Sebbie on the Webbie

Posts Tagged ‘advertising’

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.

I have been an advertiser on the Project Wonderful for quite some time, always relying on the square 125×125 standard advert, out of sheer laziness, really. I had one created for EntreCard and thought to stick one on Project Wonderful too. (Not much to loose, you know.) Then I started thinking… There are probably a lot of people like me, and the other ad boxes that must be out there go virtually unused… AND unpaid. So, I decided to create a version of my ad in all available sizes. The ad design is very similar, and the variation in textual message is minimal regardless of the size of the ad.

I realised that the standard 125×125 advert will cost me more to run, because the competition is higher, but on the flip side there’s a lot more sites to advertise on, so I kept it in the game anyway. (Besides, with PW rates, who cares?) To my surprise, the smallest of ads, the button, performed best. How odd is that? The button, based on my results, brings in 1/3 more visitors compared to the square 125×125 ad, maybe because it’s so small it doesn’t look like a paid ad but something the page author recommends. (I remember reading a blog entry along these same lines saying the same about the button ad, but to the life of me I can’t find it anymore to link to it.)

As an experiment, I spent 6 dollars on Project Wonderful and 6 dollars on Facebook advertising. Even though I created a highly targeted campaign on Facebook, the cost per click is as high as $0.16 (again using a version of the same ad showing only to people who mention “Barbie” on their profile or are fans of an official Barbie collectors page). On Project Wonderful, I ran a very untargeted campaign, showing the ads where ever I could get them for 0.01 dollars, and as a result I got about double the clicks and paid on average from $0.001 to $0.02 per click depending on the size of the ad. (The cheapest being the massive rectangle ad, and the most expensive a shared position between the 125 square and the full banner.)

Of course, there might be a situation where Project Wonderful simply doesn’t work for you because your genre isn’t on the whole network. I have found only one other site running PW ads that is about Barbie, but I am lucky in a way that my topic is a fashion icon, and everyone knows her already. I can also run the ad on craft sites, and chances are there’s a Barbie collector there who sees the ad. Also, I know that people who are into crafts can be curious about Barbie, so even if they’re not collectors yet, my site might coax them into it..! I know similar things have happened when I’ve been interviewed on the telly or magazines about Barbie stuff, and someone, who hadn’t even THOUGHT about collecting before got inspired to see what it was all about and are now active members of the community. That is why you don’t always want to put in highly targeted ads to people who may already have a routine in the niche, they might have their favourite blogging tips site that they visit every day and they don’t have the need for your tips.

Then, once the clicks are in, it’s up to you to keep them coming back. Make sure they know instantly what your site is about… And don’t do it like I did with broken links on the front page!!

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I am currently experimenting few ad networks, even EntreCard is back on the menu as they recently did some changes I wanted to check out. CMF ads visited my sidebar again, but as there still was no advertisers I took it down again. – I don’t think you should ask for advertisers on the ad networks forum to get people advertising, especially as it seems we’re supposed to buy ads of each other which makes little sense to me.

Project Wonderful has been hanging on for a while, even though the few pennies I earn doesn’t really ad up, but it has a good ad campaigning system so everything that I earn I’ll pretty much put back in.

The network I’m now going for is Adgitize. The reason for this is that the network, that seems to be in early days and quite amateurish in look still, is run by a guy who seems very dedicated to his thing and who is making eager effort to make his network flourish. The sad thing is that since the network is lacking in looks, I think it is hard to take seriously. It attracts second grade… Or shall we even say third grade blogs as publishers, often beginners and those who will add any gadget out there on their blog just because they learned the art of “copy paste”. Not only that, they are the ones who will add 3×3 -ad code to their site. In my opinion it shouldn’t even be offered. 3 ad boxes is more than enough and often that is too much on the same network (lowers the price paid for each ad box as there’s more room).

Anyway, Adgitize is good for small and medium sized blogs because you can earn in multiple ways on their system. It’s not only how many ads you show, or how many is clicked, it also has to do with you clicking on others adds, how many ads you show (this shouldn’t be rewarded imho), it even rewards you for posting content onto your own blog! There are a lot of things this network could do to improve, but it has such a flying start that I wish more serious bloggers who have more self control on advertising and understanding of quality would get into it as well.