I've been doing this online radio thing since 07, and for the last year, we've been profitable, and we don't run a single audio commercial. - Last month I grossed over $600, which isn't going to allow me to quit my job, but it more than pays for my expenses, and it lets me give my wife a little folding money to keep her off my back.
Here's how I do it: NOTE: I use wordpress for my website, but I hear Joomla will allow you to do about the same thing.
1: Content Content Content. I spent 2 years writing reviews almost every day, mostly about the music I was playing. When I put a new song into rotation, I wrote a review on it. When I started making enough money, I started hiring writers to write reviews. Now, I have someone writing music news. You can find music lovers to write fairly cheap, and it frees you up to do other things. But I am consistently adding new reviews, news, and whatever else I have time to put up.
2: SEO. I learned SEO from an honest to god guru, but its not that difficult to get the basics to work for you. Music is especially easy because its pretty much artist and title for the title, tags, and more. You aren't trying to write the artist and title over and over, just natural writing does the trick. Wordpress has a All-In-One SEO plugin that really helps. I link out to other sites that are about the subject I'm writing on, and I link other posts on my website as much as I possibly can. I'm on the front page of google for online country radio, listen to country music, and occasionally country radio, but I get most of my visits from the song reviews (I got over 2500 pageloads yesterday, maybe 5% came from radio related terms). Google george strait rolling on the river of love See where Dixie Streams is?
3: Proper Placement of Advertising. Look at the Google Heat Map -
http://inspiredimpressions.files.wordpress.com/2006/04/Google%20heat%20map.jpg. It shows you where people generally click, they call it an F shape. I use adsense and place a small ad under the title, and a bigger ad inserts itself after 30 days. These 2 ads account for about 40% of my gross, and they're simple text ads.
That's really it. Its hard work, and I know most of you guys are about the radio and not the website. But for now, the money's in the website, not the station
I'd like to know if anybody else is doing something similar or in a totally different direction, and actually makes money doing it.