I really think your opportunity lies in putting something at the end of your tutorials. It means you don't have to do a site redesign. Just stick another page at the end, which users get to when they click next. and then you sell something.

I think Amazon can be key. People are looking to learn. That means some of them will be open to buying a book about it. You appear to be an expert in many of these programs, and people will gladly take a recommendation from you about what books are good on which particular subjects.

I'm not saying randomly list books, I'm saying go get them from the library, read them, and actually list what you think are the top three tutorials for each subject you have on your site. If you're upfront somewhere on the site that you earn money from Amazon commissions, I know people don't mind it.

A lot of people have suggested an Amazon affiliate situation, and unless my assumptions are wrong it just won't pay. The following is a copy/paste from a quick spreadsheet assuming some basic information. Amazon gives affiliates 4% of a standard sale, I assumed a CTR of 1% (which I think is very generous), I guessed a 2% conversion rate, and an average sale of $45.

You can see that your monthly take will still be quite low.

Traffic 1300000 CTR 1% Delivered 13000 Conversion rate 2% Converted 260 Avg Sale $45 Your cut/sale $1.8 Your take $468

It is entirely possible that your CTR would be higher, but I tend to think not.

You said that with Adsense you only earned $400 in a month, which means you were getting a $0.30 CPM. This is pretty low, and even in this ad market I think you should be able to pull off $1.50 or more. An Ad network would help you do that, and your traffic is high enough that they would be willing to talk to you. Of course this means ads on the site.

This is what I would do: * Add a forum; with your traffic I think you could have a community discussing issues pretty quickly. I would probably do this as a sister site given your niche name. Of course this 'only' increases your pageviews. * Optimize the site for ads, forget Adsense, and work with the ad networks. Better still, try to beat down doors of people who might want to advertise directly. * Despite the small payoff I do like the idea of selling books related to the topic and would try it. I tend to like the idea of dealing directly with a specific publisher however; your cut will likely be better. * I like the idea of premium content as well. I despise sites that show you only part of a solution, but your site shows that you have enough taste to do this in a way that users would embrace.

Good luck, Jer

I run a tutorials site for programmers (its much more loosely focused than your site though, with code tutorials, career advice, a few open source projects I've built, etc.), and my Adwords CPC is similar but Amazon earnings are historically 5-6 times better than Adwords.

The key is to link to relevant books within the text of an article. In your case what might work is add references section to each category page that contains links to reviews on books on the subject. Review the book well, describing what type of user the book is geared toward, and only recommend books that you personally stand behind. This problogger article contains some nice tips for getting free review copies of books: http://www.problogger.net/archives/2009/02/14/how-to-get-fre...

Good luck to you.

They loved the traffic, but couldn't deal with the fact that it was a tutorial site. They seemed to think of themselves as Builders of A Great Online Editorial Empire, instead of what they are: ad brokers.

"We work with blogs. This isn't a blog."

"It's better than a blog. The content is more targeted."

"Uh, you're not a blog."

Maybe I'll hit up No Starch Press or somebody like that. Thanks!

You say your audience is mostly people at home, learning. Maybe you can advertise for rentacoder (eg "make money working with Access!") or similar services.

Think about what other computer-related problems someone in that situation might have, like anti-virus, certification, jobs.

Hmm. reading back these options sound kind of sleazy. You could experiment with a tip jar as well. Don't write off display ads either -- give them an honest try for a couple of months.

Package up similar content in a way that is easy to deliver to employers for them to give to employees for training. Enroll your employees in our MS Word training, $45 per employee, just as effective as having a consultant or courses but at one-tenth the cost. You don't even have to develop the course yourself -- there are almost certainly a million available, and since they're infinitely scalable information products they should have generous affiliate payouts.

It doesn't matter if most people are using your site for work. They're the fuel in the rocket, the upsell to the course is the payload.

At the college I teach at we have courses for administrative assistants and I thought perhaps you could sell courses that are cheaper and better.

Good luck on figuring out how to monetize your site.

Or start running AdSense, and get some sort of baseline for private ad deals.

Either a premium rate phone line or possible a prepaid call in 10 minute units.