When to Make a Website Profitable

Today we’re going to take another look at BeFunGames to discuss the right time to take a website and start making some real money with it. For those of you who haven’t been following the blog, BeFunGames is our own start-up. It’s a fun game site where users can compete in tournaments, win prizes, etc. Over the last month we’ve exploded to over 1000 visitors a day. You can see the article below to learn how we got there, but today’s lesson is in taking the traffic your website has and making money off it the right way, at the right time.

Take for example MySpace. I truly believe that a large part of the reason their visitors are deserting them is because of the ridiculous amount of advertising on the website. While it did (and probably still does) get them some great money, the website’s load time is unreasonable because of all the ads. Facebook – on the other hand – has advertising that seems to make them a really great profit without destroying the user interface and site load time.

As for BeFunGames, I’d say we’re somewhere in the middle. Through our research we’ve learned that we should probably be making triple what we’re making now. Why aren’t we then? Because we’re still in an extremely large growth stage. Yes, there are some ads on the site right now, but none of them break the design or are overly distracting. The goal right now – and how I feel it should be for all start-ups at this stage – is to gain momentum. We don’t just want all of our traffic from SEO to come and go. We’re looking to increase our direct traffic – the users that come back by themselves again and again – because that’s what separates the successful websites from the “spammy” looking websites.

Having minimal advertising on a website might not be something you necessarily want to do, but in my opinion it’s really something that you have to do if you want to make it big. Of course, that’s not all that counts. Having a really great website by the guys here at Web2 will definitely help you out