Do Blogs Make Money By Running Ads?

Posted in Anatomy of a Blog by DB

As part of Website optimization and Hosting, I’ve been talking about how important it is to recognize, understand and plan your monetization strategies over the last few posts, actually over the past 3 days. Yes I know, I really should tie them all up in a series. Maybe I’ll just do that by the end of this post. Anyway if you are reading this and haven’t yet read my previous posts I would urge you to read those first before you proceed with this post.

So far I’ve covered “Making Money Indirectly From Blogs” and the first sub category “Making money from Affiliates“ under “Making Money Directly From Blogs“. Let’s look at the final sub category “Making Money By Running Ads“. Again as in the previous sub category I club any paid to post earnings and the like that bloggers do as part of this sub category.

Monetize your blog by running Ads

By far this is the most difficult and the most under estimated routes that the majority of bloggers take in their route to reach that elusive blogging fame and fortune street. Unfortunately you see thousands of blogs start up each day, slap on the same 125 x 125 affiliate ads on the sidebar, setup an advertising page and wait for the money to flow in. Infact I’ve had people asking me why I don’t spice up my blog with advertisements and images. By images they are talking about the big sign that says “Free eBook available for download”.

Folks here are the facts. You can fool people into believing that those flashy images on your sidebar are Ads but apart from a handful of bloggers most of the blogs out there have nothing but affiliate links all over their blogs. After some time you get to see a pattern, the BlueHost and SEOBook Ads are the most common. The rational is that while you wait to build your blog traffic you might as well make some money selling affiliate products. The other completely ridiculous justification I’ve heard is “Prepare your readers. Don’t spring ads on them one fine day”

Let me give you a good reason to not muck up your entire blog with affiliate links in the beginning. “Gooooooooogle”. Let me say that again “Google“. You stand a better chance to build authority and trust with Google if you don’t jump the monetization bandwagon the minute you launch your blog. And really folks what’s the point, you don’t have any readers and very little content in the beginning anyway. So concentrate on building and improving that.

Ok, so what are the key areas to focus on, again in order of importance

Blog Content

The most important aspect to building a successful blog in this category is to have good recurring traffic. The only reason you will attract visitors and repeat eye balls is if you have good content. So it is vital that you can churn out good content at fairly short intervals to keep readers coming back to your blog for more. Word of mouth matters a lot and someone will refer or subscribe to your blog only if they connect with your writing and content. 

SEO

No matter which category your blog falls into, Search Engine Optimization is one of the top factors that will directly affect how successful your blog is. You are working to get the maximum eye balls for your site, you need more and more visitors coming in and search engines love fresh, good content. Write good content, build links and soon you will see traffic landing on your site. Ofcourse there is a whole lot more to SEO which is why it’s important that you start learning and start using it on your website.

Network and grow your blog

Social media, networking with similar bloggers, commenting on other related blogs, forum postings, free eBook, blog contests, viral campaigns are some of the activities you will need to seriously consider to bring in traffic. You can see that it is a time consuming and rocky road with no guarantees for success.

Blog Design

A profession design will go a long way to help you stand out apart from identifying and maximizing your screen real estate for running your ads. While you are at it ensure you also bring up SEO during your discussions with your designer.
All said and done folks, nobody will advertise with you if you do not provide them with a decent ROI. Write this point down. Even if you have a couple of thousand RSS subscribers and about 40 - 50 thousand page views, if your advertisers do not see click throughs and conversions you will soon be back to running that 125×125 affiliate ad all over again.

Once again this is most difficult route to take to successfully monetize a blog but by no means impossible. Pick your blog topic wisely and be ready to put in the long hours to make your blog a success not just in terms of traffic and fame but one that brings in a decent sized check at the end of the month.

Good luck with your blog. I wish all the success and do come back for more Hosting and website optimization tips.

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2 Responses

  1. Matt Hanson Says:
    April 2nd, 2008 at 11:00 pm

    Good writing. Keep up the good work. I just added your RSS feed my Google News Reader..

    Matt Hanson

  2. DB Says:
    April 5th, 2008 at 9:27 am

    Thanks Matt, Interesting site you have there.

    cheers

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