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Originally Posted by MrLeN
The last thing you want to do is start paying people for traffic. Trust me. When I first started out, I spent THOUSANDS of dollars - and made JACK.
What you need to do is get your site growing "naturally" from search engines, link referrals and word of mouth.
If you can get your site growing under those conditions, THEN and ONLY then should you consider paying money for advertising. And even then it probably wouldn't be worth it if you don't have your own product and a high markup.
This advice is 110% correct, true, useful, and is from personal experience.
MrLeN
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I know of lots of people that use AdWords to make lots of money... myself included. You just need to write effective ad copy, have a decent landing page, and be able to track what is working and what isn't. It's not rocket science, it's called "Test, analyze, and adjust" in the words of Mike Sack of Inceptor.
I don't totally agree on the PHP deal either. If you can get a site built as static pages, you can use mod_rewrite or ISAPI Rewrite if you decide you need to add dynamic components. Our sites all say page-name.html but they are dynamic.
Alli gave some good advice. He's showing using a diverse number of methods, which helps to future-proof your marketing campaign.
One thing I can tell you for sure is that you're going to need more links. Check
here for a growing list of directories that you can post to for starters.
When you're not selling stuff, it's tough to get a decent return on any paid advertising. You'd need to be very selective about the terms you use in order to make money off of AdSense by paying AdWords. I have one friend that is able to do it, but most people fail miserably at it.
You're most likely going to need to get a large link building campaign going for a site like yours. It seems to be pretty diverse, so each topic will really need another link building campaign centered around it. You've got articles, software, templates, scripts, hosting, wallpaper, contests and a lot more. What you've got here is an identity crisis. What is your goal with the site? You can't be everything. Start out with one topic to work on (with a link building campaign), then work on the next one, then repeat.
You're actually targeting some competitive ground here. I know because I have a friend that has the same type of content as you - he just splits his over a few dozen dommains so each site is very focused and he can have keywords in the domain names. That's much easier to get to work, but yours is doable. He has 62,000 pages on his screensavers site alone and is showing 70,000 links in Yahoo right now so you have something to compare yourself to.
In any case, you're going to be building content for a long time, getting links for quite a while, and probably going to be spending a lot of time banging your head on the wall trying to make a decent amount of money from AdSense on a site like this. My friend has done it (with a lot of advice along the way from multiple
SEO pros - myself included), so it can be done. But it takes time and a whole lot of hard work to get there.
Brian.