.

After it’s redesign launch four weeks ago, I’m now attracting 1,000-4,000 unique visitors daily looking at between 5,000-22,000 pages and this figure is climbing daily.

I’m not quite sure of the traffic as Servage, Statcounter and Google Analytics are all giving me different results. This may be down to how I am presenting the content. The graph above displays the lowest figures of the three, so it’s looking promising.

Speaking of Google, they have been in touch to say that I can’t promote Google Adsense on the site. You see the content is a bit risque, as you’ll soon tell from my most popular pages:

/drunkcelebs/drunk-celebs-upskirt/
/drunkcelebs/drunk-celebs-see-through/
/drunkcelebs/drunk-celebs-flashing/
/drunkcelebs/drunk-celebs-nipple-slip/

I’m wondering how I can monetise the site. I don’t want to fill it with full adult porn adverts, so is there anything more subtle I could do?

I’m sure many merchants in the affiliate marketing space won’t want to be associated with a site that focuses on drunk celebrities and includes the odd not-safe-for-work image. The site has profited in the early days though from promoting the likes of Figleaves and JackpotJoy with traditional banners.

I’ve also spotted that a link from my Befuddle home page to an rss feed of my shopping site ShopCodes is ranking highly for some voucher code related keywords. So whilst that page was created as an experiment, I think the site has the potential to exploit the retail market.

Google certainly seems to like the influence of it’s status, being eight years old with a PR4 and it’s WordPress formatting.

My pages are being indexed within hours of posting. The quickest I’ve spotted is two hours between page creation and the page to be indexed by Google on page 1 and for someone to search for a celebrity and land on my site.

The site is on page 1 of Google for the following terms if not the #1 spot itself.

# drunk celebs
# drunk celebrities
# celebs
# uk celebs

Who or what can I promote? You’ll see there’s an advert on there for an adult dating site but that is merely a place holder as I want to see what click-throughs it receives. (At the time of writing, it’s got a CTR of 1.02%)

I also know I’ve got a worldwide audience. Visitors from 147 different countries have visited just recently and this is broken down as such …

The UK appears low at 8% but Analytics says the UK accounts for 33% of my traffic and the visitors spend an average of 4.5 minutes viewing content. They seem to stick around

All the best. Cheers,
Ray

Greetings Raymond!

What an interesting site. I saw it prior to your re-launch and the new design definately makes it way more user friendly and “sticky”.

I suppose the issue that you have is as Adsense says – the content is a little on the “naughty” side. It’s tabloid naughty though, not terribly XXX adult. It probably is just risque enough to put a few merchants off, however it clearly brings you in a lot of traffic. Getting rid of it is therefore not an option!

I could agonise over who will and won’t let you promote them, but lets do this from an optimistic point of view. In an ideal world where anyone and everyone you apply to accepts you with open arms.

There Are A Lot of Obvious Product Areas of Appeal To Your Users

For every one of your celebrity names, I’d create a shopping section / category. Link to it from your drunk celeb categories and make “shop for celeb gear” part of your main menu structure. Given your varied demographic, I might create a page or pages that features offers from your top 2 or 3 countries. If it became worth your while later on you could use some IP detecting technology to send your visitors to the right pages for their country of origin.  You can then use these pages to punt the following: -

• Any products your celebs are currently putting their name to. All the usual things celebs get involved with, perfumes, aftershave, own brand clothing labels. David and Victoria Beckham are an excellent example of celeb branding gone mad.
• Any products they have been seen to be wearing.  Or products that look a lot like some controversial / popular outfit a celeb has recently been papped in. Merchants are always quick to talk about when something they’re stocking has been seen on a celeb or featured in a glossy. Sign up to their newsletters and use their info to help you quickly and efficiently place up to the minute, relevant products on your pages.
• Any products celebs have said they use.  For example, loads of Hollywood types are squeezing themselves into SPANX knickers to make themselves look slim on that red carpet.  Also celebs are often dropping names of skincare products such as Zelens (Cat Deely and Thandie Newton use this product).
• Products celebs are being paid to advertise. Beyonce is currently advertising L’Oreal products, David Beckham is or has been on Nike products, and lets not forget Dita Von Teese being the current face of wonderbra.
• Less excitingly, there’s always the old biography and autobiography book sales plus any albums currently on release by your featured celebs.
• Push subscription offers to celebrity gossip and style magazines.

Less Directly Related:

• Add a general shopping section with offers and product articles of interest to your demographic.
• Use your advertising space to promote particularly irresistable discount code offers and current merchant sales.
• As you’ll have already worked out, a bit of bingo type stuff is a decent fit for your audience.  I have no idea what the conversion rates would be like.  I’m suspecting less than stellar.
• Start gathering newsletter subscribers as soon as possible and push the odd irresistable offer at your members.   Could bring you in a nice dump of money every now and again if you choose your offers wisely and don’t pollute the subscribers with too much marketing rubbish.
• General designer clothing offers could be a good fit.  Merchants like Yoox give a good opportunity to help wannabe celebs find some discount designer bling.

Equally, anything and everything from the above sets of ideas could simply be added into a fully integrated shopping area of the site without cluttering your celeb pages at all.  Adding quality, unique content relating to these product areas would probably lead to some pretty fine search engine positions given the trustrank your domain probably has.

Loads of people online search for products they’ve seen on TV and celebs.  If you get your SEO right and make sure you keep up to date with what Oprah is talking about or what bra GMTV have just recommended, you could get some really sweet sales.

Whilst We’re Here, You Can Further Develop Your Traffic Through The Addition Of: -

• Celebrity news articles focusing on your users’ area of interest. Mainly documented drunken antics (of which there are many), gossip about what they *might* have done, and also celebrity trainwreck type stories. Britney Spears and Lindsay Lohan could probably populate a site all on their own. Stories such as the hilarious Ralph Fiennes incident involving a Qantas air hostess and an airplane toilet would have your users returning again and again.

I hope this has given you some ideas Ray.  To be honest I sort of envy you this site, I’d really love to have something like this to have a bit of a play around with.  I think that with the right content, product placement, and SEO you will have an extremely valuable bit of internet real estate on your hands.

You may even be able to give me back that fiver you whipped out from under my nose in Newcastle!

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