Free Sites - High Traffic, Extremely Low Conversion - Help?
 

Hey all,

My free site building skills are getting better and better the more I do it. I get accepted to about 95% of the link lists I submit to.

However - despite the fact I'm getting 10k+ hits a month, my conversion rates and even sponsor views are insanely low.

Every free site I launched I see about 30 - 50 people visit the sponsors and maybe once a week, someone will sign up.

Is that normal? It seems extremely low to me. That's about $200 a month from free sites which doesn't seem overly profitable to even bother doing.

I'm becoming very discouraged from the whole thing.

Here are a few of my sites, if you could offer some advice to get more sponsor hits, I'd love to hear it:
Site One
Site Two

Thanks guys.

Hi, Pipboy one thing I noticed is that you have no advertising at all on you index and very little text pushing the surfer to visit you sponsor. You've got a whole page, Use It! I dont think the design is so bad but nothing really grabs my attention on the galleries. You make it very easy for the surfer to not notice your sponsor links.
Hope that helps alittle.

I cant claim to be an expert but I've noticed a lot of text helps me to get surfers interested and clicking thru to the sponsor and se traffic to my free sites.

With the text I use a call to action (my phrase of the week) that seems to work well to.

What the other guys here said, beef up your advertising. Work on juicy text pitches, be in the surfers face!

As far as traffic/conversions are concerned, 10k hits (uniques) to your freesites pr month really isn't that much. How many sites have you built? How often do you build/submit? You have to give it some time for the "snowball" effect to take place. :)

That said, if you get 1 sale/week from 10k uniques to your freesites/month, that isn't so bad at all. Assuming an average CTR of 10% you're sending 1,000 uniques to sponsor which would give you a conversion rate of 1:250. Pretty decent. :D

Hey guys, thanks for the advice.

I just built this freesite that I'm going to be submitting tommorrow:
Redheaded Hentai

I've added a banner to every page and I've added a little 'flavour' text while repositioning the galleries.

Any new advice? Much appreciated guys.

I still don't see anything I want to click on.
You should use more text and less banners. And spice up your tect, giving a sober description of what they can find at cartoon copulations won't give you more clicks either.

Something like "You know you want to see these hentai bitches getting their wet pussies filled with hard cock so CLICK HERE to visit Cartoon Copulations!"
(lame example but you should get the point :) )

Add a lot more sales text.....will help a lot and you will get more SE traffic for months to come |thumb

Hey guys, there is another important question for "FreeSite starters" (for me and others) ....
If I put tons of freesites to ONE DOMAIN, could be traffic affected about it?

That would be a good thing. You could put a fake tgp on your root and send your 404 traffic to that. Or you use it as hub and list all your free sites on it.

Your sites are nice. But you need to work on your sales text. Just a text link like "Visit Cartoon Copulations" or Join for $... will not get you much click throughs and signups. You must evoke an interest in your surfer about the sponsor site.
You didn't mentioned the exact conversion ratio. You said 30-50/day to sponsor with one signup /week. That is around 1:350 Ratio? If that's the case it's not bad. You need to get more surfers to visit your sponsor. Work on your sales texts to improve click throughs.

Hey all,

Would you mind checking out my next freesite and letting me know how you feel about it? I've added more 'flavour text' to butter 'em up around the ads.

Blonde and Beautiful

Thoughts?

Hey Pipboy,

I wouldn't start the warning page off with the warning text. You want to put sales text up top and an eye catching graphix to try to get a click to the sponsor. Even just a preselling text up top telling your visitor more specifics about your site or getting him horny helps increase conversions.

On main, your gallery links were so small, to look for them I ignored your banner text. I'd make the gallery links bigger, and change font color/size of your banner text there to attract more attention.

On the gallery page you got only one link to sponsor and a huge 2257 link on the bottom you don't need. Since your banner's positioned at the end of thumbs, some people might ignore it.

Also, your gallery1/2 layout is the same. Change it up and put a banner in a surprising spot to increase clicks.

BTW, your thumbs on gallery2 page has the wrong aspect ratio. Also, I'd add a third link to your domain root to build your own traffic.

Pipboy, would you click on a link that said "$2.95 full access"? I know I wouldn't and so will lot's of your surfers :)