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Make Money Blogging
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Home » Make Money Blogging » Make Money Blogging Part 10 | Monetization, Misinformation and Myths
How to Monetize Your Blog If you have been following along and doing exactly as I showed you then you should start to receive some traffic. Now the question is how to monetize your blog effectively. Let’s Put and End to This Myth So I’m sure you’ve heard that it is not wise to put all of your eggs in one basket. However when it comes to monetization you have to be careful just how you interpret this advice. Sure, I too believe in diversifying my income streams. That’s why I have some blogs that work adsense and others that work affiliate links. That is also why I work with different affiliate programs like Commission Junction, Pepperjam and Clickbank. So what’s my problem now? I see all kinds of MMO bloggers complaining about how they don’t make money with adsense and screw Google etc…yet these same people have banners and affiliate links all over their pages along with adsense! If you want to make money blogging then don’t mix your adsense with your affiliate ads. You don’t want them competing on the same pages! But thats not what the top bloggers say! All I can do is tell you what I have learned through personal experience. You have to understand adsense, which by the way I doubt hardly any of the A-Listers do, in order to make serious money with it and not screw it up. It’s very easy to blow it with adsense and not even know why. CTR (click through ratio) is an important figure to keep an eye on. If your ctr drops down too low, on just one site, then your whole network can and probably will get priced. It works like this: Advertisers want to put their ads on sites that convert well for them. If your site doesn’t convert well then Google will ’smart price’ the ads on your site. That protects the advertiser from paying more than they should for having their ad on sites that don’t convert. Here is what can happen. You have a blog that is showing ads that pay $14 per click. Your ctr is dropping every week. One day you wake up and suddenly there are .10 ads on your site. So instead of making $400 per month you are now raking in a lousy $20 if that. Why? Because your ctr is too low. Now, not only does this site get ‘priced’ but so does your WHOLE NETWORK!! If you are going to work adsense then work adsense alone. When someone comes to your site they should have two options: either click the back button or click your adsense. You have to understand that everytime someone comes to your site your adsense is shown. That is called an impression. When you have lots of impressions but few click-throughs then your ctr suffers. Think about it. If you have affiliate links on your pages with adsense then you are giving people another way to click out. The Publishers (of whom you are an affiliate) don’t care about how many impressions their ads get because they only pay you when someone makes a purchase, but your adsense will suffer throughout your entire network. This is why so many wanna-be A-Lister bloggers complain about their adsense, yet their sites are plastered with banners and affiliate links. No wonder no one is clicking their adsense! No wonder they make $20 per month. Openx Openx is software you can use to take control of your advertising. You can actually control who sees what. For instance, if you want to show your adsense ads to only Google traffic and affiliate ads to everyone else you can with Openx. This will keep your ctr way up compared to just showing your adsense to everyone who comes to your blog. This will protect your ctr and your whole network in fact. You have to be very careful about who you show your adsense to. If you get 300 unique visits a day from Stumble then you don’t want to show your adsense to them. Why? Because they are not targeted traffic. They wont click your ads. Your impressions will multiply but your ctr will suffer greatly…and you wont make any money. I only show my adsense to Google and Yahoo traffic. This is because my blogs only rank for certain longtail targeted keywords with a need. In other words I know my traffic from Google and Yahoo is going to be high converting targeted traffic. I want to show my adsense to people who will click. I show affiliate ads to all other traffic. How does content effect your ctr? Readers don’t click. Plain and simple. They read. The better your content is the more your ctr will suffer. Then again if you write keyword stuffed crap content then you will get flagged as an MFA (made for adsense) blog. It’s a real catch 22. Once people get reading they don’t click. This is sure to shock some of you but you’re probably not making any money are you? Folks the truth of the matter is, the more your blog looks like an MFA the more money you will make. The ctr just skyrockets when you set your blog up as an MFA. But this is very short lived. You can almost bet the house that you will get flagged and your site will be de-indexed and possibly your adsense account banned. So what to do? Wrtie good content but don’t solve the readers problem Don’t give the reader all the answers he needs otherwise they will never click your ads. For example if you have an ad on your MMO blog that advertises a “how to get traffic” ebook and you get $1 per click, don’t go and write a comprehensive post about how to get traffic. If you answer the readers questions about how to get traffic then they are going to be less likely to click an ad about how to get traffic. This makes sense right? Leave your readers wondering and not satisfied with your content and they will be more likely to click your ads! I know this goes against conventional wisdom but I don’t care because I enjoy working from home full time doing just exactly what I’ve laid out here in this series. How else does content effect my adsense profits? The big money in adsense is in geo-targeted traffic. You can trigger certain ads to show on your blog by including geographic references. So say you have a blog about cockroaches and you rank well for certain obscure phrases regarding cockroaches because you went and got the anchored links. Before I go on let’s think about why someone would be searching for information about cockroaches…maybe they have a problem with cockroaches? Traffic with a need! Guess what kind of ads you are going to see on your cockroach blog? If you guessed “Ads from local exterminators” you would be correct! Now, in order to trigger these ads to show on your page you need to make a geographical reference. “Cockroaches in Boston” or some other city. Then, when someone local to the Boston area (Google sees your IP address) comes to your blog they will see the LOCAL exterminators ad, which might be a $20 click. This local advertiser (not necessarily local to you but to Boston) is not going to pay $20 per click to someone searching for information about cockroaches if they live in Florida. However, the exterminator has no problem paying $20 per click if it’s local traffic because the person clicking his ad probably lives in Boston. People aren’t reading about cockroaches for the heck of it! This is what I mean by targeted organic traffic. Do you understand now why this kind of traffic converts better then general traffic from Stumble and Digg? I could go on forever! I just wanted to touch down on what I think are some of the most common misunderstandings about adsense and monetization in general. I realize I kept it really basic but the truth of the matter is this subject could be elaborated on endlessly. There are so many little things to learn about effective monetization that I could write another 10 posts on it easily. But first and foremost I wanted to confront some of the popularly held beliefs about how to monetize your blog. If you remember just one thing from this post let it be this: don’t put affiliate banners and links, or any other kind of link on your adsense pages. It will kill your ctr and you wont make any money to speak of. This wraps up the ten part series on how to make money blogging. If you have any questions or need any help don’t be shy…ask away. My goal here at MajickWidget is to help you make money blogging without all the hype and nonsense. I see way too many new bloggers that have been duped by the scammers just throwing their money away on useless ebooks and digital junk. You have here in this series a sound model for an online business that you can duplicate over and over again and you didn’t have to sign up for my “newsletter” and there is no “magic ebook with the REAL SECRTETS” waiting for you at the end of this series. All it takes is hard work. Tags: adsense, ctr, Make Money Blogging, monetization Thursday, May 29th, 2008 at 3:19 am and is filed under Make Money Blogging . You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site. 2 Responses to “Make Money Blogging Part 10 | Monetization, Misinformation and Myths”Leave a Reply |
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September 2nd, 2008 at 1:53 pm
First i am going to thank you for your effort in writing this article. This can be change the thoughts and minds of every A-Lister :)..i myself have 2 blogs and many websites but i don’t and never have Adsense on any of them. In fact i had one great article directory with around 900 articles and got 20$ a month from adsense..no ads, no links, no nothing on it. I am reconsidering into adsense after i read your post. A good Bookmark for sure. Best Regards
November 21st, 2008 at 3:00 am
Thanks Tanicos, glad you found it interesting. Adsense pays!