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General Monetization Concepts
By Marques | August 25, 2007
Table of contents for Monetizing Your Blog
- General Monetization Concepts
- Recommended Moneymakers: Chitika eMiniMalls
This post is part of a series in our “Resources for Bloggers” page. In the blogging world you’ve probably heard many times “monetization” or “monetize your blog”. What is all this after all? The answer is quite simple: Blog monetization are techniques to derive revenue from your blog. You don’t need to be a professional blogger or writer to extract some revenue from what you write and every blog has potential to become a revenue generator. There are different monetization approaches and each one works, depending on your blog. What is hard is choosing the right monetization tactics that work for each blog. One thing that is essential for any blog monetization scheme to work is traffic. If nobody is reading your content and visiting your site, you can have the perfect advertisers but you’ll never generate any revenue from it. In my opinion, the second essentiality in any monetization tactic is added value to your readers. If your readers don’t take any value from the information or products you are advertising, forget it. It won’t work. The basics is that revenue is generated by displaying advertisements on the site. It can be contextual advertisement, affiliate products, sold advertising space, etc. Contextual advertising Contextual advertising is the name generally given to advertisement that is displayed in context to your site content. The biggest player in this field is, without question, the Adsense program by Google. It works by ”reading” your content and matching it to ads existing in their database. The big advantage is that usually the ads displayed complement your content and makes it much more attractive for your readers to interact with the ads. The disadvantage is that visitors need to interact with the ads in the form of a click for you to make any money out of it. There are other options for contextual advertising out there but none touches Google Adsense in terms of “contextuality” and ads available. Affiliate programs As the name suggests, you need to be affiliated with some company or product. The ads are displayed in your site and, depending on the type of contract you have, you’ll make money if a visitor coming from your site buys something from the advertiser. The percentage vary from company to company and can be recursive or not. The recursive affiliate programs are, without question, the best. Usually your visitor needs to make a paid subscription to something (magazines, web hosting, etc.) and every time the subscription is renewed, you get a percentage. One of the biggest players for affiliate marketing is Amazon.com but there are many others available. The advantage of this method is that you usually get a percentage of the sale (bigger sale means more money for you), and for some programs, even if the visitor returns to their site up to a time period after the initial visit. The disadvantage is that you can have thousands of impressions of a particular affiliate ad with thousands of clicks, but if the product is not of interest for your visitors you’ll never make a sale, which means you’ll never make any money from it. Sponsored Posts Some blogs out there write sponsored posts. This means that the blogger gets paid to write a review about a particular product or site. Several markets offer this type of revenue, like PayPerPost.com or ReviewMe.com. Some reviews have requirements (post length, number of links to the advertiser site, bias, etc.). The advantage is that if you meet all the requirements, the money is yours without any extra effort or visitor interaction. The disadvantage is that if, to meet a requirement, you write something about a product or site that does not correspond to the truth, you’ll loose credibility with your readers. Direct Ad Sales This is the ultimate money maker. Contacting an advertiser and selling the ad space yourself. Although it is probably the best way to make money with a blog, it’s also probably the hardest to achieve. You need consistent visitor numbers and a high quality content before you even think about this one. Your site needs to provide huge exposure and value for the sponsor. Also, it’s hard to expect that sponsors come to you. You have to go out there and find them which diverts time and effort from your blogging activities. The advantage is that you get to choose the amount to charge and if the sponsor likes your site and provides value to him, you might get contracts that extend for a long period of time. The disadvantage… well, there is really no disadvantage but it’s not easy getting to a point where a sponsor would even consider your site. Oh, guess what, the Digital-Folders Network does this for you… Topics: Blog Monetization, Resources for bloggers | Comments
