Many blogs have two audiences, sometimes equally divided, sometimes not: The daily readers and the visitors through links and search engines. But most of us treat those visitors the same – presenting them the same layout, and the same amount advertisement. Why?
If you analyze your earnings, you should see a difference between profit from your daily blog readers and visitors through links and search engines. It is because of their different focus in attention.
Daily readers ‘know’ your layout and will get very blind on advertisement. The other group is searching for something particular, and therefore is very open to contextual advertisement. Daily readers get annoyed by too much advertising (even when it is contextual), and the other group loves them.
But as you would like to earn money, there is no way to please the daily readers … or? There is. Think about it one second. What is the difference between both groups?
It is the amount of time since you published the article.
If your blog is listed good on search engines, it will at least take some hours to fetch your new article and often take a day to rank you. Your rank for an article slowly rises, so it is save to assume, that while your daily readers are through with your blog in a week, search engine and link traffic will start after a week.
So my suggestion is: Start showing advertisement if an article is more than some days old! This will need some programming you might not be able to do of your own, but someone can do for you.
Or: you can use such mechanism to display different ads based on the age of the post or gather more information how your website performs at the different times slots.
With this you get happy daily readers and still profits from your websites!
How to only show ads after X days
This article shows an example on how to differentiate those visitors based on the age of the post.
[…] ow them to guests only!
Posting a follow up to Nicole Simon’s Ads: You can post them later! I thought I would mention a common practi […]
An interesting idea, is there any data to back this up. I can see this theory behind this working but would like to see some numbers to back this up.
There can only be your data, from you blogs. :)
If you like to try it out, choose two channels (0-3 days, 4+ days), and display them according to the date.
After some time, you will have your statistics and nothing has ‘changed’ to your layout or your display of ads. Then you can decide if it is worth or not to remove them for daily readers, or not.
You need not remove all ads, but perhaps some. :)
Nice post Nicole – this has also got me thinking about tailoring the ads / affiliate links I show on my posts based on the keywords that the search engine visitors used to reach the pages. I’m sure this is already done by many sites, but has it caught on in blogging yet?
Wouldn’t putting your full, as opposed to abreviated, posts into your RSS feed be doing about the same thing?
I read ProBlogger everyday and I’m not bothered by the ads. Adsense is so prevelent these days, I’d think it was weird if I visited a site and they weren’t there.
In my blog, the issue is that the article/post is only read once or twice by the same person, and is read especially when it’s first posted, so removing the ads in the first few hours, will probably make me miss the potential CTR i have…
Nice tip overall,
Heat
Rob yes, of course :)
Jon no, because it is not about the feed reading persons but about “later” visitors through search engines. As you say, you are not bothered by the ads – because you don’t see them anymore.
Heat: Yes. But you should test, if this really comes from those readers? And how much? As Jen says, it is sometimes not as much as you would expect.
@all
Unless you have differentiated channels to track the different time slots you can’t tell if your visitors really click in these first days.
Of course, if a significant amount of money comes from your daily visitors you won’t take that away. But do these visitors react on the same advertisement as later visitors? :)
I thought of checking to see if a visitor had a referal header from Google, Yahoo! etc
I currently do this in my podcast (http://60secondshai.blogspot.com/) and video blog (http://freshwave.tv/), on a per-post basis. I only add ads in the latest entries a few weeks later. The new shows don’t get ads. But, I do have a couple of “staple” ads on the blogs… ‘don’t know if this is better – or if it makes a difference at all.
Shai, yes I think that is good. You can show much more ads the more far away you are from your daily reader to annoy them less. :))
Nicole.
That’s a nice thought for the ‘pro-bloggers’ out there … who has traffic and is capable of earning a profit from advertising. But what about us newbies who have never made a single dime from advertising? I’m still hopeful. Should I just give up altogether? I mean, if you have a blog and trying to build up a regular base of readers … why wouldn’t you advertise? Isn’t that the point to catch as many readers as possible? Surely the regular readers count.
I know it sounds “illogical” but, it makes more sense to me to remove the ads on the OLDER posts than on the newer posts. If I were searching for information and found an older posting, I would be more inclined to click on the link to the current material to see what other useful information that site has, than to click on advertising. It would be nice to think that I (and others) would be grateful for finding the information anyway, and would support the author by clicking on their advertising links, but that’s not realistic to me.
By the way, since i’ve responded this much :-D, I’m of the same viewpoint as “Jon” post #6 above .. if you don’t see ads on a blog (or popular website) .. it must then be a personal website. It’s probably one of those teenager blog sites doing their teenage daily journals like .. ‘oh I’m pink today’ .. or, ‘i hate billy because he didn’t notice me yesterday’ … or, ‘i’m listening to this music right now’ …..
HART
Hart, you will want to read about the long tail and take a look at your logfiles. :) This is why you take a look at how to make your blog search engine friendly.
Many blogs pull a lot of there revenue from old post – even single popular posts.
And you also gave yourself the answer:
– Don’t make it look old.
– Take care that advertisement uses contextual ads
so they will be the most current material
They don’t click on the add to give you something but because it is their way of continuing their search for special information.
For displaying ads: Again, if you don’t put them on ‘young’ articles, for your daily readers, they know what they get. But the older can get ads again.
In sum I disagree – you don’t need ads on it to make it look professional – and just adding adds does not make it look pro. It still can be a teenager blog. ;)))
Hart, I don’t think one has ever learned enough – there is alway more to learn, to discover and more!
And questions from different perspectives always are good because they give you new way of seeing problems.
Check out the long tail article from wired, this will change the way you look at ‘old’ posts. :)
[…] I read Nicole Simon’s article on ProBlogger this morning, and he looked at the option of separating your daily readers and visitors, when you display your ads. I happen to have quite a few daily readers who track me through services like Bloglines and FOCUSer.net’s recent updates, and I like to hide ads for them. At the same time, I am also getting a few hundred visitors landed here via Google, Yahoo!, MSN Search and others, searching for some particular information – these are the people I especially like to target the ads with. […]