Last month I wrote about how important it is to learn from others who are already successful. Well, this month I decided to make that a little easier for you to do. Here is a roundup of all the posts I've found so far where bloggers listed their earnings for October. Click the dollar figure to see their details. Shoemoney (~$30,000) Direct Ad Sales: 50% Affiliate: 30% Other: 20% John Chow ($23,448.59) Direct Ad Sales: ... 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 »
I track everything. Success for my sites is always a math problem. "If I move this AdSense ad here, what happens to my overall revenue per visitor." Things like that. I'll write more about that later, but this post from Scott is worth a read simply to see how a successful affiliate makes business decisions.
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 »
We'll get into all of these in much more detail over the next few months, but I wanted to go ahead and give you a quick run-down of the top 3 money-makers for your blog. Keep in mind, though, not to let monetization become your focus. 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 ... Keep reading »
On Monday, Shawn Collins gave some advice to someone just entering the Internet publishing world. One portion of that in particular stood out to me because it was something that was on my list to talk about: After you've posted five to ten times to your blog, check out the affiliate networks for some relevant offers to promote. Don't fixate on the EPCs - rather look for what is most relevant to you. Pick two to three merchants that ... Keep reading »
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