Direct Advertising Doubles Blog Earnings
There is not a silver bullet that works for every blog. However, if there is one thing I have learnt it’s that, the quicker you can tap into direct advertising the better chance you have of making a living out of blogging. Here are some thoughts and tips to chew on.
1. Contextual ad programs are great. Simple to operate, easy to install, they really are a modern marvel. However, if you really want to boost your income the word is “go direct”. Cutting out the middle man can double and sometimes treble your revenue from a particular ad location.
2. Write a list of potential advertisers that you want to target - probably best to start small, not blue chips! Try and find out how they currently spend their ad budget - then work out how you can offer them better value.
3. Select a company off your target list that you like and believe in - this is really important. Then write a couple of posts about them. It helps if you target low competition keywords in the title and text - you need to try and ensure that your article has high search engine visibility for that particular keyword combination (use something like the excellent Wordtracker as your keyword research tool). Then send an email to the company telling them about the posts you have put up and that they are prominent in the search engines under the titles keywords. Sit back and wait for the company to bite. In 12 months of using this tactic I have probably managed to obtain 1 direct advertising deal out of every 3 approaches. That starts to tot up to some serious wonga.
4. The fundamental key to direct advertising revenue is to make sure your site stats are readily available. I personally use AWstats as a point of reference, purely because their server side accuracy leaves little room for doubt in the advertisers mind. However, don’t feel like you need to generate millions of uniques a month to get advertisers on the hook. Using the direct approach technique outlined in point 3, I was able to attract advertising for even comparatively low traffic blogs.
5. How much should you charge? I could go into alot of technical mumbo jumbo about CPM’s and ROI, but I’m not because you’re probably fall asleep before I’m finished. The key thing to remember here is that the market dictates. i.e your ad space is worthless unless there is someone out there willing to buy it - so be flexible. However, one simple rule of thumb is to use AdSense as a benchmark; i.e use your channels to tell you what a particular spot on your blog is worth per month, then double or even treble that value to get to your potential market value. It’s not perfect, but it works just great for me.
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