As I mentioned in my Time for a Change post, I felt I needed to come up with some kind of plan for how I'm going to monetize the new look blog and this is it. As I see there are ? main areas to consider for monetizing my blog, contextual text links and banners ads, affiliate ads, inline ads and direct banner ads. I'm now going to look at each one individually.
Contextual Text Links and Banner Ads
By this ofcourse I mean Google Adsense, there are other companies that offer the same sort of advertising, but I'm already making money with them, so I want to leave this part alone. Over the next few weeks I'm going to play around with ad unit placement to see what gives me the best click-thru rate.
Affiliate Ads
To begin with I will be promoting 2 affiliate programs through 125x125 ads placed in one of the sidebars under the title "Affiliates". The 2 programs that I will be using are Adult Friend Finder and 888.com, I'm already making good money from Adult Friend Finder so I will continue to push that and as online gambling is so popular these days I think 888.com has good potential. I'm also on the lookout for a third program to promote alongside the other 2, I will then concentrate on just these for a month and see how they perform. If after a month any of them fail to perform I will start to look for alternatives.
Inline Ads
Inline ads are ads that popup when you hover over certain keywords on a page. I've already tried this before with Adbrite, with quite poor results, this may have been down to Adbrite not serving any quality ads. This time I'm going to use Kontera's ContentLink ads instead and see how they perform, as I said before I will give it a try for a month, if the ads don't perform well I will remove them.
Direct Banner Ads
At the moment I don't feel I get enough traffic that I can sell space directly to advertisers so for the time being I'm going to put a "Featured Ads" heading in the sidebar with a number of 125x125 banners from Commision Juntion, 888.com and Adult Friend Finder. I've also signed up with Project Wonderful to give them a try, I'm currently waiting for them to approve my blog. Project Wonderful apparently offer advertisers the opportunity to bid for ad space on your blog, I've heard some good reports about them so I'll give it a try.
One thing that I'm going to stop doing is putting big banners ads at the end of posts, as it makes the site look cluttered and unappealing and they don't perfom that well anyway. Once I've implemented all these things I'm going to watch very closely over the next few months, what performs and what doesn't, if something doesn't perform well it will be removed.
Well, that's the plan, I'm now going to start putting the ads into place, I will let you know how it goes.
1 comments:
As internet advertising gets more and more cluttered with banners and hyperlink rollover texts, why not leave the late 1990’s and get with it by creating branded content. It drives traffic and has consumer appeal. Heavybag Media did a kickass site for Ovation VXT guitars at their launch by allowing users to create and edit their own video mashup of people playing the instrument that could then be sent to a friend. Check out their work and their site::
http://www.thevxt.com http://www.heavybagmedia.com
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