Caydel’s SEO Blog

Back in January, I wrote a piece on whether the newly-popular Blogkits blog ad network lived up to their claims of outearning Adsense on blogs. My feeling at the time was that they did not even come close, but I was willing to give them more time to prove themselves.

Nearly five months have passed since I wrote the original piece on Blogkits; by now, Blogkits has been on my blog for nearly six months. Before someone points this out in my comments, I must admit that I did cheat on the blogkits challenge a bit; rather than removing Adsense and completely replacing it with Blogkits, I ran both ad networks side-by-side.

So, what are the results?

Blogkits
Impressions: 50,716
Clicks: 286
Leads: 0
Payout: $0.00

Adsense
Impressions: 22,340
Earnings: $39.64

Within the six-month time period, Blogkits has not earned me a dime, despite nearly 300 clicks. This indicates horrible conversions on their part. Meanwhile Adsense was been quietly accumulating the whole time.

Of course, we should not forget that a single sale on Blogkits has the potential to generate more earnings than Adsense; it could just be a string of poor luck that I have no conversions yet. On the other hand, I think enough time has passed to show that Blogkits is not a particularily effective blog monetization solution.

One interesting point is the fact that Blogkits reports twice as many impressions as adsense for the same time period; neither ad network correlates well with the pageview statistics shown by my analytics / stat programs.

Share This

It appears that Commission Junction has shut down my account do to a lack of activity in the last couple of months. Searching around, it seems that the only solution is to sign up again with a new email account, since they don’t seem to re-activate people’s accounts.

I am giving Shoemoney’s Ebay Ads script another shot on a few of my sites. I’ve used it in the past, but not with any really spectacular results. I guess it all depends on the niche, and your visitor demographics. Yesterday, I thought of a new site idea which could capitalize big on these ads. Unfortunately, to use it I need my Ebay publisher’s ID which I can only get through my Commission Junction account….

If you are curious what this script looks like, take a look at the sidebar on the right. Currently, it *should* be showing a Google T-Shirt up for auction, although occasionally, in a show of defiance for all logic, a 3 Stooges DVD collection seems to come up for my ‘google shirt’ query. In a day or two, I may change the query to try to find some ask.com swag, or something else cool.

I have a real great idea for a new site where the Ebay ads will do great - it is a niche of collectibles in which people will purchase dozens of this item used over eBay. And the niche is small enough that a single new site in it will immediately be noticed by the community.

Share This

This morning, ReviewMe, a new company run by Andy Hagens and Aaron Wall launched. Similar to some extent to PayPerPost or the upcoming LoudLaunch, ReviewMe is a site that seeks to link companies to bloggers.

The basic idea is this: You log into your account at ReviewMe, and submit your blog. If approved, you will provided a set of products, services or other items to review, with a certain amount of monetary compensation.

It also appears that your blog is listed in a directory on ReviewMe, through which Advertisers can browse. Each blog’s listing contains some statistics about the site, including Alexa Rank, Technorati Rank, an estimated number of RSS subscribers, and an overall ranking out of five stars for the blog. Each blog has a specific price attached to it, for which advertisers may purchase a post on that blog. I hope these rankings are updated often, as this blog seems to fluctuate randomly on each of those statistics. Currently, my Alexa and Technorati rankings are lower than typical.

One slightly disappointing note: While my blog currently carries a price tag of $40 for an advertiser to offer to sponsor a post, the share going to the blogger is only 50%. I would have liked to see ReviewMe follow other programs such as Adbrite or Performancing Partners in that they pay the blogger 70% of the total advertising cost.

Where ReviewMe stands apart from the crowd is it’s focus on full disclosure. In a bid to ethically remain on the white side of the line, they require their bloggers to include a disclosure policy in every post written for ReviewMe. This separates ReviewMe from other services such as PayPerPost where a disclosure is not necessarily required.

Previously, I have spent some time looking at PayPerPost as a way to monetize my blog. Unlike PayPerPost, you are free to express your own opinions about the products and services you mention; there is no pressure for your review to be positive. The view taken by ReviewMe is that the advertiser is paying for a review, not a sponsored praise piece.

ReviewMe seems to hold a lot of potential for the blogosphere. It seems to take on PayPerPost on a higher ethical level. While there no doubt will be some initial resistance by many bloggers on the idea of sponsored posts, this will provide ways both for marketers to get word out about their products, and bloggers to make a little extra money to cover their costs.

P.S. This is a sponsored review. Please note that this post represents my true views on the subject at hand.

Share This

So, now you’ve decided that you want to monetize your blog. Additionally, now you’ve set your goals. You know where you are, and you know where you want to be. Now you have to decide how you want to get there.

There are a variety of different options out there to monetize your traffic, each with lesser or greater amounts of intrusion upon yourself, your visitors and your ethics. I will give a quick rundown of some of the different options available to you.

Google Adsense

is the ‘typical’ text-based ads that you see on most sites. You are generally paid a cost of $0.01 - $5 per click, depending on the keywords on your blog. You can run image or text ads on your site.
Adbrite

Adbrite offers a variety of different methods to monetize your traffic. You can run network ads similar to the Google Adsense program, as well as allow advertisers to purchase ads on your site directly. This type of ad is paid either daily, weekly or monthly. They also offer interstitial ads.

Performancing Partners Network

The Performancing Partners Ad Network is a newer program which allows you to sell 125×125px graphical advertisements on your site. The slots are sold on a monthly basis.

PayPerPost

PayPerPost is a network aimed at bloggers, which gives the bloggers the chance to review or write a post for an advertiser. These offers typically pay $1-$20 per opportunity.

Please note that you should research your options thoroughly prior to choosing your programs. The information given above is merely to give you an idea of what’s out there.

To monetize this blog, I chose to work with Adbrite and the Performancing Partners Ad Network. I made this decision since in my prior experience, i have found that the payouts from Google Adsense are generally fairly small for blogs, with low click prices and click through rates. I rejected PayPerPost because I have no desire to do paid posts; while I am interested in advertising on this blog, I do not want my content influenced by too many outside factors.

The benefit common to Adbrite and Performancing is that both programs allow me to sell ad slots myself. They both allow me to control the prices of the ad spots I sell. Additionally, they are paid on a weekly or monthly basis, rather than by traffic. Because of this I can leverage the fact that since a blog is made up of many repeat readers, even if an ad is not clicked, it still has strong branding potential with the blog readers.

A large factor to consider is how the ads will work within your layout. I found that the Performancing ads work well within my sidebar, and the flexible unit size in Adbrite allowed me to create a large unit on the right side of my screen that may contain a larger number of ads.

Placing Your Ads

Placement of your ads is very important for them to have the maximum effect and monetary return. Rather than cover this (exhausted) topic myself, let me refer you to one of the best resources for ad palcement information. Please see Google’s ‘‘.

Conclusion

Research the programs above, and decide how you want to advertise. For the rest of the series, I will mainly focus on Adbrite and Performancing, since they are the programs I am using, although I will make some reference back to Google Adsense.

Share This

Before starting any project, the first, most important step is to set some goals. Since you are reading this, it is logical to assume that you want to start making some money from your blog. This is a good starting place when developing our goals.

• I want to make some money from my blog.

Now, let’s send some basic questions to define our goal. For example, how much money do you want to make? These numbers should reflect your traffic to a certain amount to ensure that your goals are obtainable. Perhaps an extreme example, but hoping to make $1000 per day on your blog that gets only 20 visitors per day is not easily obtainable. For example, a blog with low traffic (<100 uniques per day) may hold the following goal:

• I want to make $100 per month from my blog.

That’s a good start. But a goal should consist of both a what and a when. So far, we have the what, but we need to set a when. Without a time frame to work in, it may be difficult to reach all your goals within a reasonable time

• I want to make $100 per month from my blog by the end of two months

This is a reasonable goal. But what are you going to do when you get there? Are you just going to rest on your laurel and just let your blog take care of itself? Of course not. Set a few more goals, so you know where you want to go.

• I want to make $100 per month from my blog by the end of two months
• I want to make $300 per month from my blog by the end of four months
• I want to make $600 per month from my blog by the end of six months
• I want to make $1200 per month from my blog by the end of one year

Once again, I want to stress that you should adjust your goals to match your traffic levels, keeping in mind that as you develop your blog, your traffic will only grow. At the same time, don’t be afraid to be optimistic - optimism will just mean you have to work a little harder. As with all things, blogging is all about getting a return on the work you put into it.

Hopefully, you now have a rather complete set of goals to achieve. In the next post in this series, we will look at developing a strategy to conquer those goals.

Share This

You have a blog, and you want to make some money off of it. Ok, fair enough. You, and 20 million other bloggers have the same dream. In fact, I share that dream with you. So, I have decided to write a ‘Monetize Your Blog’ series as a bit of a learning process for myself, as well as to provide a resource for anyone else who wants to follow in my footsteps. As it is said, why re-invent the wheel?

As it stands, the information within this series will be blog-oriented, but you should be able to take the basic concepts from what I have written here, and apply them to your own site, no matter what type of site it is. Right up front, I want to make sure everyone knows that I welcome questions, comments, and suggestions. in fact, they are encouraged.

Game Plan

Now, there is no point in even starting a project like this without some sort of a game plan. So, to give you a sneak preview into what you expect, here is the series as I envision it:

1. Introduction
2. Set Your Goals
3. Select Your Advertising Programs
4. Creating House Ads
5. Creating an Ad Sales Page
6. Optimizing Your Ad Company’s Copy
7. Estimating and Setting Your Initial Price
8. Attracting Advertisers
9. Summary and Results

Of course, this will be subject to change as we go on. I may encounter issues and subjects which should be touched upon, or I may take a post to answer questions or comments.

Share This