Blogging can be very lucrative if you choose the right marketing channels. Knowing these channels come from experience and research because you can learn an enormous amount online. Simply reading what others have written about blog monetization will provide you with more than enough information to know where you should focus your energy. For example, here’s what I’ve heard so far…
- Start your own digital produce
- Sell banner ad space
- Google Adsense
- Circulate CPA offers
- Product reviews
- Etc
The point is you have several options with some proving to be more lucrative than others. I recently performed some research when looking to monetize my blog and found some interesting information. There are experts in the industry claiming NOT to monetize your blog with “Ads†and you should explore other options. When researching this statement, here’s what they had to say…
Attention War
Blogging is very competitive and over the years you’ve been tweaking your content for maximum exposure. Your always tweaking your headlines, content, images, videos, format, etc to capture a visitors attention so you can increase user engagement every time someone visits. The reason you do this is because blogging is your business and you want to ensure you get the MOST out of your investment. However, you have to remember advertising companies are running a company too and will tweak their ads to capture the user attention also. This means your going to be competing for the visitor’s attention which can be bad for business. Remember,
Whenever you add banner ads to your website either within your content, sidebar, footer, your taking the risk of an advertiser taking your visitors. If they are attracted by the ad then they’ll have no problem clicking through to another competitor website.
Pay You Peanuts
Not only do you run the risk of losing your visitors to competitors, but you’ll be paid peanuts in return. Depending on your program you could be earning anywhere from $0.10 per click to $1.00 per thousand impressions. If you’ve been blogging for years than you know how difficult it is to build a blog from the ground up and your essentially losing visitors for peanuts by promoting a competing product or service. Here’s the bottom line,
Advertising requires enormous traffic to even convert into substantial income and if you are getting 1,000 visitors per day I’m sure you can find better ways to monetize your blog.
De-Value Your Blog
The problem with banner advertising is you don’t have too much control over what “ads†will be shown on your blog. Much of the backend work is hidden and the algorithm they use to determine adverts for your blog is controlled by the network itself. For example, with Google Adsense you’ll only be able to control the following…
- Size
- Color
- Type
- Block a few domains (NOT too effective)
This means when people arrive on your website they’ll be shown ads that are NOT only irrelevant, but poor quality too which will devalue your entire blog. When your running your own advertising program on your blog you’ll have more control and can screen all your applicants making sure you have the highest quality. Some of these visitors arrived on your blog because of the high quality content you provide interconnected with the overall experience. If you hurt one element then your hurting the other.
Slow Down Your Website
Here a quick point I wanted to mention about “banner adsâ€. Since their control by the actual network sometimes they fail to display or take longer than expected. We all know the importance of a website loading in under 3 seconds for optimal user experience and many of these ad’s don’t meet the requirements. Your indirectly hurting the overall user experience and increasing your load time so you want to be sure to test different networks if you decide to follow through with banner ads. Keep these things in mind…
- Page load time should be under 3 seconds
- Load time is a ranking factor for Google
- 69% of people claim load time is very important when visiting a website