Making money with your blog is easy and actually almost automated once your blog gets a bit of age and ranking. This is mainly due to the fact that most blogs die a lot sooner than traditional websites and advertisers view them as “more volatile” investment but once you have proven that your blog is here to stay – You Got Yourself Blog Income Potential!
In fact I get nearly several requests each week for advertisements on pages of my blog. They come in multiple shapes and forms but have couple things in common, which we will get to in a bit. What I want to discuss here is YOUR blog goals, because it will help you identify which ads will stay and which will be declined!
What Are You Trying To Accomplish?
A core question you should ask yourself and one you need to answer honestly.
- Is your blog designed to get subscribers?
- Sell Your own product?
- Sell affiliate products?
- Monetize via AdSense
- Or simply deliver content you are passionate about?
And while I understand that multiple monetization options are and should be deployed at every blog – I’m sure you can identify one that works for you the best. That is the one that should become the center of attention – Your Main Goal.
And once you have established the main goal it becomes easier to understand what is one action you want your visitors to take and how to distribute other monetization options on your blog to not interfere with that action, not distract from it.
External Advertisement simply becomes one of those options and for some might even become The Goal, which will change the priorities but you will have to evaluate it for yourself! In case of this article I’m talking about external ads as an “additional income stream” and nothing more!
Put A Price On It!
Now that you have a clear understanding of your main goal – you need to evaluate your blog:
- How well does it lead people into taking an action toward Your Goal
- Do you have enough of the “Calls to Action” for your goal or do you have Too Much?
- Do secondary goals, which could be ads or subscription or just about anything you define, interfere with your primary goal or do they coexist nicely and perhaps even add to it?
Once you have that understanding – you know how much extra space you can dedicate to secondary goals or as is the case with my blog – affiliate ads and external advertisement!
This exercise just helped me to identify How Much Space I can Allow For Secondary Ads!
One other thing I still need to determine is how much blogs similar to mine and with comparable traffic ask for their advertising space, taking into account number of ads they have available and number of ads I’m willing to allow.
Nothing scientific here but simply understanding that if a “Blog A” charges $25 a month for a 125×125 banner on their blog while giving room for 6 ads – I can safely increase this price to $35 a month if I only provide space for 3 ads because with comparable traffic I offer HIGHER visibility to advertisers.
One last thing to consider is by doing this exercise on several of comparable blogs and coming up with a Ad Value or Price on my blog. It is my blog space to sell but I have to be competitive OR Not Participate At All!
Stick To Your Guns!
Now that we have the understanding of how much we value ad space on our blogs – we need to stick to that value, if it doesn’t sell well – we might have to re-evaluate it but still stick to it!
Create an Advertise page on your blog where you clearly explain how much it costs to advertise on your blog and options available. Your choices can be just about anything you are willing to offer and I’m not here to give you any ideas – just have a look at what options offered at the blogs evaluated previously. Craft your offer to be competitive!
One thing I see time and time again is that when people contact me for advertisement opportunity – they will try to low-ball the price, completely ignoring the guidelines on my page.
I guess some people might think I’m desperate for the money 🙂 to accept the price a lot less than what I set.
Well, guess what…
External Advertisements are just a sidekick on my blog and its either my way or no way at all. In fact I have just removed the row of 125 banner from my sidebar to achieve my other objective – more important to me than selling ads space – offer people subscription to my eZine, which pretty much reduced advertising options on this blog to NOTHING but its OK with me…
My Main Goal Is Not Selling Ads Space!
Sticking to my guns in this case is not only a matter of getting the right price but also delivering a consistent message from the pages of my blog. I’m not hiding anything – I’m an affiliate marketer and I earn by providing relevant reviews on this blog, but not too often.
Main blog content is about sharing what I know and love and proving my right to speak on the subject. And once I have accomplished it and managed to deliver the content my readers come to expect – my goal is to sell the prime product I offer – Expert WordPress.
And to be quite honest – enough people take advantage of the offers provided for my product that I don’t need to sell Ads Space because my main goal delivers what I need!
Conclusion…
Oops, looks like I got a bit emotional in writing this post but it delivers the main message and hopefully shows Why and How to make determination of the basic ad value on your blog. I also tried to make a point that you Do Not Accept the low-balling ad offers!
- You have worked hard to create content optimized for search engines and written for people.
- You have spent time to bring the visitors to your blog
- You have invested effort into getting higher authority status for your blog
…don’t sell it off for pennies to “wannabe advertisers” who try to low-ball you. One click on their ad and you are loosing a visitor you have worked so hard to bring to your pages!
Know the Value You Present and Demand its Worth!
that’s good advice, sticking to your guns. and it’s much easier to do when you know just how important ads are to you, and especially if a certain type of ad is merely secondary. for now, am just looking at adsense. but i like how you lay out a rather straightforward procedure for thinking about ads.
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I also only typically use adsense on my hopefully income-producing sites. I’ve been considering moving away from this or diversifying.
LOL. One day I might have lots of folks knocking on my door to advertise…but that time’s not quite here yet.
Andrew Goulding
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i agree with you but one thing i want to mention is that the most effective and easiest way is adsense along with affiliates and adspace to sell never over do it the blog look really ugly if you put a hell lot of ads on it and becomes slow and annoying for the reader take john chow as case study his website sucks more than anyone because it feels like he dont blog for blogging he blogs for money money and only money and fall of everything comes when you risk the essence of the place which it meant to have.
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This is great for me. I really need to decide how many, and how much.
Those are fantastic advertising tips. It’s also great to have a product of your own to promote, as not only do you have more motivation, but you make more money that way.
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Great post. Really usefull and nice to have someone actually trying to help people looking to make money from home rather than just make a quick buck themselves. Thank you for the advice.
@TheSpotter great post my friend. One of my many offline businesses is launching a corporate blog (replacing the temporary page we have up now) that will actually be the corporate website for now or maybe ever (I know some major 8-digit a year offline companies that there blog is their only web presence – no website at all!)..The company online goals are easily defined with the sole intent of:
A) Creating opt in’s for follow up autoresponder letters and monthly electronic newsletters. (We all know the real money is in the LIST).
B) Generating leads/calls that turn into offline business statewide.
C) Branding our company in the real estate industry, and in the state of Texas as an authority.
My dilemia is I have been a online marketer since 2000 (seems like forever) and worked for three Fortune 500 companies in sales, marketing and consulting. But I am a blogger newbie for sure, but ramping up very quick. How would you or other big company bloggers you know of RIGHT NOW, monetize the blog without taking away from our main corporate goals?
Since were going to have a pretty good traffic to this site relative to our industry. There will be NATIONWIDE title companies, mortgage companies, realtors, law firms, deposition companies and the Texas general public looking for us online so that’s our web visitor base.
Again our goal is not to make money off adsense or affiliate programs like most online bloggers, so how do you softly monetize things without losing track of the goals we have set and redirecting them off our website?
I was thinking possibly of ad space with local and state realtors, mortgage companies, law firms and title companies once we get enough traffic and with the general public it could be basically anything I guess.
Thanks I love your blog and sorry I think I put keywords into my name space on my last comment. It’s just a SEO habit I guess! ; )
Ben,
Corporate blog monetization is one of those tricky things I’m exploring right now and I agree – this is totally different beast. Here is my take on it:
1. Identify main goal your blog trying to accomplish – looks like you have already done so, Leads.
2. Identify secondary goal – once again, in your case Identity
3. Monetization comes as distant third at most
I would structure blog to provide consistent message for branding purpose but with EVERY post, page leading to offer to subscribe in exchange for substantial benefit you can provide to your customers. Also include the subscription from as sidebar item, popup, etc.- don;t ignore any option you have, just test them since this is your MAIN goal.
With all above done I would go to monetization ensuring that ads don’t contradict your main message.
1. Ad space is the most obvious
2. Blog gives you RSS subscribers – you can use this plugin to add additional ads to RSS articles (more ad space to sell) http://www.blogclout.com/blog/goodies/feed-footer-plugin/
3. Since you are working within specific industry – Review Posts with outgoing links to related companies can be a source of income, monetize info sharing – SEO love and traffic is always something to be considered for sale.
4. Since you are building list of leads with blog and I assume have autoresponder setup to turn leads into customers, I’m sure you have some point within your autoresponder campaign defined as breaking point, when you know that this lead will not become your customer. Consider offering doing solo mailing ads for related companies or even your competitors to that narrowly defined leads segment.
Those are just some of the ways I would use to monetize a specialty blog. I’m sure you can come up with more creative ways to include other marketing in it as well. Each industry is different and you might have ideas I don’t even know exist.
Alex
Great post. I'm surprised that blogs are considered more volatile than traditional websites.
Tim
Good advice for people. Especially if they are just starting out. I usually just use Adsense but site sponsored ads might make sense too. Do you have any suggestions of the price you can charge based on the amount of traffic a site has? I honestly don’t have a clue what a fair price would be.
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search the google then find your site.
that is a really excellent post.
Thanks for the post.
Only thing I’d add to this is I’ve found that with an advertise page you could be limiting yourself. For instance, Microsoft contacts you when you have an open spot and you have it listed for $35 then they can pay ten times that much. But if Joe Schmo blog finds you on the advertise page then they can only page that much. So I guess what I’m saying if you don’t have an advertise page and seek out advertisers you can charge more for a bigger site. Contact Microsoft and offer them ad space for $500/month, contact Joe Schmo and offer them ad space for $35/month. (Microsoft is obviously just an example and I wouldn’t let them advertise on my site anyway 🙂
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Very interesting POV Pat, I’ll have to see what my readers think since I also wrote about the importance of an advertising page (of course there will be a link back to you) 😉
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Great advice. Some people just rushing too quickly to get up a blog and putting all kinds of ads in it. They forget to come up with a plan and goal of what they want to achieve. When things doesn’t turn up right. They wonder what went wrong. Great tip you give especially on having too many ads in blog
Great advice. Some people just rushing too quickly to get up a blog and putting all kinds of ads in it. They forget to come up with a plan and goal of what they want to achieve. Great tip you give especially on having too many ads in blog