what is blog advertising
 |
| Advertising a blog |
How Do You Know If You've Done Too
Has it Gone Too Far?
Advertising is good. It offers information, gives you access to a product or service you otherwise won't know about, earns people money, and fuels several different industries. But you know how anything excessive breeds discontent and greed, and neither one is pretty. The wrong use of advertising on your blog could send your traffic south—not exactly the direction you want it to take. So when is blogging bad and when is it just right?
Is your blog succeeding? The key indicator that you're probably doing something right with your blog advertising is when you're actually succeeding. You get the traffic you want, you earn money for a few simple efforts, and your advertisers are happy.But don't get carried away by your success. You might think that placing many ads on your blog can help you earn exponentially. What it will do is earn you a spot on your advertiser's black list. Advertisers have guidelines about how many ads you can place on one web page. Generally, this can range from 3 to 5, depending on the sponsor.
If you don't want to break the good will that exists between you and your affiliate or advertising program, learn what the policies are and respect them.
Is that a blog or a splog? One of the worst labels your blog can be slapped with is "splog". That's a blog that contains spam. If your blog is nothing more than just pages upon pages of advertising and little content, you'd probably be better off publishing a fashion magazine.
Too many ads on a blog can bury your content, distract your visitors and even frustrate them. Some, such as the very wary ones, will leave your blog in a hurry. If your blog resembles an infomercial, forget it. It will look annoying and take away from the good reputation you're trying to build.
Too many choices Another challenge you will be facing when it comes to blog advertising is persuading your visitors to pay attention to the ads long enough to actually do something with them. Otherwise, these ads will be useless.
 |
| a blog with advertising |
The problem with a blog that has too many advertising units is that it can confuse the visitor. When they're confused, they're less likely to click on an ad, much less subscribe to or buy anything. That leaves your advertisers—and you—empty-handed.
Managing your advertising A blog page can easily handle an average of three ads, which is something most advertising and affiliate programs will allow. Placed strategically, these ads can easily attract the attention of your visitors. Since there are only a few ads to look at, your visitors can easily decide which one to click on.
Now imagine if there were 10 to 15 ads running on the same page at the same time. You've probably seen blogs like this before, with ads splattered all over them, rivaling a NASCAR race car.
To use blog advertising correctly, first consider the type of program you will be running. If you are an affiliate of a brand or company, there are certain restrictions you have to work with. Some companies, for example, prefer not to have a competing brand's ad placed on the same blog.
Second, placement and aesthetics matter. Consider some of the highest-rated blogs and study their ad placements. What are these ads placed on a page? What are their sizes relative to one another and to the content box? What do these ads contain? If you've seen enough of these successful blogs, you'll have picked up enough lessons to know how to use blog advertising to your advantage.
With Little Investment
During your initial foray into weblogging, you'll find that it will take some conscious effort on your part to promote your blog. Of course, you could just simply write feverishly and hope that your blog takes on a life of its own.
But that's putting your hopes on randomness, which might not work in your favor. If the thought of advertising your blog has never crossed your mind, it's time that you gave it some consideration, especially if you've only begun blogging.
Here are ways you can start advertising your blog at little or no cost:
Share information for free. Don’t expect or demand to be paid for information just yet. You're still trying to build your reputation, and nobody knows you. Focus on putting out excellent quality entries or posts on your blog. Good content, coupled with enough promotional activity, will put you on the blog universe's map.
The way to do it is to write articles about your specific topic and articles that are related to your chosen topic. Include a brief introduction to yourself and your blog, as well as a link to your website.Writing articles helps establish your reputation as a reliable source of information and makes you recognizable.
Take article writing a bit further and send it out to article databases or social bookmarking sites where it can generate more buzz and get free promotion. Social bookmarking sites allow visitors to vote for your article, so the more it gains in popularity, the more exposure your blog will receive.
Focus on online forums. Online forums are today's bulletin boards, the equivalent of the office water cooler. These are sites or pages on the internet that people frequent to ask or answer questions, share their opinions, tell a story, rant, rave, or just simply say something.
Seek out online forums where topics related to your blog are found. Forums offer free advertising opportunities for your blog and let you network at the same time.
Link up with other blogs Never underestimate the power of a good connection. Many bloggers form associations with other bloggers and reap the rewards of a symbiotic relationship in the process. They do this by swapping links, allowing themselves to share their audience with other bloggers like you.
Bloggers can also actively promote your blog by mentioning it in their posts while at the same time providing links back to your site.
Frequently, blog owners will allow you to guest write an article or post for a day or a week. This helps expose you and your blog to that blog's visitors.
Give your two cents' worth Don't always treat other blogs with content similar to yours as bitter competitors. Sometimes, they could work as silent partners to help you promote your blog. It may sound sneaky or unacceptable to your idea of good ethics, but if you look closely, it's not only practical, it's also legit.
Each time you visit another guy's blog, consider the niche market it targets. Simply take a look at the prevailing topics and sentiments and you'll have an idea of whether it's a match for your needs or not. Leave a short but meaty comment on a relevant article that you truly find interesting. Then leave your name and a link to the blog page where a related topic can be found.
What this does is simply promote your blog to a market that already exists. You're not exactly stealing another blogger's audience-you're simply providing them with an alternative. And that's not so bad for advertising your blog.
Advertisement Types
If you want to sell ads on your blog, you have several options, including pay-per-click ads, affiliate ads, direct ads, and more. Here's a rundown of the most common types of ads used by bloggers to make money:
Direct ads are exactly what they sound like: a space on a blogger's site where advertisers can place their ad for an agreed-upon monthly fee. This ad is typically displayed as a banner, and the price is determined by a variety of factors, including the number of page views per month.
Pay-per-click ads: As the name implies, site owners (bloggers) are paid an agreed-upon rate each time a visitor to the blogger's site clicks on the advertiser's ad.
Affiliate ads: An affiliate ad can be a pay-per-click ad, and it simply refers to an ad that allows the blogger to provide links to the advertiser's product in a variety of ways. The blogger is compensated when a user purchases the advertised product.
Pay-per-impression: In a pay-per-impression ad, the advertiser pays the blogger (site owner) for each time their ad appears on the blogger's site.
Reviews, contextual ads, text link ads, and pay-per-action ads are some of the other types of ads. However, the ones listed above are the most common and, consequently, the most profitable.
Understand Your Audience
If you've decided that advertising on blogs is the best way to make money, you should know what type of advertising will sell best to your target audience. As a result, learning statistics about your audience via a program like Google Analytics can assist you in learning the basic demographics of your audience.
A reader survey can also provide you with additional information about your audience, ranging from demographics to psychographic questions. The more you know about your target audience, the more effectively you can sell advertising to them.
Begin Planning
After you've considered the type of advertising as well as your target audience, it's time to start planning what kind of advertising you'll use and how much you'll charge for it. At this point, you should think about the stats you just learned, the most important of which is how many site visitors you have each month. The amount you should charge should be determined by the number of monthly site visitors to your page.
If your page receives 5,000 or fewer page views per month, you should probably not charge more than $10 per ad. However, the price is entirely up to you, though it is recommended that you stay within the realm of how other bloggers advertise on blogs.
The Next Step: Blog Advertising
Once you've planned and are ready to go, it's time to do some self-promotion in order to attract advertisers willing to pay for space on your blog. You can do this by either creating an advertising page on your current site, sending out an email with information about your blog, or doing both. Both are recommended for the best results. Your information should include the following:
- Site statistics, particularly the number of monthly visitors to your page;
- Your prices, or how an advertiser can get in touch with you about prices;
- What kinds of services (ad spaces) do you provide?
- The number of people who follow you on social media;
- Your policy on disclosure;
- Why will advertising with you benefit the advertiser? and
- Any other relevant information
Before you start selling ad space on your page, you should create a disclosure policy. Because advertising equates to financial gain for your content, informing readers about the purpose of your blog can be beneficial. At disclosurepolicy.org, you can create your own disclosure policy.
In addition to sending an email and creating an advertising page, you can notify advertisers that you want to start advertising by creating ad buttons that say things like "your ad here" or "advertise here."
Keeping Your Blog Advertisers
If your blog receives around 5,000 page views per month, you shouldn't have too much trouble attracting advertisers. Having said that, it is still your responsibility to actively seek out and attract advertisers.
Having said that, it is still your responsibility to actively seek out and attract advertisers. To do so, you can contact small businesses with your advertising proposal, blog about it, trade advertisements with other bloggers (you advertise their blog if they advertise yours), use social media sites to discuss your advertising plans, or offer a special deal or discount to those who begin advertising right away.
If you're willing to pay a commission—typically around 25%—you should sign up for an advertising service.
An advertising service will not only assist you in finding advertisers for your page, but they will also handle your finances so you don't have to waste time dealing with invoices. While the commission may be a little high, the time saved and opportunities maximized may be well worth it.
Finally, the last tip for retaining advertisers is to do so on the basis of a 30-day trial offer, or an agreement between you and the advertiser that if they advertise for 30 days and it isn't beneficial to them, they can remove the ad from your page with no strings attached or hurt feelings.
This will not only make advertisers feel more at ease about advertising with you, but it will also result in more ads appearing on your page than ever before
Take it easy and keep going.
One of the most important things to remember when attempting to make money through blog advertising is to relax and take it easy. You won't have any trouble making money from advertising if you have great content, a large number of visitors to your site, and a great offer that advertisers can't resist.
Once you've got some ads up and running, it's your responsibility to keep your site stats growing by keeping your blog current and up-to-date, using social media sites, and looking to other bloggers for advice on what they're doing right.
How Advertising Works On A Blog
 |
| A blog with advertising |
Popularity means income. It's a sad fact and rather prejudiced against blogs that are just starting out, but to make advertising work on a blog, that blog has to have enough traffic. Without sufficient traffic, the ads found on that blog will just not find an audience and therefore will not earn any money.
To build traffic, your blog has to have a strong niche and targeted content. Finding a niche for your blog can be tricky, especially if the topic you're offering is obscure and not that easily relatable in terms of advertising. It is tricky, of course, but not entirely impossible. You'd be surprised at the number of targeted ads some little-known topics generate.
However, your best bet and the surest way to make advertising work on your blog is to promote a topic that is highly targeted or one that speaks to a niche audience. By building a following, your blog will gain enough popularity to be trusted by advertisers.
Advertise on your blog. The way advertising works on a blog is simple: when advertisers want to promote their products and services, your blog provides the platform on which they can gain exposure, mainly by being the site where their target market frequents. If your blog is about shoes, the people who visit your blog are those who want to know more about shoes. From the shoe advertisers' point of view, these people are a gold mine, more likely to buy their shoes based on the interest they have shown.
There are two ways you can make advertising work on your blog: by providing ad space on your own or by relying on an advertising server to do the work for you. Selling ad space on a blog is fairly common, particularly on blogs that target a niche market. You simply set the rates, actively contact advertisers and agree on the terms. Or, the advertisers can contact you after seeing the potential of your blog.
How you get paid is simple enough: once the ad has been placed on your blog, your visitors will click on it. Depending on your agreement with the advertiser, you could earn either from the number of clicks the ad receives or the type of action solicited by the ad, such as a purchase or a subscription.
If you're fairly new to the blog universe and would rather build your reputation slowly by providing quality content, you might find yourself too busy to actively negotiate with and communicate with advertisers. If this is the case, you can choose to work with an advertising server. One such is Google's Adsense, although there are others that work just as well.
An ad server looks at your blog and determines the best ads that relate to your content. You simply take the code, put it on your blog and let it go to work. You simply have to collect your earnings using your account. This is a rather passive approach to letting advertising work on your blog, but it can earn you a little. Of course, if you want higher earnings, you need to actively put in more effort and seek out higher-paying ads with the right combination of keywords that work best for your blog.
How to Make Money from Blog Advertising
There are numerous methods for monetizing your blog. However, post sponsorship is the most popular method. In this case, you are compensated for including a link created from targeted keywords inside of text written specifically for an advertiser. This could be a product review, a website review, or it could be related to the other content on your blog (but give your sponsor a brief mention in it).
Google Adwords
These are the small contextual ad blocks that can be found in the sidebars of many websites. They only display offers that are directly related to your content. You will earn money whenever a visitor clicks on an offer.
Affiliate Marketing
You can earn a commission for each sale you make here. You will need to put up banners and integrate the affiliate program's products or services into your blog. While you will need to do some research to find the best affiliate program for your blog, you will make more money here than with Adsense.
Direct Advertising
This will give you a consistent and reliable revenue stream. In this case, you will charge people to place advertisements on your blog. If you have a popular blog, you can charge more than $100 per month for this service. When you multiply this by five or six slots, you can see how profitable this can be, especially since you don't have to worry about small dips in traffic or determining what people are interested in. Of course, you'll need a consistent readership before you start looking for people who want to advertise on your blog. As a result, if your blog is brand new, this is not something you should begin with.
How much do bloggers make from ads ?
 |
Earnings from blog advertising |
How Much Does a Blogger Make on Average?
Do you know what the Pareto Principle is? According to economist Vilfredo Pareto, 80% of output goes to only 20% of those who make inputs. This principle is applicable everywhere. It's a little more unbalanced in blogging, with probably 90%-95% of the output going to 5%-10% of bloggers. The average blogger may earn between $0 and $1,000 per month, but do you want to be in that category? Strive for greater heights. The average blogger in the top 5%-10% earns between $5,000 and $10,000 per month.
Post a Comment for "How to start a blog with advertising"