Time for a quick reader survey. I’m sitting here at FOOA and have heard a few presentations today highlighting different ways bloggers make money and how advertisers can target blog readers. These have been from companies like BlogAds, PayPerPost and Federated Media.
It strikes me that these three models are quite varied – but that they only scratch the surface in the different metthods that bloggers are using to make money from their blogs.
So here is my question:
How do you monetize your blog?
What ad networks, affiliate programs, review programs etc do you use?
Feel free to mention the specific services that you use and even give us a review of them if you’d like.
PS: as an example of how you might like to comments – see my post on how I make money from blogs.
Adsense and Amazon. Amazon is best if you post about the book or product you’re linking to. Adsense is good some days and bad others. I blog about my life (I’m really interesting, I swear), which involves being a stripper. Adsense wisely applies that by giving me ads about wire strippers and paint strippers. Those days I don’t do so well. Other days I do okay.
– Adsense: doing well
– TLA: nice extra
– Auction Ads: this is one that will be a big grower I think, I am really surprised by the excellent results, but my site being a product related site makes it logical I think
– An e-partner for CD’s and DVD’s
– selling banners and other packets
– Chitika: I have mixed feelings about this one…
All in all an ad mix that is doing pretty well its job. The house is being paid with it, so I can’t complain :)
I ran a poll recently asking similar question to my blog readers.
http://www.sabahan.com/2007/05/25/whats-your-blogs-biggest-money-maker/
I like Foodette’s approach. Very sensible.
Adsense,Tla. I have to try video ads and direct sales that is the better way i thik. :)
I currently use AdBrite on my BattleCity Classic website which is working pretty good!
Great post. I just hit the 3 month mark on my blog and am now able to apply for all the paid review programs, but I had previously applied to a few before my traffic was high enough, so I am now waiting on those.
Yesterday, I got a pleasant surprise when SponsoredReviews emailed me to say that a company had purchased a review from me! That was my first real earning, since I have only made a few pennies from Adsense.
At the moment, I am using Amazon affiliate links, a little Adsense, and now Sponsored Reviews. My main focus so far has been to build the quality and traffic for my blog.
If you have a blog with traffic, I highly recommend BlogAds. (I’d be happy to sponsor others into BlogAds if it fits your site.)
My top revenues sources, in order:
1. BlogAds
2. Google Adsense
3. Auction Ads
4. Text Link Ads
5. Amazon
AdSense and Auction Ads — 50/50 split for impressions, and 50/50 split for revenue.
We’re just diving into Blogging and currently use it to help promote our consulting and training. I gave this post some link love on our Friday, “Who Said That?” Our readership continues to grow. That’s our main focus at this point.
I love payperpost and all of the other paid to post programs. I average 8 ads a day between my 3 blogs and I have 2 others am waiting to get page ranks on and they will also be listed on those sites. You have to write the adds yourself but those 8 ads a day make me anywhere from 40 to 70 dollars a day and usually take 1 to 1 1/2 hours to write, and thats. I’ve also been seeing a lot of opportunity to do video adds lately and they pay a lot more. I’ve just been to lazy to hook up any of my web cams.
I personally use Adsense, Text Link Ads, Blogads, Auction Ads, Amazon Affiliates, targeted affiliate programs in the form of banners and text, rotating banner ads through 3rd party agency, and then personal ads which I get very few but when I get them they sell for the highest prices.
I used to use Adbrite but dropped them last month. Wasn’t working well for me and used up too much space for such little pay.
I only have a blogspot blog.It is only one and half months old.So my blog doesnot qualify for most of the paid to review or paid to blog sites.I can go for affiliates but i dont think so with a less traffic i can earn much.I just joined Auction Ads.Im really worried about it.I have had nearly 2500 impressions and 60 clicks last week.But the worst part is that no one bought anything.So now im only concentrating on getting traffic to my blog.
I have adsense and I really like Auction Ads. I can’t get a CPM network yet, as I do not have enough unique visitors a day. I think this will be where i would do best. Being a movie review site, I do not get a lot of click through on Adsense, Auction ads I get a lot of click throughs but not a lot of conversion. I have not made 100 dollars yet in 6 months. I guess making a movie blog is hard work.
I use Google Adsense primarily. I’ve tested the others, but since my site isn’t product related, they don’t work well. Right now, I’m attempting to do more marketing to help my Adsense earnings increase.
I make money from Google Adsense.
But, as my blog is in portuguese and Brazil is still discovering the blogsphere, I don´t get so much money.
Anyway, my plan is to write a lot of marketing content, to in the future, when Brazil finaly discover the blog magical world, I´ll be prepared.
I’ve dabbled into Chikita in the late 2005. But, now I’m pretty much fully Adsense. I would like to branch out into TLA and Affiliate though in the very near future.
Currently make about $1000 a month, my top performers are (in order of highest payout to least):
Indeed
Adwords:
Amazon
YPN
I recently started a blog talking about music and the benefits of learning music. http://musicbeginnings.com – So far I just have a couple of Google ads posted, but I don’t use anything else right now. Everything I’ve read has talked about building up your reader base and traffic first – establishing a quality blog – and then try to monetize. So what I’m doing now is trying to collect what information I can about blogging and monetizing and doing some research, and when I feel my reader base has grown enough I will implement some money-making tools.
I do have some income through AdSense, but not past the 100$ mark yet. No-one likes my blog. :-(
I use Affiliate Programs from affili.net, especially eBay relevance ad, TLA, and AuctionAds
I’ve started using adsense across about 5 blogs and sites, and get most hits from my blog, churchtechmatters.com, and have a steady stream of income coming in, not a large stream yet but it is growing.
I’m starting to do reviews from reviewme.com, I wrote my first review and it will post either tonight or tomorrow, once I proof read it again, with another in a few days.
I signed up for text link ads but need to check on the status of that.
I haven’t tried Chitika yet but since you rave about it so much, I want to give that a shot.
That’s all, at the moment but I’m looking for more ways to bring in some real income.
Mostly Adsense ads, but I also make some money by linking to online savings accounts with referral bonuses for new opens.
I’ve used Adsense so far only.. not earning alot atm but still it does pay off for the domain name and hosting!
It’s not easy at all, I’m trying with AdSense, Auction Ads and Amazon and I’d like to experience with others but there are inconvinients such as the fact that I still haven’t reached monthly traffic figures big enough to apply on Chitika, TLA, etc. or because my blog is in spanish and Pay Per Post are exclusivelly for english content.
Revenue from those I’m using has already become a “family joke” regarding the fact that I’m “counting cents” I guess the main issue in my case is the content, I’m blogging about current events, especially related to Venezuela and Latinamerica and also on history, biographies and books reviews and I guess those aren’t quit commercialy attractive topics for my readers since I’ve noticed that there are plenty of items and services offered trhough the ads that are actually related to my content but people just don’t click on them. I’ve been trying different locations for the ads with the same result…
Either way, I’m trying to be patient, I enjoy blogging a lot so this won´t dicourage me from doing it but it would be even nicer if it paid off; I guess sooner or later it’ll take off and I’ll see the “family joke” removed from our conversations and we’ll have to find something else to laugh on…
I make money mainly through TLA, I have been trying to make revenue through adsense but I’m having a hard time :(
I’ve been blogging for 2 years plus but have yet to get any cheque from Adsense. However, I’ve been actively involved in many Paid to blog network like PayPerPost, Blogitive, Blogsvertise, etc. PPP is where my bulk of income comes from.
Apart from that, I like to use Linkworth and just started direct advertising too.
I’m a 1-year-old-blogger and I have been using AdSense. Currently my adSense income is almost 200 per month and I expect to grow it much more. I know I will do it working a lot. I also began to experiment with Amazon Affiliates Program but I still don’t have nothing to report about it. My blogs are written in spanish and I suspect the ads are much cheaper than the english ones. I expect that the Google AdWords Program also grows to have better ads in the future.
Hi Darren,
I’m using Adsense at AspireNow and a custom ad program that I administer. This is starting to bring in some revenue. I’ve found that Amazon has been largely a bust, so far. CJ was disappointing, so I recently switched to Clickbank.
On my blogs, both http://ARRiiVE.blogspot.com and http://aspirenow.blogspot.com, I’m just using Adsense. I’m sure that as traffic grows, I’ll bring in other alternatives.
Cheers!
Scott
P.S. – You might want to join my Plaxo group on collaboration. Obviously, you’re good at getting it! I’d love if you’d contribute your thoughts and ideas: http://advancedcollaboration.plaxogroups.com
I am trying adsense on my blog mmadepot.blogspot.com, with poor results. It is mainly a video site though, but on my other sites, tekshelf.blogspot.com and genuinemen.blogspot.com adsense is doing great.
Affiliate sales is number one plus a daily trickle of adsense.
I am try YPN on my blogs currently however I haven’t had much luck with them. I have signup with TLA however i have not had any sales yet.
I monitise my blog with adsense and some affiliate banners.
Very nice,
Please visit my blog and see how to make money
Hi there,
Great blog. Very informative, and the comments are great too.
I think I recognized the owner of this blog was at the TED 2008 conference!
Anyhow, I don’t make money with Google ad sense (but I only tried for a week). I am sure it is because I don’t want to impact the design of my blog. I never return onto web sites that have many ads. I don’t know how others do.
But do people clic on ad and why?
Dave Morgan (AOL Global Advertising Strategy) blogged about a study that they did to investigate who clicks on ads:
I quote him:
“What did we learn? A lot. We learned that most people do not click on ads, and those that do are by no means representative of Web users at large.
Ninety-nine percent of Web users do not click on ads on a monthly basis. Of the 1% that do, most only click once a month. Less than two tenths of one percent click more often. That tiny percentage makes up the vast majority of banner ad clicks.
Who are these “heavy clickers”? They are predominantly female, indexing at a rate almost double the male population. They are older. They are predominantly Midwesterners, with some concentrations in Mid-Atlantic States and in New England. What kinds of content do they like to view when they are on the Web? Not surprisingly, they look at sweepstakes far more than any other kind of content. Yes, these are the same people that tend to open direct mail and love to talk to telemarketers.”
A link to the study:
http://blogs.mediapost.com/spin/?p=1085
So in sum, web marketing seems to capitalize on a niche group.
I have a google page rank of 6, more than 700 average regular feed readers on a culture blog, and yet no clic ever.
Of course contextualizing the ads make a lot of sense through channel and ad units, however it also depends on the niche and the demographic of your readers.
Because I have a relative good number of rss feed reader, I sometimes do reviews, but only if it melts perfectly with the content of my blog and if the product is interesting. Two in one, these reviews are great!
Cati
I developed a blog to try to make money as well as get people to my zlio store http://pampered-puppy.zlio.net
People do not click through on ads much on either site. Even if product is click on it should get some money but not as much as if they actually (gasp) were to buy something.
I dont’ know if that is what some of you mean by direct sales.
I have used adsense for the past month and I have a link in my email to groups that I belong to somewhat related to my blog topic. I only post to those groups once in a great while though as my presence decreased over last 6 months while I focused on yahoo answers.
I do post my blog link whenever appropriate.. Maybe I am to educationally oriented instead of $$$
In last month I have made a measly 1.24 from adsense and probably 1/2 that is because my son who also blogs click on a couple of ads to see what’s going. he has one that is for guitaras and cameras and has been very active on photo websites for years so he has done better with adsense than I have.
I am not convinced that ads are the way to go but I am going to try some of the problog tips and also fellow bloggers tips.
HAHHA today I am attending one of those free make money on the internet pitches with free lunch.. we will see what they say too.
One thing I wondered was my son said you can pay for traffic to your site and I haven’t explored that yet… anyone have any luck with paying people to visit? if so would you pay them to visit yoru store or your blog?
Good luck to all of you bloggers.
Nice post, thanks!
I never wanted to have adds on my blog, I liked the design too much. However once I got past 500 uniques per day I thought it was about time I cashed in a little.
I’ve had AdSense displaying for a week and made $20. Not bad, but I will be looking at some of the other suggestions in this post and the comments, thanks guys!
Monetizing your blog seems to work best when you give your readers motivation to use your advertising products. If you promote quality products that fit your website audience and are useful to your readers, then they’ll want to use them and you’ll be providing your readers with a service, not a nuisance.
I’ve been running a documentary blog for a few months and only just starting to see a decent number of unique visitors. I’ve read up quite a bit on adsense placement and been experimenting but have so far seen extremely disappointing results with regards to number of clicks and profit per click.
I know its early days but I feel that adsense my not not be the answer to my money making prayers.
I’ll probably hang in there for a couple more weeks and see if things pick up, if not I’ll investigate other options.
Anyone with ideas of how I could monetize a documentary blog, feel free to let me know :)
Hi Guys
The last few months I have been using Blogger and Adsense. It is a long road to get things rolling but it sure nice to see it generate an income almost everyday. Right now what I am making won’t make me a millionaire(yet!) but I keep moving in a positive direction!
Good Luck