So you want to make money blogging?

As a long-time freelance writer it’s always been my dream to self-publish and eventually make money doing it. That’s essentially what monetised blogs are – online self-publishers making money from their blog content. But how do they go about it..?

From the outset I should state that if my, admittedly still fairly limited, experiences are anything to go by then making money from blogs is a long, hard, not necessarily fruitful road.

In the first of a series of posts on this subject I’ll examine the most obvious way to make money from blogging – through advertising.

AdSense for Content is one option

Advertising on blogs

As many of you would be aware there are plenty of advertising services available to the aspiring blogger. These include the likes of Google AdSense, Blogsvertise, and umpteen more.

How much money can you make from services like Google AdSense?

It’s against Google’s terms of service to talk about specific figures but if my experiences are anything to go by, you need HUGE volumes of sustained traffic to make decent money from services like AdSense.

Of course if you do manage to get up into the hundreds of thousands of hits per month, there’s no guarantee that your readers will be clicking on your ads.

So aside from worrying about overall traffic volume, you also need to ensure that your blog’s subject matter is conducive to people clicking on ads.

Find your niche

This blog (The Beginner’s Blogging Guide) doesn’t cover an especially good subject for an ad friendly blogsite. Instead, blogs on subjects like photography or tech gadgetry tend to be more ad friendly.

For example people proactively seek out information on consumer electronics devices in order to make an informed purchase. They are often primed and ready to buy when they visit a technology blogsite. So if they see an appealing content ad on a tech blog they are quite likely to click on that ad and make a purchase.

If your primary goal is to make an ad friendly blog – pick your topic very carefully. And be aware that the most lucrative subject areas for monetised blogs have already been saturated so you will be competing against established players, often whole networks of blogs.

Ideally you want to find a niche within an ad friendly subject area which hasn’t already been done to death.

Context sensitive ads

Context sensitive ads

As most of you would know services like Google AdSense are context sensitive and will attempt to run ads which are relevant to the subject matter of your blog. This sounds great in principle but it doesn’t always work.

For example on my games blog (Growling Dog Games) I was using AdSense and because much of my content involved World of Warcraft, most of my AdSense ads were touting the services of insidious World of Warcraft gold-sellers.

Now World of Warcraft gold-selling happens to be illegal and for many of my prospective readers – the presence of those gold-selling ads was not exactly a glowing endorsement of my site.

The importance of control

So as we can see – automated context sensitive ad services can run ads which may actually damage the reputation of your blog. And with services like AdSense for Content, you have very little control over what ads are actually displayed.

Furthermore, if you run a business blog and you use context sensitive ads, there’s also the distinct possibility that ads for competing businesses and services will be showing up on your site.

So how do you control what ads are displayed on your site?

If you eventually manage to build a large, established readership your best bet may be to directly approach companies selling products in your niche area. For prospective advertisers, the more focussed your blog is, the better.

However to have any credibility at all you will need to be able to present some hard data to prospective ad clients.

Google Analytics is a useful tool

Google Analytics

If you want to sell ads yourself and negotiate your own ad prices then you will need rock solid data to back yourself up. A tool like Google Analytics is invaluable in this situation and allows you to filter and sift through all the statistics of your site’s traffic and make it accessible to potential advertisers.

On the downside, installing the Google Analytics script on your site can slow down page loads. Google are always working to improve this so hopefully it won’t be an issue in the future.

Ads can now be placed in RSS feeds

Ads in feeds

Also bear in mind that a lot of people may only visit your site once and, if they like what they see, they may subscribe to your RSS feed. As a general rule this is great for bloggers, but if you depend on ad revenue it’s not so great. Up until fairly recently – it was tough to display ads in feeds. So if most of your readers viewed your content in feed-readers they were not seeing any of the ads on your blog.

Of course since Google bought Feedburner, ads in feeds were an inevitability. Using Feedburner it’s now possible to set up your RSS feeds to display ads. However, be forewarned – some of your readers may see ads in feeds as a huge turn-off.

Conclusion:

1. Services like Google AdSense are incredibly easy to setup, especially for users of Google Blogger, but they have their pitfalls.
2. If your main aim is to make money through ads on your blog you will need to pick an ad friendly niche subject that hasn’t already been saturated – proven subject areas include consumer electronics and digital photography.
3. To make decent money you will need a high volume of sustained traffic which means you will have to regularly create unique, entertaining and informative content.
4. If you want to have more control over what ads run on your site you can directly approach prospective advertisers (in your chosen niche area) and negotiate your own rates – but you will have to back this up with hard data using a tool like Google Analytics, and you will need a demonstrable history of high, sustained web traffic relevant to their business.

If you guys find this post useful or interesting I’ll put together another article on making money from blogs in the next few days.