Savvy Affiliate

It Annoys Users And Isn’t That Profitable

More and more I am seeing blogs which are being monetized using a new form of contextual advertising.   These are ads like those displayed by Intellitxt or Kontera Contentlink (no affiliate code in those links )Although this method of advertising is barely acceptable on forums, don’t do it in your blog.

I’m sure you’ve seen the advertising I mean.  It is the ads which appear as double underlined links in a person’s content.  If you mouse over that link it will display an ad.  If you click the link you will follow it to the advertisers site.   The problem with these links is that they are too easily confused with sites you intend to link too.

The intext ads prey on the trust you have built with your readers.  Your readers will click on the ads thinking that they are a link you put there intentionally to send them to an interesting or useful site.  When they end up on a paid advertisement site, more often than not they will be upset.

I have stopped visiting several blogs which made to much use of intext advertising.  Several blogs that I used to frequent took it even a step further.  Besides just displaying the content ads, they modified their CSS so that all their ads were double underlined.  That made it impossible to tell which links were worth clicking and which were not!   As a result, after a couple of misclicks, I simply stopped visiting those sites.

The bottom line is that your visitors are too valuable for you to lose by displaying the in content ads.  There are many different methods of monetizing your site which can perform much better.   Pick a different method and your users will thank you for it.

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It’s Time To Make Some Money… But How?

One of my recent posts was on when new bloggers should begin to monetize their site.   So say that you have decided to begin to monetize your site.  You have enough visitors, it’s time to make some money.  How should you start?

1) Start Slow - To begin, only place a few ads on your site.  Its fine to place these ads above the fold on your page, after all you want them to convert, but try starting with only 1 small ad block on each site.  By starting slow with only 1 ad block, it will give you a baseline for how much you are making.  After that every change you make can be compared to your baseline to see if it is an improvement, or if it hurts your revenue

2) Use Discreet Ads- Don’t start your advertising by displaying flashy banners on your site.  The point of beginning to advertise it to make some money without annoying your readers.   You may want to start out with something which seems like a regular blog post, paid reviews

3) Experiment - When you are beginning to advertise, much like the beginning of college, it is all about experimentation.  You need to determine which ads work and which ads do not.   Don’t be afraid to try a bunch of different things in order to see what converts the best.   The point of your first few ads are just to find what works, and what you can use in the future.  You aren’t trying to get rich from your first ads.

4) Go Basic- Many bloggers start out advertising using Adsense.  Why?  Because it works.  Advertising with Adsense is a great way to get your feet wet.   It is a good way for bloggers to make their first several dollars.   And if Adsense converts well for you, you can always keep it on your site long term.

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Too Soon and Stunt Growth, Too Late And Lose Money

One problem which faces many new blogs is the question of When to start to monetize.   And how heavily should they advertise at first?

The trade offs are this -

1) If you put too many ads up to early you will deter visitors from coming back  - When you begin your site it is very important to make the most of the visitors that you get.  You need to those one time visitors to become repeat visitors, and to link back to you from their own site.  Because new sites generally have very little traffic to begin with, losing the opportunity to convert your visitors because you have too many ads up can be a very bad thing.

2) But if you wait too long, you can be losing a significant amount of money.  - Obviously it doesn’t do to wait too long though.  It won’t do you any good to wait until you have a PR 6 page to begin to advertise on it.  It could very well take a year or more for your site to really start to climb in rankings. If you go too long without monetizing you could lose interest in your blog.  Although some people blog just for fun, many others are in it for money. If you put off current income for too long to fund future growth, you could lose interest in your site and jeopardize both.

So How Do You Know?   

There are two basic ways to tell if your site is ready for some monetization.  The first is the total amount of traffic that you get.   Clearly it doesn’t do to try to monetize your site until you get a decent amount of traffic.  If you are only getting a few visitors, even a lot of money per visitor won’t add up.   I recommend waiting until your site gets ~200 unique visitors or ~500 page views a day before you try to monetize.   Until you get that many, it may be better to go for growth.

Alternatively you can focus just on your search hits - Search Engine traffic is the most profitable.  It is far more profitable to get a given number of search hits than it is to get the same number of direct referrals or hits from social networkings.   So if you are getting at least 50 visitors from search a day then you can begin to monetize your site without worrying about stunting future growth.

Next - How to begin to monetize

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I was recently turned onto this WordPress Plugin called WPBankroll

Basically WPBankroll performs the same function for you as ReviewMe or PayPerPost.   The  difference between the two is that WPBankroll is free  ( although there is a subscribed version as well )  where as Reviewme takes half of your payment.

Obviously WPBankroll can’t take over all the functions of ReviewMe.  ReviewMe will still be great for getting advertisers who wouldn’t otherwise have come to your site.   But what about bloggers who have a “ReviewMe for $300″ banner on their site?   What is the point of sending advertisers to ReviewMe so that they can send them back and take half the money?   

By using WPbankroll judiciously you can increase your income without sacrificing your ReviewMe income.   I recommend putting up a ReviewMe review price of $X  and then setting your WPBankroll price equal to 75% of your ReviewMe price.    Your advertiser will benefit from the cheaper price.    You will benefit by getting 50% more income per review.

Sounds like a Win-Win    (And a lose if you count the commission ReviewMe is losing)

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It Applies To Blogs …. Just As It Does To Everything Else

The 80-20, also known as the law of the vital few and the Pareto Principle ( Wikipedia Article ) is a rule which states that 80 percent of the consequences derive from 20% of the causes.   That is, in other words, that a minority of people exert a majority of influence on any given thing.

The 80-20 rule can be applied to many things.  You spend 80 percent of you time with 20 percent of your friends.  You get 80 percent of your recognition at work from 20 percent of your activities.

So Who Cares?  Or more precisely, what does an abstract thought such as the pareto principle have to do with you as a blogger?  Well one could apply it in this manner You will get 80% of your traffic from 20% of your posts.  And that would certainly be true.  Any given blog will derive much of its traffic from the minority of posts that get widely linked to.  Likewise you will probably get 80% of your income from 20% of your pages. 

However that isn’t the most interesting application!  It is much more interesting if you apply that law to the blogosphere as a whole.  If you do that you can say that 20% of the Blogs make 80% of the money!   Don’t believe me?  Check out Paula’s List of Blogger Salaries

You can see that there are very few bloggers who are pulling down significant amounts of money.  But those that are are dominating the field.   It is interesting to note the scarcity of middle income bloggers on her list.  She has very few people on it who are pulling down $20K - $50K a year.  There are far more people pulling down $120K + a year.  And far far far more people who are making less than $5K a year.

Although Paula clearly has some bias in that she is more likely to index popular sites than less popular ones, it is clear that the top names in the industry pull down the lion’s share to the money, while the others get the leftovers.

So what does this mean to you?   Basically, what the 80-20 rule means to you is that you have to differentiate yourself from the crowd. You need to develop your writing, pick your persona, and improve your SEO skills. Because If you are only better than 50% of the other blogs you are out of luck!  You have to be one of the best blogs around to start making serious money.  But once you rise to those hallowed ranks, the rewards can be great.

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Maybe Much More Than You Think

How much do you think each post on your page is worth?  Well if you are a freelance blogger, the answer to that question is as little as $20.   Freelance bloggers often sell their posts for around $15-$20 a page.  If you go on many forums and offer $20/post you will find a lot of takers.

So is that how much they are worth?  The answer here is a resounding no.   In order to find out how much the posts are worth, you need to figure out how much income they will generate over their lifetime.  The best way to do that if you have an established site, one that has been around for at least 1 year, is to simply divide your monthly income by the number of posts on your page.  If you don’t have an established site it is harder to estimate your posts worth.  However text-link-ads on your post can give you a good idea of how much each page is worth.  According to that, if you can sell the text link ad on your page, it should be worth at least $5/page/month.

What does that make each page worth? I calculate that on average, for me, out of 5 posts, 3 of them are generally worthless and won’t generate much in the way of revenue.  The other two can probably sell ads at $5/page/month, or they will be able to once the site matures some.   That means that every 5 posts nets $10/month.  Giving me a post value of $2/post/month

If I value each post at $2/month, it is relatively simple to figure out how much they are worth overall.  I try to write my posts such that they will have a decent life expectancy.  I figure that each post can still be getting hits in 5 years.  5 years = 60 months.   Therefore it is reasonable to assume that every post has a lifetime value of $120.

That is how I value my posts.  Yours could be more or less valuable depending on

1) Your Website genre - Clearly some topics are more valuable than others.  Sports cars are more valuable say than bycycles.

2) How long your posts will live for.   If you post about new technology the life expectancy might be 1 year or 6 months.  If you post about cats, it could be far longer.  (cats don’t change much)

3) If you will keep the blog up- You can kill your posts abruptly if you stop posting all of a sudden.  If the main page of your website dies, then the subpages will die as well

What does this mean in summary?  If you are looking to make money long term, you need to operate your own site.  Additionally it means that an enterprising webmaster can make money by buying posts and publishing them.  Some people do this by the truckload.

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Easy Money

I had posted recently about selling post level text link ads on your site.  In the post I stated that you could make $5-$10 per post simply by putting a single link on the bottom of your site.   It turns out that I understated the case.

It turns out, that for post level text links ads, the amount of money you make is Solely Based On Page Rank.  That’s right, the amount of money you can make for each text link ad is based on the page rank of that particular post page, and nothing else.   The theory behind this, I guess, is that since the posts are no longer on the front page of a given blog, their entire readership will be driven by Google.  So Page Rank is the best method of determining that readership.

What does this mean to you?  It means that it is very simple to detemine how much a given page will make in income.  Simply find out your page rank, and look it up in the chart below.

Here is the chart of how much text link ads pay on a page rank basis.

• PageRank 2 - $5.00 / month
• PageRank 3 - $6.00 / month
• PageRank 4 - $8.00 / month
• PageRank 5 - $10.00 / month
• PageRank 6 - $25.00 / month
• PageRank 7 - $50.00 / month

Clearly what this payment format caters to is a site which has lots of posts.  Although getting your post another page rank or two higher will help it make a little bit more money, writing another post with a Page Rank of 2 will generate the same amount of cash.

Here is a text link ads calculator tool

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Paid Reviews, A Godsend to the blogger

Recently I wrote about how you can make money with paid reviews. So how much money can you make?

Well the simple answer is that you have the potential to make lots of money with paid reviews. If done correctly, paid reviews can net a page more money than Adsense, text link ads, or banner ads.

Don’t believe that you can make that much with reviewme? Take a look at John Chow’s April Earnings. In one month he made over $4500 with Reviewme posts. That is over 4 times as much as he made from adsense and almost twice as much as he made from affiliate sales. Sure, your page might not have the page rank of John’s, but just think if you could do one simple thing and make twice as much money as you do in all your adsense sales. You can with paid reviews.

What’s The Downside? - The downside with paid reviews is that you can’t do too many of them without annoying your readers. If all you do is paid reviews many of your readers may start leaving the site for greener pastures. You have to be careful not to try and over monetize and kill your site in the process. I recommend making sure that not more than 10% of your quality posts are paid reviews. That is a good number which keeps your readers happy, and puts money in your pocket.

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Need A New Revenue Stream? Try Paid Reviews

Recently a new players has emerged for blogs trying to monetize their sites.  It is something which can potentially net a blogger more money than Adsense, banner ads, or text links.  And that method of monetization is paid reviews.

What are paid reviews?  Paid reviews are simply when the blogger sells their blog post.  Instead of buying a single ad on the side of the post, the advertiser pays the blogger a set fee to have the blogger review their product or service.  Although contractually the blogger can write whatever they want, many people find themselves obligated to write good things about the services that they are reviewing.  After all, if you bad mouth your advertisers you aren’t likely to get many repeat customers.  In fact you aren’t likely to get any customers at all.

How Can I Sign Up?  There are several sites that are in the business of selling paid reviews.  In order to market your own site, simply sign up at one of them and give your set price.  Potential advertisers will contact you and you can pick and choose among them.  The biggest name in the game is Reviewme.  Review me lets you set your own price, but you have to disclose that it is a paid post.  Other potential sources of revenue are Blogvertise and PayPerPost.

Why Do It? The biggest reason to do it is that you are getting paid to do something that you would be doing anyway.  If you are a blogger in on a topic, chances are that you will be reviewing products and companies anyway.  Why not make some money doing it?  Just because someone pays you to blog doesn’t mean you have to sell out.  Disclose to your readers that it is a paid post, and blog what you really think.  Only accept products whom you feel comfortable endorsing, products you would use yourself and you will do well.

See how much money you can make with Paid Reviews

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