Sebbie on the Webbie

Posts Tagged ‘adsense’

Turning readers into cash

The easiest way to turn your traffic into cash is selling ad space. That’s the theory. If you have visitors the money will roll in. However, I have found through years of experience that this just doesn’t happen unless your blog fits into a very detailed category of blogs.

The most important thing for a blog to have is “high paying keywords”. On the top of the list, is “domains Yahoo” which can bring in a ridiculous amount of $97 a click. Ninety Seven Per Click! I wish I made 97 a year of my blogs or websites! The keywords by themselves of course don’t solve your problems alone. You will have to have the blog, have traffic, then have keywords in your content and advertisers who are willing to pay for displaying an ad on your website. It won’t help me one bit if I repeated that keyphrase a hundred times on this page, because my blog is low ranking and I don’t even run AdSense here (because it makes no sense on this type of blog).

In addition, your topic determines what kind of keywords you actually CAN use on your blog. If you blog about making handbags at home by hand, you won’t normally slip in words like insurance, lawyer and viagra. Even if you did, once or twice, the keyword density would make it obvious that you’re not exactly blogging about those topics, and therefore the advertisers stay away. If you started using these keywords regularly, I’m willing to bet your hand bag making readers would be quite put off by it.

If most of your readers come from countries that are not high on advertisers radar, they can cut you out from the list as well. This localisation, or targeting thing is really great if you’re advertising a local business and you really don’t need traffic from the other side of the world, but if you’re the blogger or webmaster and your readers, as in “eyeballs on your page” are of non-american origin, you’ve got the short end of the stick again. You can combat this a bit by targeting your content to the same market as the advertisers would, for example, if you’re Finnish, blog in Finnish for Finnish people about something they can buy in Finland.

Then there are those of us, who are not prepared to plan their website under the conditions of what advertisers want them for. In our case, monetising is a lot harder. Our readers may be scattered all around the world, with just a couple in each country, or just a “wrong” country. Our topics are not keyword dense. We talk about creativity, psychology and imagination, and those are things that are priceless – in the true sense of the word. They are the best things in life, but even though your readers would put a lot of money on their hobby, there’s not much of a reason why they would put money on your website, or why an advertiser would like to spend dollars on advertising on your site. The bottom line here is, that if you want to turn that kind of a site into cold hard cash, you’ll have to think outside the box. How do we do this?

I wish I could give you an answer. I know you were waiting for an answer, but instead all I can offer is a place for a conversation, maybe you, my reader would have some ideas. Maybe you can just vent out your frustration about your popular blog or website being worth zip in money… I’m thinking hard about this, and I promise I’ll tell as soon as I come up with something that I can actually try out in practise.

There are two types of sites that make a good money through adverts like GoogleAdSense; Boring ones that have good subject lines, and hugely popular ones that people go to when they are bored. The thing is, the only time you really pay attention to ads is when you have absolutely nothing better to do. It is very unlikely that someone would actually read what is said in the add and go “Hey I have to check that out!” When that happens, it’s usually a situation when a person is disappointed with the content she or he has been provided on the site the add is displayed and wants to see something different this time.

Sometimes however, users of a very good site that they absolutely love, will just click through the links to offer something back to the site owner, but that happens when they remember to. If the site is so good, they most likely won’t remember to click on ads, as they have other things to do there – they might also plan to do it later, but forget.

I have a site like this with 135 visitors a day. I have some loyal visitors, that return daily to discuss a collectors item we all take interest in. The rest of the 135 are visitors that I don’t know if they return daily as they don’t discuss, but some of them might read things daily, and judging by the even amount of daily visitors they are mostly the same people. This site is the best performing site, simply because of the user base, but with the rather modest click through rate of 0,08, while the most lame site I’ve got has a click through rate of 0.48%! Almost every second visitor clicks on an add, because there’s nothing there! (That would be great, but there’s not much traffic either, because there’s nothing there…) Anyway, talking straight money, let’s just say that after 2 years of running the adds I haven’t made enough to get paid, as Google has the payment limit of 100 dollars. I have, however made more than half of it, so I don’t want to stop running the adds either, or I would loose over 50 dollars. *sigh*

I wish I had an idea on how to actually make money with your website you have invested so much time on, but I don’t know. Maybe selling T-shirts with your logo on it would do, but that is just another thing you should add to your list of things to do, while you’re already flooded with the maintenance of your site. But if you would have time and a large fan base, maybe?