Jasmine, who used to work with at Kiwibox, recently launched Glamourite.com, a blog devoted to life in New York City. Along with 10 “Glamourites,” Jasmine chronicles nightlife in the big city. While I know very little about nightlife, I know about making money online. I recently gave Jasmine some suggestions to improve monetization on her site, and she graciously allowed me to post my ideas.
Monetization Ideas

• The adsense ads on the site have a gray border around them. I would alter the adsense code to make the border of the ads white, and therefore blend the ads into the site a lot more. From my experiences, this will significantly improve click through rates on the ads.
• To be more aggressive with the ads, I would use the adsense injection plugin for wordpress. It will randomly insert an Adsense box ad unit into one post on the page. Having ads this close to the content can generate some very good click through rates.
• I might also experiment with the adsense link unit ads that will show a search term instead of an actual ad. I have read that they can perform well. I would put them in place of the gevalia affiliate program on the right side bar.

Traffic Ideas

The site has a ton of interesting content, and I think it I think it would help to do more to expose visitors to additional content.

• I would using the related post plugin. After each post, the plugin will automatically provide links to related posts on the blog. It is a great way to get visitors deeper into the site.
• Post the 10 most popular posts up in the right or left sidebar to encourage visitors to explore the site.
• Generating traffic from other New York focused blogs would be great for Glamourite’s traffic. I would start a series of posts to highlight/review favorite nyc blogs or favorite posts in some of these blogs in order to drive some traffic their way and get their attention so that they eventually link to Glamourite.
• Setting up a myspace page and linking to it from the site would be a good idea. A lot of Glamourite’s target audience is probably on myspace, and it wouldn’t hurt to build up a friends list there.

Content/Partnership Ideas

• Every Thursday, I would have each of the glamourite ladies write a sentence or two about a weekend thing to do and then put it together in one post. This type of regularly scheduled content will help to build the audience and may help to garner linking attention from other sites.
• If the site becomes more events focused, I would syndicate RSS event listings from flavorpill, eventful, and upcoming and post them on the site. This would provide new fresh content with minimal work.
• For partnerships, I would start discussion with a club promotion site like clubplanet or velvetlist to work out a deal where one of the glamourites could attend one of their events per week and post about it and/or include it in the weekly things to do post mentioned above in exchange for some promotion.

The ideas above work on both the monetization and the traffic side of the site. These changes would boost key drives in the monetization framework that I have written about before, and should have a strong positive impact on the site.

I plan on doing more case studies in the future. If you would like your site to be reviewed, please email me at paul@monetizetraffic.com.