Monetizing your blog
While there are varied opinions on when to start monetizing your blog, I’m going with starting early. I recently emailed Darren Rowse of Problogger, to see what his opinion on the matter is.
His response:
My theory is to start early – that way your readers don’t suddenly find you hitting them with ads once they’ve already bought into it.
Others would say to wait til you have enough traffic to make it worth your while. But you do lose some income by doing this.
He makes a good point here. If you can embed the ads into your site early, as you gain readership, they won’t all of the sudden be bombarded by your ads.
Try different ad placements as well, to see what works best for you. Some ad spots generate a better click-through than others.
If having ads isn’t an incentive enough, check out what Google has to say regarding referrals:
When a publisher who signed up for Google AdSense through your referral earns $5.00 within 180 days of sign-up, you will be credited with $5.00. When that same publisher earns $100.00 within 180 days of sign-up and is eligible for payout, you will be credited with an additional $250.00. If, in any 180 day period, you refer 25 publishers who each earn more than $100.00 and are all eligible for payout, you will be awarded a $2,000.00 bonus.
I don’t know about you, but I could use a $2,000.00 bonus. Signing up for Google Adsense is as easy as clicking any Adsense referral. Creating an account is very painless and you’ll be copying and pasting the code into a widget in no time.
Why not, right? What do you have to lose?
What else is there?
There’s a wide variety of advertising services out there, as a means of monetizing your blog.
Text-link-ads
Text-link-ads is a service that you can use to publish post-level or text-linked ads for promotion of or on your blog. As an affiliate, you can earn cash by referring others to the program.
AuctionAds
AuctionAds are an embedded code that displays real-time eBay listings on your blog. This takes from the content of your blog and tries to match it up with a listing or two from the online giant.
There are also other services worthy of mentioning, Chitika eMiniMalls, LinkShare, and Amazon are handy for product-based websites.
Whether or not you wish to monetize your blog, just know this: It won’t pay off unless the content has some quality to it.
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Hey it’s really nice of Darren to personally reply
Text-link ads is cool, though I prefer doing private ad deals, since TLA takes a huge cut (50%)
I totally agree with Darren, start monetizing early, even if you don’t make tons of money, it’s still better to start early, so all the new readers will be used to the ads.
I make most of my blogging income doing guest blogging gigs, ghost writing, and from recommending products and ebooks, although adsense earns me a nice chuck of change, it takes time to optimize and find the right link unit for your blog, your posts, and design
Awesome comment Jonathan, thank you. Darren is really personable, that’s one of the reasons I read his site so much.
I haven’t made a killing on this site or Earsucker, but at least the readers are used to the ads they see.
I’m still trying to find what works for this site….
It is a catch 22 in the past i have started since day one monetizing on my current project I decided to have traffic and a small loyal base.
Will see how it goes.