Posts Tagged Advertising

So I was accepted into the ScribeFire QuickAds beta program on Monday and finally got around to getting everything set up yesterday.  I'm really impressed with the interface.  Very clean, very easy to use.  There are still a few rough edges (like the color blocks in the ad editor not updating when you enter a valid color), but far fewer than I expected to find.  Definitely doesn't look like beta ... Keep reading »

You'll never get rich blogging. 18 months ago that was the very first thing I wrote on this blog, and I still think it's true. However, that's no reason not to make some money from your blog. Depending on what you're blogging about, even 10,000 to 15,000 monthly visitors could earn you $5,000 or more annually. Not enough to quit a job on, but who couldn't use an extra $416.67 every month? So what I want ... Keep reading »

If you rely largely on advertising for your revenue -- whether direct, affiliate or contextual -- you're making money by encouraging your visitors to buy or do something elsewhere. There's an important concept there that we often never think about: If the advertiser is willing to pay you $0.10 per visitor that you send them, then that visitor must be worth noticeably more than $0.10 to them. Otherwise, they wouldn't be willing to pay you that, right? (In other ... Keep reading »

Very often, it can be hard to figure out what products or companies to advertise on your site. Some sites have obvious tie-ins (a site about cars, for example) but others are much more difficult. If that's your situation, or if you could just use some fresh ideas, check out sites like yours who are successful and see how they're generating revenue. Who advertises there? Where are the advertisements on the page? Use some of the same ... Keep reading »

I wrote last week that you can learn a lot by looking at the public stats of those who are already successful. Well, an article in Sunday's San Francisco Chronicle reveals that A-List blog TechCrunch makes $240,000 a month with about 1.25 million unique visitors. That's $0.19 per visitor. You have to dig deeper into those stats to get the real story, though. The 1.25 million visitors comes from comScore, who in ... Keep reading »

Alright, I know I said you need to think beyond AdSense, but I'm also all about grabbing all the low-hanging fruit you can. This is one of those cases. If you haven't read Joel Comm's AdSense Secrets, you need to get a copy. I bought it back when it was $97, but I made that back in a week with a site that was getting less than 100 visitors/day. Now ... Keep reading »

Too many times, I see people focused on AdSense as the sole source of their revenue. That is a huge mistake. Even Eric Giguere admits that AdSense is a crapshoot. Don't get me wrong. It is often fantastic for getting a site off the ground -- very often I can instantly make my money back with good AdSense placement -- but you're leaving a ton of money on the table if ... Keep reading »

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? 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? 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 »