Monetize Your Blog 3: Selecting Your Advertising Strategy
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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
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 ‘Blogtimize - Optimize the ads on your blog‘.
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.
