How to make money from blog advertising

Over the course of two posts, I’m going to turn your perceptions of blog advertising upside down.

In this post, we’re going to explore the problem with blog advertising. In tomorrow’s I’ll share the solution, based on a case study on my travel blog.

So here’s the problem:

The page view obsession

Everyone is hooked on page views. But stop and think for a moment. If you are buying an advert on a website, are you really interested in page views? I’m not. It’s clicks that really matter to me. And surely it’s clicks that matter to the advertiser. That’s the real ROI of any advert on the web. Unless you’re Coca Cola, and you can afford subliminal brand advertising.

But because of this page view obsession, everyone has tailored blog advertising to it. We put six or eight adverts on every page of our blogs – that way we get the maximum amount of page views. And what does that mean?

• We can only sell six or eight adverts on our blogs, so we have to charge as much as we can. Result? Lots of empty space and constantly chasing for new advertisers to replace the ones who leave us
• We serve irrelevant adverts. Result? People don’t click them! I searched today for some help with Drupal. I found a brilliant site which answered my question, and there, on a page with a Drupal tutorial, was an advert for a premium Wordpress theme. I’m never going to click it! I don’t use Wordpress!

So there you have it. Unless you’re huge A list blogger, with massive traffic, and you can charge $250 a month for a 125 by 125 advert, you’re always going to struggle to sell your advertising slots, and when you do, your income will be a pittance.

That’s why most bloggers don’t actually bother. And don’t fall for the “Ad blindness” line either. Relevant ads will always attract the eye – it’s the ones which have no interest or relation to us that get ignored.

But it doesn’t need to be this way at all. We’ve come up with a whole new way of selling advertising on our travel blog, and it will work in any niche. You’ll be able to sell your adverts for a low price, keep your clients once they’re on board, give them value in the form of clicks, and make a decent living from it as well.

How? Check back here tomorrow. And no this isn’t a sales pitch for any kind of product, I’m simply going to share this with you.

How to make money from blog advertising - Part Two

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Check these out too:

1/ A conversation about paying for content

2/ Why you have to become a better writer

3/ How to be rich and happy