Posts tagged advertise

When dealing with monetizing a blog or website most web developers or authors will usually get stuck or follow bad strategies.
The most simple monetizing strategy is of course text links like the ones in Google Adsense, which are always a good resource, given that you have at least a thousand visits a day.

If that was not the case there are some simple steps to get money with your blog, although they require one important detail: patience. Money does not fall from the sky and it won't be given to you effortlessly. Although there are some things that you can do to speed up the process.

First things first, you need popularity, or importance. To achieve this you need at least a couple of months and good content. So speed up your writing process and set up a goal that you won't break. Mine is one article per day. And if one day I don't write, the next I write two. To make this effort valid, register at the top social bookmarking sites that are relevant to your niche. I recommend Stumble Upon, Digg, Reddit, Dzone (Only for my niche), and maybe del.icio.us. Make sure all of your articles are submitted to all of those sites, and if you can, make friends that like the stuff you write about and let them know about your articles. In Digg is called shouts, in Stumble Upon that happens automatically, and in the rest I don't know.
This will drive traffic to your site, and that traffic is translated in popularity, measured in PR, Alexa rankings, Compete...

As soon as you have this setup, it is time to give information to people about how to "use" your blog.
There are several ways of providing services in a blog, and I will go through them one by one.

Paid reviews

There are some sites out there that provide the tools to get paid reviews, and they are of course a good way of getting some fast money, but you must be careful with them and never overuse them, for sometimes it will result in PR penalizations from Google, and even banning.

The good way to do this is by doing them yourself. Simply create a page in your blog where you explain how they work. I charge my paid reviews per lines, and I ask for a minimum number of lines. Another important thing is that you must always write the review yourself, it is more respectable and it is more in line with blogging ideology.

Make sure you chose who you review, no matter how much they pay, and by this I mean that if you talk about TVs in your blog, you shouldn't make a review about a hotel in Hawaii.

By the way, when you publish the review, don't say it is a review, or other potential customers who would like a review might not ask you for one (They want to get people to think you like their product) It is almost the same thing as TV ads with famous people, they don't say: "I am being paid to say I like this", you know they are, but they pretend it is they're actual choice.

Banners and text links

Selling the space in your blog is a good technique and gives a very stable income. But you must think a lot on how you'll do it.

Here is my approach, and it is one that over the years I've found to be the best:
First decide where you will place the ads and how much available space you'll have in pixels. For example in this blog the available space is of about 200x600px (Width x Height). Then setup a minimum amount of pixels that can be bought and the minimum time span (Usually a month)

Now setup the divisions, to ensure that they look actually good. The way I've set them up in my blog are like this:
Minimum is 25x25. Then 50x50, and maximum is 200x200. Although you can buy for example one 200x200 and a row of 25x25 and you'll end up with 200x225 of available space.

Now this is the most important part, selling that space. The way this works is you have a maximum number of "slots" per month. And a starting prize. To begin, make them be free.
As soon as all the slots are full and someone asks for one, tell all the advertisers that finish their "contract" the next month that the new prize is of 1$ for example, and if some of them say no, then tell the interested client that they can have a slot for a dollar. Every time that the demand is greater that the number of slots you have, the prize increases, although they can avoid this by buying long-term, which is also good for you since it ensures a fixed income.
You can also limit the long-term advertising to 3 months for example. This way you ensure that they will have to pay the new prize every time it raises.
Be careful though to always give preference to current advertisers, they deserve it

Follow this tips and you'll get some money for sure, and remember to be patient, some day the fee will be high enough to be considered a good income!

Other ways

There are several other ways to earn money with a blog. If you are the author of a plugin, and it is in your blog, you can offer yourself to install it and configure it, and update it as soon as need it (As well as modify it to suit the client's needs) for a fixed monthly rate of say 50$.

If you are good at writing, you can also sell articles. This is a very good way of getting money, but of course you need good reputation, popularity and credibility. If you think you have all of this, you can sell articles for 5-10$ per line.

And the most important tip: Be imaginative! Imagination is the key to success!