One of the reasons you may not be earning the amount of money you would like is because of poor advertisement placing. Online advertising is not much different from printed ads on billboards or in magazines in the sense that placement is everything. With ad placement, it’s important to remember not to overwhelm your users, but you need to get them to look (and click) the ad. So what do you do? Here are Some Tips For Ad Placement On A Website (more…)
I’m a regular reader of Darren Rowse’s website ProBlogger and I saw that he recommended a CPM advertising company called Chitika. Without going into too much detail, CPM stands for cost per thousand (M is the Roman Numeral for 1,000). This means that the CPM rate of an ad unit would be how much money you make for every 1,000 times the advertisement is displayed. If you get 2,000 pageviews every day and your CPM rate is $3, then you will make $6 a day, regardless if any of your visitors click an ad or not. The alternative to using CPM advertisements is CPC, which stands for cost per click. This means that if you have a Google AdSense unit (they are CPC ads) that has a CPC rate of $0.30, you will make $0.30 every time it is clicked. If you receive 1,000 pageviews a day, but only two people actually click your CPC ads, then you will only make $0.60 that day.
My favorite CPC advertising company is Google AdSense. I like AdSense because they are the largest advertising agency, which means they will have more people looking to publish ads with them. Google displays AdSense ads practically worldwide and they give you the option of either text-based units or multimedia units (which in my opinion bring in more income).
I think that you should use CPC ads (preferably Google AdSense) because they are great for people who visit your blog for the first time. A lot of new readers won’t be familiar with where you place your advertisements, so they will be more inclined to click one if they’re interested. On my blog, a lot of my AdSense units display ads related to cell phones, SEO companies, web design companies, blogging templates, or web browsers. This is great because if somebody made a Google search for “how to increase website seo” and clicked on one of my posts, my ads in the sidebar would be for SEO companies. That way, if the steps given in my article seem to complicated or the SEO company being advertised is within their price range, they will click the ad, which will make me money.
As of yesterday, I just started including Chitika advertisements on Omega Web. Chitika is a CPM advertising company that offers text-based units and mobile advertisements. The way that Chitika works is when someone visits your website from a search engine (which is called organic traffic), then they will display text ads relevant to their search terms.
CPM advertisements, such as Chitika ads, are great because the users don’t have to click the units for you to make money. All your readers have to do is create pageviews on your website and for every 1,000 views, you will make money. This is good if you have a lot of organic traffic because if somebody visits my post about my OS X Mountain Lion Kernel Panic by searching for “os x mountain lion kernel panic”, then Chitika will display advertisements based off of their search terms. If the reader clicks an ad, that’s great! If not, it doesn’t really matter because you’re still making money… That’s the beauty of CPM ads.
Because every website has a variety of readers, it would be smart to publish both CPC and CPM advertisements on your website. I know that Chitika advertisements only work in certain countries while AdSense units will display almost worldwide. If you have readers that have you bookmarked and return regularly, they will begin to ignore all of your ad units because they know where they are placed. In this case, you would still make money from your CPM ads because they are racking up pageviews.
Regardless of your blog’s traffic and success, CPC ads will help fill in the holes that CPM ads leave and vice versa.
When you look around and see so many people making a living on the Internet, why would you not want to make it a full-time job? Sure, bloggers like Darren Rowse of Pro Blogger make enough money to live happily, but there are other moves that can be made to supplement your income.
When you first set up your blog, you’re going to need a day job for another few years. If you’re really good at what you do, you can probably make $100 in your first year of blogging. Making money from eBook sales, advertising, affiliate marketing, and other means is very slow and takes a while to pick up. Don’t expect to have an overloaded bank right away – or ever.
If you ever look around when you do a Google search, most of the top websites that are being displayed have been around for years. Blogs like Engadget have been high ranking websites since 2004 and will continue to be high ranking for many years to come, so competing with these blogs is almost impossible. If you’re considering a niche that may be overcrowded, you might never have success in the field of blogging.
At this current moment in time, I run two blogs (Omega Web and Aquarium Watch), go to school at Northwest Florida State College, run a web design service, and still have a life. If you’re planning on writing one or two blog posts a day, that may only take you about two hours. Writing more than two posts a day is not necessary to rank higher in search engines or make more money.
If you have a job such as a middle or high school teacher, you could always use the downtime when your students are working to write. Plenty of my teachers in high school spent their time on the Internet playing games, reading the news, or emailing their friends, so I’m sure blogging would be okay with your principal. If you could write one blog post for every two classes of the day, you could have three or four posts done by the end of the school day – and be paid a teacher’s salary.
Just like a business, your blog’s success and your income are closely related. If your blog gets hammered by a Google update and you have a 50% drop in viewers one month, then theoretically you will have a 50% drop in income as well. If you are trying to run a family and pay bills, an unexpected 50% drop in your monthly income would not be a good thing.
After reading this far into my rant, I’m sure you can conclude that blogging is not something everyone can do full-time. I’m obviously not against the concept of making money on the Internet, but plenty of opportunities will allow you to blog and have a full-time job at the same time. Even if you only work at McDonald’s and publish a website, you will be bringing in more income than just one or the other. I see blogging as a tool to supplement your already-stable income, not a way to replace it.
Image Source: Part-Time Jobs For Pregnant Women
