Lisa Sugar had an inkling that her online celebrity gossip blog PopSugar was on the right track when Banana Republic called in July 2006 and offered to buy up all the ads for a week -- six months before she had even hired an ad seller. -- "The Sweet Spot," Forbes, April 23, 2007
How would you like that? A huge advertiser calling you up out of the blue to offer you money. Judging by the size of ProBlogger's readerbase, I imagine most of us would consider it a dream come true.
Care to venture a guess as to how many visitors she was seeing at that point, though?
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For those of you who are new to the site this week, I keep a list in my sidebar of the great things I've read through Google Reader. They have a Share function that makes it easy to -- well -- share particularly interesting posts. I try to always put them in a post when I've built up 10 or so so that you RSS subscribers see them as well, but regular readers will tell you that ... Keep reading »
Back in February, I wrote about "The Top 3 Ways to Generate Revenue from Your Blog" -- number one being advertisers:
Dedicated advertisers are usually your best source of revenue. They pay a much better rate, they’re a guaranteed revenue stream every month, and they tend to stick around. The only downside is that you usually need to have really healthy traffic levels to make it worthwhile for advertisers to work with you directly.
I noted later in the comments that what constituted a "healthy traffic level" really varied from nice to niche -- some sites may be able to attract advertisers with a tenth of the traffic of others; it's just so dependent on what type of readers you're attracting.
Additionally, you definitely want to avoid monetizing too soon. Very few things can kill a site quicker than letting your advertising overwhelm everything else.
Let's suppose, though, that you do have healthy traffic levels for your niche and are indeed ready for advertisers. How do you go about finding them?
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Oops. For those of you who are reading via RSS, I forgot to post my shared links once I hit 10 new ones like I promised last week. So without further ado, here's the new 14!
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Since most large advertisers are experimenting with video now -- large advertisers who most often have the largest budgets -- Google recommends the 300x250 Large Rectangle format because that's the format they most often use.
That's the format I'm using prominently over on my website design gallery, Unmatched Style, and this morning I noticed the ad you see to the right. (It's just an image here, so it's not clickable.) My problem ... Keep reading »
One of the most difficult parts of selling advertising on your site is actually figuring out what rate to charge. Here's a super easy way to get started, though.
When you determine where you want your ad(s) to go, put an AdSense ad there. After a few days or a few weeks you'll have a firm idea of how much that ad is making you. Then, you can simply mark up your advertising over that rate.
For example if ... Keep reading »
Google Reader has a Share feature that allows you to mark items in the RSS feeds that you subscribe to. When you do that, those items are then made available for public consumption through a custom URL and through a custom RSS feed.
Well I read things all the time that I want to share a link to, but it's frequently a chore to write a full post about them, and I just never seem to get around to ... Keep reading »
John Chow made $7,011 from his blog last month, which seems to contradict my claim that You’ll Never Get Rich Blogging. John's obviously an exceptional case :D His post is definitely worth a read to see a great example that your income from blogging isn't going to come from a single source. If it is right now, you're probably leaving a lot on the table.
As long as Nika keeps commenting, I'll have something to write about :D This time she mentions how she's been experimenting with ads, but getting zero clicks.
Here's the dirty little secret: despite the fact that the vast majority of links available from affiliate networks are images (banner, buttons, etc.), they just don't convert very well. Nika, you're finding that out firsthand.
Now obviously I'm painting with a very broad brush here. Many (most?) of the things I'll ... Keep reading »
Last week, I urged you not to monetize your blog too early. In the comments, though, Nika made a great point: ads can often lend the impression of credibility to your site.
Here's an example. Let's say I'm starting a personal finance site.
Day 1, I can go over to Commission Junction and get me a big Wall Street Journal advertisement to put on my blog. If you then came to ... Keep reading »
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