Ask HN: Have high traffic med site, what to do? | Hacker News Reader

Ask HN: Have high traffic med site, what to do?

5 pointsgohat9 comments

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.

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The standard answer to "I have a high traffic site in a vertical which is awash in cash and AdSense is not an option" is affiliate ads. In particular, if your site is trusted, you can bolt on a section with more commercially oriented content (such as, e.g., reviews of exercise- or diet-related info products) and rank on the strength of trust built through your non-commercial content.

You 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.

Its pretty tragic if they removed him from Adsense for that reason. He writes an article that concludes that there is no evidence that Acai leads to weight loss and then Google chooses to serve the snake oil ads and dings him for it.

Their reason for dropping him may or may not be related to the vertical -- I'm just explaining the mechanics of why his site was earning $1,000 a month.

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.

Those are some good ideas, thanks. Again, a lot is my comfort level. Will definitely look into it; maybe there are some that I am fine with, and the margins could be quite good.

Have you tried Amazon affiliate links? If you're willing to put in some manual effort in selecting books, you could put a "further reading" type link at the bottom of articles that'd actually be relevant.

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.

Feel free to mail me (no contact info on your profile). My 9-5 corporate company may he interested in this (alternative healthcare). James.

thanks - don't see your email tho? mine is dgurevich5@gmail.com

I'd like to contact you directly, mind adding your email address to your profile? Or check my profile and contact me.

Thanks.

Sure, done, thanks.

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