Young Blogs Trying To Sell Advertising Directly
By Matt Jones on Sep 28, 2007 in Blog Money
A lot of the major players in the ‘make money online’ and ‘blogging’ niches have switched over to selling advertising directly, rather than using affiliate programs or 3rd party services. This is great for them because it allows them to earn much more. However, a lot of owners of smaller blogs are looking to do the same thing, which could be a problem for them.
The reason I have only recently implemented direct advertising is not because I only just thought of doing it, but because Blogging Fingers has only recently grown to the stage where it would be worth advertisers paying any money to advertise here. In fact it was ready to use direct advertising a while ago, but I allowed the lack of PageRank update to delay me… which apparently may be occurring as I write this (fingers crossed!)
If your blog is very young, and only getting a couple of thousand unique visitors per month that is a great time to get started with some affiliate links, which I strongly believe are the best form of blog advertising for a young blog.
The never ending debate of ‘when to monetize’ still continues, but my firm opinion is that if you are building a flagship blog (as opposed to a niche blog) then focus on building traffic and subscribers before worrying about monetization. Especially if it is a blog where the readers are web-savvy and are aware of the monetization taking place.
Selling advertising directly sometimes involves writing posts about your prices, which, if you don’t make the sale are completely useless and will only hinder traffic. This is one of the reasons I upped my posting frequency to twice per day, because it allows for a normal post that benefits the readers and from time to time a post about my latest advertising deal.
Affiliate links in a post don’t damage traffic at all and you might make you a few dollars in the early life of your blog.
If you were an advertiser trying to gain exposure for your site, would you bother to buy advertising on your blog?
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Nice post Matt. What affiliate programs have you used? How successful have you been with them?
My blog is definitely a niche blog and monetized it from the get go. I put up a few place hold sponsor spots for friends and used Chitika eMiniMalls and Text Link Ads from the get go. I’ve been debating on using Kontera but the over all opinion I’m getting from my readers is that those link type ads drive them nuts.
FredPeters, I’ve used several affiliate Programs. The two I currently use on Blogging Fingers are CashCrate and Feedm8. CashCrate has earned me over $200 from referrals and I will find out how successful feedm8 has been at the end of the month. I have used others in the past with varying success.