Part 8-9 – Monetizing Your Blog_AdSense
You have to turn your traffic into money from AdSense
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| Part 8 – Monetizing Your Blog_Adsense |
There are several ways to generate profits from the visitors to your blog
Google’s Adsense program allows you to do so with ultimate ease. First, visit their website at http://adsense.google.com/. You’ll find out more about their advertising program there, but here are some extra bits I’d like to tell you.
First, Google’s Adsense program is a really useful way to monetize your blog because when users finish reading your newest post, chances are they want to leave your blog because they have nothing else to do with your blog. If your Adsense advertisement block is visible on your blog, they might see advertisements relevant to them and click on them to exit your blog. Ka-ching! You’ve just cashed in on your first virtual cents!
placing your Google ads in the right places
But yes, your profits will only be cents if you don’t “do it right”. This involves placing your Google ads in the right places and ensuring they blend into your site so that they appear more like links rather than advertisements to your visitors.
Consult the page https://www.google.com/support/adsense/bin/static.py?page=tips.html to see the “heat map” of your blog. The “hotter” a certain area, the greater the chances of someone looking at your blog.
Once you get a Google Adsense account, you can change the color of your advertisement text and links. You will want them to match the colours on your blog. If your blog’s text is black and the links are red, do the same for the ad blocks too! It’s that simple.
other different way to earn profits from your blog
Another way to earn profits from your blog is to recommend products to your readers. When your visitors buy from the merchants you recommend, you get to keep a little commission too. This is known as affiliate marketing and it is very easy to start because you don’t have to create your own products or services.
Anyway, let’s refer back to our technological gadgets blog example. Let’s say you discover this Gadget X on a merchant’s website, and they offer an affiliate program. What you would do is create a post in your blog and do a mini-review on this Gadget X. Rip it apart and point out its benefits and bad points, if any, and include a link (which is given by the merchant) for the visitor to purchase the Gadget X online.
If your visitor clicks and purchases the gadget, the merchant will track from the link that the purchase is referred by you, so they will send you your share of the profits. Imagine if 1 out of every 100 visitors you get purchases this product, and you earn $27.00 commission from each purchase! If you get 10,000 visitors in a month that would be a $2,700.00 paycheque for you just for writing about ONE product.
Now, affiliate programs are very nice ways to generate profit, but how do you find affiliate programs that are related to your blog’s theme? Easy, just go to Google and search for <your niche> +” affiliate programs”. Another slightly better way is to go
to http://www.associateprograms.com/search to look for affiliate programs in your niche.
The two ways mentioned above are basic ways to generate profits from your blog. We’ll be discussing other great, profitable ways, so keep your eyes peeled!😣😉
Part 9 – More Monetizing Options
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| Part 9 – More Monetizing Options |
We’ve discussed using the Google Adsense program and other merchants’ affiliate programs to generate profits from your blog. However, we have a lot of other options to monetize your blog, so we’re going to look into that today.
The first option we’ll be looking at is Chitika
(www.chitika.com). Chitika is a very innovative contextual advertising program because it can serve very detailed advertisements. For example, on your technological gadget blog, Chitika will show advertisements for tech gadgets such as iPods. The way they show it is in different tabs: one for “Best deals”, another for “details”, another for “reviews” and so on. This way, it is more of an informational section for your visitor rather than an advertisement, and naturally the click-through will be higher. You can apply here: https://chitika.com/application.php?type=mm
You can also be an affiliate for Amazon
Amazon offers a wide range of products but its predominant domain is in books. Whatever your niche is about, you can probably find a book about it on Amazon.com. Join their Associate program here: https://associates.amazon.com/gp/flex/associates/apply-login.html/
Once you join them, you can refer visitors to them and earn up to 10% commission. It’s not a lot but if you can manage to refer big volumes of visitors, Amazon is for you. This program really shines when it comes to the ways you can refer visitors: you can use their predefined templates to pull up recent items that match certain criteria you set, you can target your ad to show a specific item on sale or you can just simply weave your referral links into your blog posts.
sell advertising space on your blog
Last but definitely not least, you can sell advertising space on your blog if your blog is truly popular. Just take a look at blogs. some blogs receive over 10,000 pageviews every day and naturally, merchants will want to strike a deal with the blog’s owner to post their advertisements there. If you manage to pull in huge amounts of traffic like that blog, you can definitely get people to buy ad space on your blog for prices from $150/month upwards, depending on your blog's popularity.
To gauge how many pageviews and visitors you get every day, just use the free tool available at https://analytics.google.com/. or https://statcounter.com/ They have a very detailed setup guide there so I won’t go into it.
If your blog has not acquired a large number of visitors yet, you can still sell ad space on your blog on a per-click or per-impression basis. For a complete list of these sites,
visit http://performancing.com/node/60.
Hopefully, that will help you maximize earnings and profits from your blog!