Monetizing Your Blog/Efforts (or, actually getting paid for SM)

If you're like many bloggers, social media folks, etc, you probably ask yourself from time to time, what if I were actually paid for my efforts consistently. Of course, you are making a good living at what you do, but so often there seems to be a disconnect between the hours of labor you put into your blog posts and the actual return on this effort. One way to recapture these costs is through monetizing your blog with advertising. There are many ways to do this, we'll tick through a few of them today.

• Paid Ads
• Links
• Advertorials or Hosted Content Pages
• Publisher programs such as Google Adsense Or Yahoo! or Bing

It's important to note that any time we add this 'commercial' aspect to our blog, it carries with the potential reward a corresponding risk. I can't pretend to be able to advise you on every risk and how it pertains to your application, so be warned - investigate the risks of these activities as they relate to your implementation prior to engaging in this practice.

1. Paid Ads

This is basically adding a column or area to your site and selling space. In this endeavor you would create a standard format and constrain all ads to the format. For example, you may have a headline with 48 characters, and 2 lines of text with a character limit, followed by one more line with the address of the site being advertised. Another model might be CPM (stands for Cost Per Thousand), also known as banner advertising. In the CPM model, your advertisers pay your a set amount for each thousand impressions their ad sees. It's not uncommon to see $15-$35 CPM depending on the specificity of the area on which the ad is displayed. If you would like to manage your own CPM campaign, there is software out there such as OpenX that can help.

2. Links (or Text Ads, or Text Link Ads)

This is basically the addition of links to other sites to some area of your site. There are HUGE opportunities to make money here. But there are also corresponding HUGE risks to doing it.

There are a few basic ways to do this:

• Sell links yourself (work directly with other parties to place their links on your site)
  • 'Advertise with us' programs
  • Working with vendors to sell links
• Sell links on behalf of another party (allow another party to place links on your site as part of a 'system')
  • TextLinkAds
  • TextLinkBrokers
  • Many Others
• Sell non-SEO links on behalf of another party (allow another party to place links on your site that DO NOT pass 'link juice'. These are links strictly for traffic, with no search engine benefits.
  • Text Link Network sites

NEVER work with any site that seems shady. This includes many sites in the PPC (Pills, Porn, Casino) space. Some folks will want to buy links on your blog for the search engine benefits, but always look at selling links as a way to send quality traffic to other sites. If you don't think the link will benefit the other site by way of 'real' traffic, don't sell it. BE WARNED - Google may remove your site from their index or disable your site from passing page rank if they believe you are participating in any activity that may influence the quality of their search results.  With this said, you may not care so much about the search engines - in this case, you can disregard what they will think about your activity. Just be sure you know what the impact of losing search engine traffic would be before you make a decision to discount their wrath.

3. Hosted Content Pages

These pages look like 'normal' pages or posts, but are actually advertisements for your advertiser. In this model, you create a page or post (or your advertiser creates the page or post) and you place this page on your site generally with a link to the advertiser. Often there may not be a link, but a phone number or some other way to contact the advertiser.

Search/Publisher Programs

In these programs you simply add a bit of javascript to your site and Google, Yahoo!, Bing, etc will automatically place ads on your site and pay you for each time an ad is clicked.  Also, most blog software will offer plugins to do this fairly easily. This is a fairly 'search engine safe' practice so long as you stay within the guidelines set forth by the search engines with which you are working. It's fairly easy to earn $100 per month with a program such as this if you have good traffic and lots of diverse content. Naturally, there are folks earning MUCH more than this, but in this article I'm focusing on small sites with limited traffic (less than 100K visits per month).

Overview

There are no 'safe' advertising methods. All carry some risk. Evaluate the risk/reward model for each and choose for yourself which makes the most sense for you. In addition, you can try different methods to determine which is most profitable for the least amount of hassle.

We Buy Ads

If you have a nice blog, we may have clients interested in participating. We may not be interested in links, but there may be other things your blog could offer our clients that would earn you monthly income. We have clients all over the country (and world for that matter) and they may be interested in some local advertising on your blog/site. We don't do anything sleazy, just good old fashioned web marketing, so no worries there.

I can Help

I may not always have answers to your questions, but I am always willing to help. Feel free to call me at 866.432.8235 x100 anytime and I'll offer what free advice I have given your situation. In addition feel free to email me at bsterzenbach@goupward.com for advice. Good luck and I hope to speak to you soon.

Bill Sterzenbach