1. Create a clear next action on your front page. I'd bet you have a significant bounce rate right now -- people arriving from a search engine or linking site, and leaving within 5 seconds because they're not clear what the site has to offer.<p>--1a. I'd get more of the articles and forum posts above the fold. These are potentially some of your best spots for getting click-throughs.<p>--1b. Consolidate that massive top menu. Make more options part of the sub-menus, or let some areas (polls, photos) just stand as content sections on the main page.<p>--1c. Remove or move that topmost nav bar to the footer. None of those links are priorities; it's just taking up space.<p>2. It doesn't look like you're currently using Google Analytics? You should really add it, and get a sense of where your traffic is coming from. Particularly where your search traffic is coming from.<p>--2a. Check which keywords you're getting traffic from that have a high(er) bounce rate. This can be a good guide for new articles. You could also write some code (or see if your CMS has a module/plugin to do this, Wordpress does) to display a message based on the search terms used to enter the site, and recommend some next pages.<p>3. Style your AdSense ads to get a better click-through rate. ViperChill recently posted a great case-study: <a href="http://www.viperchill.com/adsense-account-income/" rel="nofollow">http://www.viperchill.com/adsense-account-income/</a><p>4. Nuke your current forums. They're dead, and will take years to gain momentum in their current forum. Use software that does a better job of showing activity, and start small with <i>one</i> (two or three at max) broad section.<p>Don't take your tiny audience and make them look for conversations in 50 different rooms. Start with <i>one</i> room for everyone to go into, and it will be easier for newcomers to see conversations happening and join them. You can create more specialized sub-forums later.
That's cool. Sounds insane, but I actually thing pet services and businesses are totally under appreciated. People are crazy about and spend shitloads of money on their pets, even in hard financial times, and there are very few real entrepreneurs taking advantage of it.
I run an ecommerce business that sells jellyfish aquariums: <a href="http://www.jellyfishart.com" rel="nofollow">http://www.jellyfishart.com</a><p>I know, weird. But jellyfish are a hot new trend in personal aquariums. We just started an affiliate program that is doing really well. Our affiliate commission is 5%, conversion rate is 0.25% and average purchase is $198. Would you be interested in signing up as one of our affiliates? We have banner ads you can run.<p><a href="http://www.jellyfishart.com//affiliate_info.asp" rel="nofollow">http://www.jellyfishart.com//affiliate_info.asp</a>
This is kind of a hot niche with website flippers at the moment. With the domains age you might be able to sell it pretty quickly on a place like Flippa.<p>Otherwise, if you aren't looking for quick cash, I'd sit on it and see how the AdSense performs while trying out some affiliate offers. Standard practices for content sites like this. You'll have a better idea of its worth after a few months.
Are you a pet lover?<p>It's hard to invest in something like that for a long time if you're not passionate about it. That doesn't mean that you shouldn't do something with it if you're not, but maybe you could find someone who is excited about it and have them help you with ideas and content?<p>One idea is that you could feature a member and their pet on the home page each week. Kind of like how there is an "ADOPTIVE PET OF THE WEEK" — which isn't actually a pet of the week, it's just a random pet with each page load.<p>This would take some more work, but you could do some really cool things with geolocation, like post adoptable pets and upcoming community events that are actually in the area.
Believe it or not my friend owns <a href="http://www.urbanpup.com/" rel="nofollow">http://www.urbanpup.com/</a><p>It's the biggest manufacturer and reatailer of pet clothes in the UK. Maybe you should get in touch and see if you stock some of their goods?
Whether it is worth something or not is what you'll find when you try to auction it, but at 200 hits per day that's not bad at all.<p>You could start with putting a pet lovers forum on it and see if it takes off, sounds like the perfect domain for it.
Talk to pet lovers and see what they need.
I have a dog and here are some of my issues... what is the best type of dog/pet insurance out there? What is the best type of dog food out there? Where can I get a toy my dog won't destroy in 2 hours? Where are some of the best places to take my dog around Boston? Am not looking - but is there a place for pet owners to meet other single pet owners? Joel Spolsky mentioned in his mixergy interview that he wanted to create versions of stackoverflow...
Wow, the SEO on this could be improved drastically:<p>* Install Google Analytics. Collect some data on what search terms visitors are coming in on.<p>* Use the Google Keyword Tool: <a href="https://adwords.google.com/select/KeywordToolExternal" rel="nofollow">https://adwords.google.com/select/KeywordToolExternal</a> to find what keyphrases you could compete well on. You have to strike a balance between finding something with decent search volume, but not too much competition.<p>* Use SEO Best Practices. For example:<p>- Your home page currently has a TITLE tag of "onlyforpetlovers". Something like "pet social networking - onlyforpetlovers" would be better.<p>- Your search results pages could be huge traffic sources, but the TITLE tags of them are all "Pet friendly resources," and there are no links to results pages for crawlers to access. If you had links in addition to search, you could have a link saying "pet friendly hotels in chicago" with a link to search results with the TITLE tag "pet friendly hotels in chicago."<p>Just those couple of things would greatly increase your traffic.
Personally I'd take a look at where it does well on certain Google search terms and then try to build and scrape data from other websites that you could use (legally of-course) like pull in twitter feeds or Wikipedia articles from DBpedia. Tidy up the design and get rid of the dead wood on the site. And then flip the site in a few months when traffic starts to pick up.<p>It's pretty much what Demand Media does. But if you are really passionate about pets and don't mind not turning it around for profit then I'd just keep it updated and try to build a community out of the niche that it has.
Check out <a href="http://dogster.com" rel="nofollow">http://dogster.com</a> and <a href="http://catster.com" rel="nofollow">http://catster.com</a> for some ideas.
decent affiliate marketing possibilities, I'd a thought. Get some quality content. Offer deals on... I dunno, whatever pet owners might buy.<p>Old-skool affiliate model FTW