Blog Monetization

Whats the best idea!?

[AllanS]

Hi All,

I am trying to decide whats the best way to monetize my blog. I have been selling adspace and have a few buyers, but not enough to fill my inventory. Can anyone suggest another way to monetize my blog with 125 x 125 banners times 6. I am looking at CPM networks, is this a good idea. Is there a good one to chose. Its about 15,000 uniques per month, SEO blog.

Also I am looking ad adsense. Have tried for a while, but its not really that lucrative at 15,000 uniques. Can anyone give tips on wehter they have made good money on adsense. Is so, how. I was thinking its probably due to what type of traffic you rank for, arbitrage on popular phrases is quite easy. Is this how you do it i.e. paris hilton, etc etc?

Many thanks,

Allam

[mobileguy]

Mixing arbitrage and Adsense can get you banned from AS (and AW).

If you have such a small amount of visitors a month (15,000 or so) I would say that you are better off working on getting more visitors and then focus on revenue (have revenue generating ads up, but understand that more visitors is your main goal).

You can tweak your advertising all you want, but if you don't have more than 15,000 visitors a month, you will hit a revenue cap (if you haven't already).

If 15,000 visitors a month is your visitor cap, that is you have such a narrow niche that no matter how many hours a day you spend writing articles and gathering information you'll never go above 15,000, then you should throw on some commission-type stuff (Amazon, CJ, etc.) and move on to another site. You should still keep adding to the 15,000 visitors a month site, just to keep return and new traffic coming to the site, but realize there is a point at which you run into diminishing returns.

There's also this: You may have such a narrow site that you only get 15,000 visitors a month now, but six months or a year from now, something may change that drives that up to 100,000 visitors a month. Hence, the reason to keep the site updated every now and then and to keep an eye on traffic logs. It's not something to rely on, but it's a reason to keep an eye on it.

[Admaster]

I've had decent results from Adsense will less traffic than you. THe best one is around 10% CTR with only 3,000 uniques and around $500 per month for one client. THis is in the medical market though where the payments are around $1.50 per click. However, it is always the best idea to be able to charge fixed price rates to bigger spenders where you don;t have to just take a cut. If there is a way of boosting your traffic and then offering some cut price ads to the big players this will get their competitors interested. Then, if you can reach their competitors, provide something of interest on a page where their competitors ad is showing and direct them to it. Then, have a link to your media pack in full view. Not short term solutions, but thinking big might get you to move in the right direction. Good luck with everything, Admaster

[AllanS]

Thanks for the advice guys. The website I run is an SEO blog, very similar in style to searchengineland.com, but smaller. I guess its niche but not that niche, and I think mobile guy, you are right, we should be focusing on traffic and visitors, first and foremost. I think what I am trying to do is forecast some kind of return on invesment, in terms of time/cost taken to get these visitors VS the potential ad revenue that we could potentially generate. Does this make sense?

On this point, Admaster, the feedback that you gave on Adsense and generating $500 per month is indeed encouraging. I don't think the CPC's will be as high in SEO as in Medical but none the less, your feedback is still encouraging. Very encouraging!

Admaster, out of coincidence, my day job is for the largest medical recruitment company in the UK (PULSE, Match Health Care Locums.) I am their online marketing manager :) What is it you do?

Final question!..... Does anyone have any advice on the sort of revenue which can be generated from Adsense in the "All things SEO" David Naylor / Shoemoney kinda style blog arena / vertical. If so it would really help my psudo ROI calculations.

Peace.

ALlan

[Admaster]

Hello Alan S - I mainly run advertising sales consultancy services and run websites in lab equipment, health service, thyroid, surgery and insurance. My main business though is running a service called 'ARC advertising revenue centre' for website owners. Good luck with the ads and I hope you continue to test them and find something that works. Oh by the way, I have one or two SEO sites for publishers and they get around 25p per click or 45 cents. They have been optimized for the higher end tools so the contextual code google uses pays a slightly higher CPC rate. So, a related example would be that if you optimise a page for 'facelift surgery' instead of 'hair restoration, the more expensive surgical procedure will usually pay more. So, I optimise them for that term and then embed videos, uniques content and higher value keywords there. Hope this helps.

[edited by: Admaster at 12:13 am (utc) on Aug. 26, 2008]