How to make money from blog advertising - Part two

Yesterday I addressed the problem with selling advertising on blogs. In summary, they were:

• By focusing on page views, ads tend to get placed on every page of the blog, resulting in only a few slots and consequently high prices
• For the same reason, ads are often served that are irrelevant to the page being read, hence the low click through rates

Today, let’s look at an alternative.

Why not focus on the biggest strength of any blog? The huge number of pages, a number that is always increasing!

When we started this on our travel blog, we had over 1000 posts in place. We decided to allow two adverts per page.

Benefit number one: The blog doesn’t look like it’s “full” of adverts.

So, two adverts per page equals 2000 potential advert slots. But instead of selling single page adverts, we offered a package of ten adverts to each advertiser – for just €30 a month, or $44, they get ten adverts.

Benefit number two: Ten adverts for €30 a month is great value for money – I call it a “no brainer” price.

You may already have done the math, but in case you haven’t that means you can sell 200 sets of adverts on a 1000 page blog!

Benefit number three: The amount of advertisers is limited only by how much selling time you can create for yourself.

Now we don’t just place the ads where we feel like it. Advertisers can either choose their ten pages, or we select appropriate pages for them. An advert for a restaurant in Puerto del Carmen will only appear on pages that talk about food, eating out, or the resort called Puerto del Carmen.

Benefit number four: The ads are placed only on pages relevant to the topic, which results in click through rates of between 1.2% and 2.8%. Now that’s significant compared to the industry standard of less than 05%.

And the results?

They have been fantastic. Getting advertisers is easy as the cost is low, and we haven’t lost a single one who has joined us so far. We provide a monthly report showing clicks to their site, and where they don’t have a site we either link through to their Facebook page, or we create a special page for them on our own site.

So far we have only scratched the surface, but with the number of advertisers we have the income is already pretty good, and best of all companies are beginning to approach us to advertise. In the last month two hotel chains and Thomas Cook travel have joined the site, simply by emailing us and asking to come on board.

What are your thoughts? When we first started I kept waiting for the catch, for the mistake in the logic to become apparent. But four months down the track our 34 advertisers are all happy, we’re very happy with the income we’re generating, and now people are coming to us.

Also check out:

1/ A list of productivity and time management posts

2/ Selling advertising on your blog

3/ Eight tips for how to sell advertising on your blog