Does Your Blog Monetization Leave Money On The Table?
Each month I post my stats which includes the amount of income that I have earned. Every month I’ll get at least a handful of comments from people saying “wow that’s awesome you can make that much with my blog, I only made $2 with AdSense this month”, or something to that effect. Blog monetization is a complex subject and I’d like to pick it apart a little in this post.
Let’s Talk About AdSense
One area of confusion (I really should be more clear in my stats posts) is that the AdSense income that I report does not come from this blog. I have a small niche site that I setup months ago and then never touched. It earns around $1 a day. Many people think that I should run AdSense on my blog, however I disagree for two reasons.
AdSense Is Not For All Sites
When running AdSense ads, you are not paid a fixed amount per ad. The amount you are paid depends on the site that it is placed on, the standing of your overall account and probably many other factors that only Google knows about.
Google wants to maximise the revenue earned by their advertisers so they try to ensure that their ads are displayed on relevant pages, they want their ads to get lots of clicks and they want those clicks to be made by geniunely interested buyers. They have a system called “smart pricing” which means that if one of your sites performs poorly, you will be paid less per click. However, this penalty is applied to your entire AdSense account.
Now I’m only toying with AdSense and I hardly make any money with it so it doesn’t affect me all that much but if I had a whole bunch of niche sites running AdSense then I would not want to risk having the whole account smart priced by running ads on this blog.
You may be wondering why AdSense would perform poorly here? Simple - my readers are tech savvy Internet Marketers and social media users who know what an AdSense ad is and don’t click on them! Having said that, I have just learned from Courtney Tuttle about a WordPress plugin that allows you to show AdSense only to search traffic which is a major breakthrough.
But I still don’t want AdSense on my blog, and this is why…
AdSense Sends Visitors Away
Search traffic is lovely because it is so targeted. Somebody has searched for something in Google and arrived at your site and hopefully they have found just what they were looking for. So now that you have that visitor, what do you want to do with him? For my niche site I want him to click on my AdSense ads because that is the sole purpose of the site.
However that is not the case with my blog. My niche site took me a few hours to put together and that’s it. On the contrary, I have put thousands of hours of hard work into this blog and it is not worth all of that time and effort just to earn a few cents from AdSense.
I have said many times that the goal of this blog is not to make money. I do still make money with it and I’ll come back to that in a moment but for this particular blog I would much prefer to have an RSS subscriber or a Newsletter subscriber, a StumbleUpon Fan or a Twitter Follower than a few cents from AdSense. These goals are all about extending my reach as a blogger which has the potential to increase my sphere of influence over time and of course, if I work it well, that should also increase my revenue in the long term.
However, that doesn’t mean that I don’t use any direct monetization. Of course I do, but it tends to bring in much more bang-for-the-buck than AdSense. I’ll use ause affiliate promotions, display banner ads for affiliate products and sell private ad-space. All of these things tend to bring in several (or many!) dollars a time, and not just a few cents.
Selling private ad space is another very popular way to monetize your blog but I cringe quite a lot when I see what some bloggers are charging. Let me explain why…
Many Bloggers Under-Price Their Advertising
WordPress themes that optimise for ad-space, especially 125×125 sized square banners are all the rage now so more and more blogs are offering up private advertising. However I keep seeing well-read bloggers offering up their precious screen real estate up for a pittance. If you are in the market for some cheap advertising then read on!
- Garry Conn, 800+ readers, $6/mo
- Mixed Market Arts, 500+ readers, $10/mo
- Blogging-Ads, 1000+ readers, $25/mo
Note that I have listed RSS readership in the above list and really that’s an irrelevant number as those readers don’t see the ads - it’s the actual traffic that counts. However, I can’t see traffic stats (well I could use Alexa but that’s not so easy to compare) and blogs with lots of RSS readers usually have lots of traffic too so it’s just a ballpark.
Banner ads are unsightly things that are usually ignored but they take up valuable space on your blog. Is it really worth taking up that space for an entire month just for a few bucks like the bloggers above? What else could you do with that space?
Pricing of ad-space is a very personal thing. I’m sure somebody like Garry Conn knows he could charge a lot more than $6 so he must have his reasons for doing so. However, I suspect that many bloggers simply pluck a figure out of the air and then just leave it like that.
This is exactly how I started. When I first put ads on the blog I had around 15,000 visitors to the blog that month and I charged $50. However, a short while later I doubled my advertising rates to $100. Why? Because I mixed in affiliate banners with private advertisers and I noticed that several of my banners were making me close to $100 a month so I increased the rates accordingly. I don’t get many advertisers now but I have removed most of the ads now anyway as I prefer to use the space to promote my writing and social media profiles.
Under-selling ad space isn’t the only way that many bloggers make me cringe.
Many Bloggers Don’t Build Beyond The Blog Itself
I have talked before about the benefits of building assets that generate revenue long after the initial work is done rather than always working for money month after month. A blog is an asset. All of the affiliate sales that I made last month (with the exception of BlueHost that I’ll discuss in a moment!) were either from posts that I had written a long time ago or from the affiliate banners that I mentioned earlier on.
I did not have to do any extra work in the month of April to earn that income. If I was to stop blogging completely, I would still earn some income for quite some time. However, a blog has much more potential than earning revenue from direct methods that I’ve talked about in this post. Once you have started to develop a good readership (a couple of hundred readers perhaps) then your blog takes on a whole new power as a platform from which to launch a whole business.
My blog is in the Internet Marketing niche so there is lots of potential there. I have already released an ebook which has brought me several thousand dollars in income over the last 3 months. You may not see the connection between the ebook and the blog - I would not have made anywhere near that much income if the book had not been so heavily promoted on both my own blog and the rest of the blogosphere. I could not have got other people to promote it for me if I had not had been a complete unknown. The relationships I have built up in that time allowed me to reach out to a far wider circle of influence than I could have reached on my own.
I’m now writing a course about driving traffic with StumbleUpon and I use this blog to talk about it. I’ll promote it in my newsletter and I’ll be offering it up to affiliates which again allows me to reach out to the audiences of other bloggers in my niche. I would not be able to do any one of those things without this blog! Without it, I would have to rely on getting traffic to my Stumble Rush site with methods such as pay-per-click advertising. I have already talked in depth about how you can make money blogging by selling your knowledge in this way.
Conclusion
Some bloggers have absolutely no interest in making money from it but I’m guessing that those bloggers don’t read this blog! If you do intend to make money online and a blog features in that strategy then I urge you carefully consider exactly how you want to do it. There’s more to blog monetization than just slapping up some AdSense ads and hoping for the best.
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Mark Mason
May 7, 2008
Many bloggers that I trust (especially including Yaro) indicate that the “money is in the list.” That is the real asset in any business, because it represents future revenue.
That is not to say you should ever exploit a list for money. On the contrary, you should respect your list and add value.
But the money is in the list. Everything else should be about getting people on the list and keeping them there.