Online Advertising Directed towards Overseas Chinese

[MakMak]

Hi there, I have a website http://www.canton168.com and I was thinking of putting some advertising on there to cover the costs of hosting it. I know there's things such as Adbrite, etc that are "Pay Per View" but

1) my website does not get enough hits to garner that type of revenue

2) the ads are all irrelevant and I don't want them to be driven away

Google Adsense is great and useful, but I find those ads to be quite useless because most of them are directed towards the General American populace more so than what I'm going for (People interested in China specifically Cantonese) which just gives me ads that say "Learn Chinese!!!".

I was wondering what you guys have in mind that I can use to advertise if anyone. The best idea I have so far is being an associate or affiliate with http://www.yesasia.com and http://www.yesstyle.com because of what they sell. Do you guys have any other ideas, comments, suggestions, (even if it's about my site and not the advertising)? Thanks

[wai ming]

I don't know much about online advertising, but I agree that being an associate/affiliate of YesAsia is good, as they do stock a lot of Cantonese items/titles

[MakMak]

do you know of any other sites that sell similar things? like cantonese (or asian goods) aimed at a western or asians-in-western-society audience?

[wai ming]

I don't know of anything that sells a similar range of goods to YesAsia, but the following two sites sell Cantonese learning materials to western audiences:

• http://www.green-woodpress.com/ - the premier publishers of Cantonese learning materials
  
• http://www.chinabooks.com.au/ - an Australian-based bookshop that has 'Learning Cantonese' as a separate category of books
  

Both also sell non-Cantonese Chinese learning materials as well.

[roddy]

Affiliate sales don't happen unless you've got a page that will appeal to people actually considering buying something. If you did reviews of the relevant DVDs or something, that would be a good match, otherwise I wouldn't expect yesasia and the like to outperform Adsense.

[MakMak]

Yeah, that's what I was going for, that's perfect. Thanks Roddy

The only thing is, the only three ways I know of garnering revenue through a website is 1) Adsense 2) Affiliate Sales 3) Link Referral. The others... just don't really work... do you know any other good version of #2 and #3?

[Prodigal Son]

You're trying to monetize canton168.com is that correct? I really don't think it's worth the trouble to do much more than put Adsense ads on there. Affiliate sales for language learning problems might be worth a shot, though.

[MakMak]

Thanks I'm not trying to so much "make money off my site" but rather "make enough to cover the costs of running"

[roddy]

What does blog costing cost though, a few dollars a month? Adsense should cover that.

Do Chinesepod and PopupChinese have Cantonese courses? They'd be a good fit.

[MakMak]

Currently, my hosting is free because I don't need that much space, bandwidth yadda yadda. As for domain, I don't trust GoDaddy... just what some people told me, so I got it off a company that referred me to.

If you get GoDaddy, domains cost $0.99 to $10

Other places could go for $15-$20

That's yearly fee~~

The thing thought is... if things sounds too good to be true, it probably is.

[roddy]

Godaddy's customer service is pretty shabby, but domain stuff is all automated, there's no reason to ever contact them. I've got a dozen or so domains there, no problems at all. They're huge, hence cheap.

It's a hobby, it costs a little money. Might be worth just accepting that and have a nicer-looking ad-free site. Unless you're running to thousands of uniques a day or are attracting visitors who are actually researching products and services to spend money on, it's all pennies.

[Prodigal Son]

Roddy is absolutely right - unless you raise your traffic above 5-10,000 visitors per month, we're discussing money you couldn't buy much more than noodles with.

[roddy]

Mmmmmmmmmm, noodles.

If you do want to have ads, just put Adsense up and forget about it. Maybe affiliate ads as well, but I suspect they'll just distract from Adsense which is more likely to make you any money.

You might bring in a bit extra if you start pitching your articles to attract ads. 'Cantonese Textbooks', 'Online Cantonese Courses', that kind of thing. But it all comes down to substantial quality traffic. Eyeballs, with dollar signs in them. And I doubt there are many advertisers targeting 'Cantonese --------'

[MakMak]

Alright then. Thanks guys for the input

[deathtrap]

Since domain + hosting costs you a few dollars per month, you would do your readers a great service by NOT putting up ads and go work an hour or two to cover the expenses. Just make your site a quality resource that people enjoy reading and give them that experience in an uncluttered page without ads. If you want to make more money than just to cover the $7 or $10 per month in hosting fees, which in other words means turning it into a business then ads are a very poor source of revenue, especially in terms of the disservice it will cause your visitors.