How will you monetize your blog?
This is the second part of the seventh chapter in our 11 things to consider before you start blogging series. The first part takes a look at when you will monetize your blog and concentrates on monetization from the day the blog is created and monetizing a blog as soon as a certain threshold or goal has been achieved. The second part of this chapter will be looking at the different choices you have surrounding the monetization of a blog. What advertising programs you have to choose from, which are the most popular and which pay best from my own experience.
There are several ways you can make money from your blog and its totally up to you which way you choose. It took me a couple of months before I eventually decided which ways I was going to focus on making money from my blog. It may be helpful to test a couple of different monetization methods that you think may work on your blog, each method has different affects on every blog at each stage of its development. Keep that in mind, because one method which may not seem to be working well at stage 1 of your development may work much better at stage 2 or 3.
Here are 7 popular monetization methods.
Obviously, because they are popular methods of monetizing a blog they do work however it doesn’t mean to say they will work the best on your blog. Its all about experimenting and testing different monetizing methods to see which work on your blog with the best results.
- Affiliate Programs
Affiliate advertising is very common among the Internet these days mainly because they are generally easy to set up and often offer large commission usually between 50% and 75%. Many Bloggers also choose to use Affiliate advertising as a main source of income because of the potentially large profit and large span of product choice.
What is Affiliate Advertising?
Affiliate Advertising is basically refering a reader to a product or service of someone elses, if the reader then decides to purchase the product/service you receive a handsome commission in response.
The benefits of Affiliate advertising are the large commission potential as well as the simplicity of monetizing your blog with this type of advertising. Obviously there are a few different ways of affiliate marketing (promoting the product you are an affiliate of) and it can be as simple as adding a link from your blog to the product or writing a in detail review of the experience you have had with the product or feedback.
With Affiliate advertising you have to be careful not to refer your readers to…too many products as you run the risk of shooting yourself in the foot by making your readers suspicious of your actual honesty when reviewing products and whether you actually like the product and honestly advise others to purchase it or you are just trying to make a couple of dollars out of them.
Personally I keep my products relevant and specific to my website and the readers who read my site. I only refer people to products I have either used in the past or use currently and I always provide honest reviews, generally with both the positives and negatives made clear. At the end of the day you cannot force someone to purchase a product or service they still have to make the final choice.
You might also want to take a look at my article on how to use affiliate programs, it guides you through setting up an account and a general look at affiliate programs.
Also these are several Affiliate programs that you may wish to sign up for
Clickbank - This is the current Affiliate program market leader.
Commission Junction - Similiar to Clickbank offers a widerange of Affiliate Products.
Amazon Associates - Offers Affiliates the chance to earn commission on everything their referal purchases.
2. Google Adsense
Google Adsense allows you to display relevant adverts on your website in a matter of minutes. The adverts that are displayed are automatically taken from Google Adsense’s conjoined service Google Adwords and advertises relevant companies/websites which want to increase traffic towards their website. You are paid per each click on the adverts displayed on your blog and you can track your progress in your own Google Adsense account report page.
I have used Google Adsense in the past several times and found it has had very different affects on the different types of website I have added it too. For my blogs I have found Google Adsense to not be worth my time and the space on my site, instead I feel Affiliate programs or direct ad sales are more effective. However on smaller more automated sites such as proxy sites or automated content sites they work much better.
The amount you get paid from Google Adsense varies from blog to blog and depends on the contents catergory and the adverts that are displayed on your blog. Health niches have generally always been high paying markets as well as some Internet marketing niches such as SEO.
You can sign up for Google Adsense here
3. Direct Ad Sales
This type of monetization offers the blogger to cut out the middle man and instead target the advertiser themselves. This benefits both the blogger and the advertiser as it allows them to cut down the costs of advertising charges and publishing charges and instead focus specifically on one fee for the advertising space the blogger is selling.
Direct Advertising sales allows the blogger to directly communicate with the advertiser which helps to negotiate fees and time periods. The benefits of this monetizing method is quite clear for both users however it is sometimes easier to use an advertising program such as Google Adsense or Adbrite.
The reasons for this is because it can sometimes be very time consuming to find an advertiser for your blog, after you are able to do this you may have to provide traffic reports and other statistical information as well as a contract or bind of agreement for both you and the advertiser. Also unless you agree on a specific time period for the advertiser to remain on your blog they may pull out of the deal after the first week or month. This means that you would have to start over again and find another advertiser.
Obviously selling direct ads gets easier with the more growth your blog receives and this is when it becomes most beneficial. I personally keep trying direct advertising sales however it has not worked out quite well just yet. After people have wasted my time and messed me about I have only ended up with one actual sale for 1 months advertising.
Now you may be wondering well what do you charge the advertiser? In my own personal experience I like to use a rule that I first created a couple of months back. I would charge the advertising $1 for every thousand impressions my website made within a one month period. This looks like this
1,000 Impressions = $1
3,000 Impressions = $3
5,000 Impressions = $5
10,000 Impressions = $10
I am sure you get the idea by now, this just makes it easier for me and the advertiser to figure out the monthly cost of advertising on my blog and generally I think its value for money.
4. Direct Product Sales
What I mean by Direct Product Sales is by creating for example an eBook on your chosen blogging subject you are then able to promote and sell your product through your website having 100% profit on each sale (unless you have to post your eBook or have any other distribution or development costs).
The benefits of this type of monetization method is that you have already got your target audience and you are able to promote to them a 100% targeted product that they are most likely to be interested in. If they are repeat visitors of your blog then they may also be loyal to you and your blog and with this in mind they may feel your product is worth purchasing because it is your own.
5. Sponsored Posts
I have never really been interested in sponsored posting mainly because I feel they are a little degrading and tend to have negative affects on your readers because they often feel you are just trying to make a quick bit of cash but they can sometimes be produced in ways which offer more than just the cash.
Sponsored posts enable you to produce a post on your blog relevant to a certain product or service which the sponsored programs want you to advertise. They then pay you for each post you create which talks about one of these products or services.
Reviewme is just one of these sponsored programs and whilst I am signed up on this website I have not yet found a product or service that I am interested in writing about. It totally depends on what sort of website you have as well as the actual reason you set up your website. I never set up this blog to make money from it, although I did hope that in the future I would make enough money on the blog for it to be worth my time. I actually spent my time writing the posts to educate others and share my experiences as I enjoy doing this.
6. In-Text Advertising
In-Text advertising is another monetization method I have not been eager to try out. A word of warning is that this type of monetization has been said to have negative affects on your search engine rankings. Now I am not sure how to true this is however its true enough for me to not try this type of monetization out.
The way these work is they target specific keywords within the pages content and make that keyword in to a hyperlink which when clicked redirects readers to relevant product/service pages.
For example the above peive of text containted the word search engine rankings now the program could of selected this as a keyword and added a relevant service or product such as SEO For dummies book from Amazon or SEO Books training program for SEO users.
As I said above I haven’t had any experience with this type of advertising mainly because I don’t like the idea of a program covering my article in hyperlinks to other websites. However I do know of a couple of bloggers who are making substantial amounts of money with this type of contextual advertising.
These are just a couple of websites which operate for In-text advertising.
7. RSS Ads
RSS Advertising is becoming increasingly popular with the introduction of RSS advertising being a monetizing method which is optional for anyone with a Google Adsense account. It allows bloggers to add contextual adverts to their RSS feeds so that anyone reading the RSS feed will see an advert within the content of the feed.
The main benefit of this is that you are able to monetize an area which was once unable to be monetized. As well as this it is a general fact that most people who are subscribed to your blog will not actually visit your blog but instead read your RSS feed so with RSS advertising you are able to attempt to monetize your subscribers.
I have yet to use RSS adverts, my main reason for this being that the amount of subscribers I currently have doesn’t really equate to it being worth my while just yet, however I am sure I will use this type of monetization one day if not for long term, just so I can test its effectiveness.
Although I have just listed seven different monetization methods it leaves a lot of other methods unspoken. However these are seven methods which are used throughout most blogs on the Internet and it totally depends upon the results you want to receive as to which method you choose. I would advise you to try and test a couple of these methods at different stages of your blogs development, because they will have different effects on your blog at each stage. Some of these methods may not work very well when your blog is in its earlier stages however they may work better when you have reached a certain threshold such as Affiliate Programs.
In my own experience I prefer to use Affiliate programs and Direct advert sales as ways of monetizing my blog. Although my blog isn’t at its peak in development or traffic I am able to reap the most benefits from using these methods. I have used Google Adsense and other advertising programs in the past and although I generally made money each day it was usually in cents or merely made up a couple of dollars. I have tested several other methods and found that although some methods made me money each and every day like Google Adsense over a one month period I was able to make more from other methods such as Affiliate programs.
I hope you enjoyed this article and I am sorry it was so long, there is just so much information I want to give to my readers. Please subscribe if you enjoyed this article too.
Also I am very interested to know what types of monetization you have used in the past or use currently to produce the highest amount of income from your websites.
Enjoyed this, why not download the 11 part series as an E Book at 73 pages long I am sure you will find it helpful. Subscribe and download right here.
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[...] split up in to two articles the first being When you will monetize your blog and the second being How you will monetize your blog. The reason for this is because I felt the article would be too long if I wrote them both together. [...]
Your direct ad fee structure of $1 per 1,000 impressions becomes a little bit steep when the traffic is high; I think it might deter advertisers.
For example, on my World War II history site http://ww2db.com , my fee is $100 per month, and my monthly page view number is well over 400,000. If I charge $400, I think it will turn a lot of my clients away.
Your thoughts?
@Pete firstly thank you for your comment. Thats an excellent point to make and I think I should of probably spoke a little more about my $1 for 1,000 impressions rule. Obviously it is not a rule that can be abided by every website. I was really taking it from a bloggers point of view that $1 per 1,000 impressions could probably work quite well. However when you bring other websites in to this rule then it may not work out that well. A great example would be for forums where impressions will be very high however click through rate may be quite low.
Excellent point to make and with a site like yours it may be easier to edit this rule and perhaps increase it to $1 per 10,000 impressions or something of this sort. At the end of the day its the website owners (yourself) decision if they feel they can get $1 per 1,000 impressions on what ever site they own then go for it but if it seems to be too high then obviously amending it is the only thing you can do.
Thanks again for your comment.
[...] -How will you monetize your blog? [...]
I still use Adsense as the ads will be displayed based on the keywords on the specific page and currently it gives me some cash. Selling the place for ads directly to visitors through impression is a nice idea. I charge the advertisers per month to advertise on my site and it works =)
Sponsored post also has a good potential to give you a big earning but the way you ‘decorate’ the post will affect the readers and the advertisers. If the post able to promote the advertisers’ products and beneficial at the same time, you got both earning and attraction from your readers.