JasonN
08-30-2006, 11:29 PM
I created this site with the purpose of making it the de facto reference site for my niche (how fly fishermen can imitate insects to catch trout). The niche was chosen because of my interest in it and not based on the keyword payouts, which are mediocre but not awful.
Main URL: http://www.troutnut.com
Some good jump-right-in links to typical specific content:
http://www.troutnut.com/hatch/7/Mayfly-Ephemerella-subvaria-Hendrickson
http://www.troutnut.com/hatch/649/Mayfly-Isonychia-bicolor-Mahogany-Dun
My goal was to present all the most interesting information I could put together on the topic in a way that would be as easy as possible to understand. I've tried to create a lifetime asset that's useful to a lot of people, but I also want to monetize it as well as possible.
I did all the programming (from scratch, no CMS), writing, and photography. It took about 20 months, about 10 of which were full-time work.
Here are a few of the coolest features from a webmaster standpoint:
I have an internal ad serving system to store several different AdSense code versions with different channels and rotate them. I rotate them by session, rather than by pageview, so users aren't bombarded with an obtrusive rainbow of ads, but they see a different color every time they come back.
It also randomizes ad positions by having more than 3 ads in the code for the page and showing some of them only 5% or 10% of the time or something, and stopping when it gets to 3/page. Interestingly, I found a lot of the randomized occasional positions didn't work very well, so I recently disabled many of them because the bottom leaderboard (last in the "queue") got a better CTR.
I have a detailed behind-the-scenes system to keep track of the notes I took from books, which I used as the basis for my articles. I use a quick UBB-code-like tag in the articles to insert Amazon affiliate links to the books.
Any tips/comments/ideas on the site or monetization?
Main URL: http://www.troutnut.com
Some good jump-right-in links to typical specific content:
http://www.troutnut.com/hatch/7/Mayfly-Ephemerella-subvaria-Hendrickson
http://www.troutnut.com/hatch/649/Mayfly-Isonychia-bicolor-Mahogany-Dun
My goal was to present all the most interesting information I could put together on the topic in a way that would be as easy as possible to understand. I've tried to create a lifetime asset that's useful to a lot of people, but I also want to monetize it as well as possible.
I did all the programming (from scratch, no CMS), writing, and photography. It took about 20 months, about 10 of which were full-time work.
Here are a few of the coolest features from a webmaster standpoint:
I have an internal ad serving system to store several different AdSense code versions with different channels and rotate them. I rotate them by session, rather than by pageview, so users aren't bombarded with an obtrusive rainbow of ads, but they see a different color every time they come back.
It also randomizes ad positions by having more than 3 ads in the code for the page and showing some of them only 5% or 10% of the time or something, and stopping when it gets to 3/page. Interestingly, I found a lot of the randomized occasional positions didn't work very well, so I recently disabled many of them because the bottom leaderboard (last in the "queue") got a better CTR.
I have a detailed behind-the-scenes system to keep track of the notes I took from books, which I used as the basis for my articles. I use a quick UBB-code-like tag in the articles to insert Amazon affiliate links to the books.
Any tips/comments/ideas on the site or monetization?