forget traffic... how do you monetize?

[uclaboyz]

Seems much of interest with bloggers are with how to promote and get traffic to your blog... but not much discussion has been said about how to monetize your traffic...

I'll start:
Google Adsense
Text-Link-Ads
paid reviews

Thanks,
Steve

[Nathan]

Originally Posted by uclaboyz

Seems much of interest with bloggers are with how to promote and get traffic to your blog... but not much discussion has been said about how to monetize your traffic...

There is a reason for that. Monetization is easy if you have lots of traffic. However, unless you have 500 or so visitors a day, don't expect to make any money off of a blog.

So traffic comes first, then money. Most people never make it to the money stage because they never get their blog fine tuned enough to get the traffic.

[uclaboyz]

Originally Posted by Nathan

There is a reason for that. Monetization is easy if you have lots of traffic. However, unless you have 500 or so visitors a day, don't expect to make any money off of a blog.

So traffic comes first, then money. Most people never make it to the money stage because they never get their blog fine tuned enough to get the traffic.

I'd like to call you out on that... I think it's quite the opposite. Master monetization (conversion) first, then worry about traffic.

I'll give you 500 visitors each day - would you know how to monetize that traffic? If you can master monetization, you can make money off just 10 visitors a day.

Thanks,
Steve

[Nathan]

True, there are some ways that are better to make money than others. However, in general its better to have more traffic.

Most people go straight into making money like that's the most important thing about blogging. So they load up their pitiful blog with a default Blogger theme, trashy articles copied from other sources and then stick a bunch of Google adsense up and expect to make their hundred bucks in the first month.

It doesn't work like that. I'm just saying that most people need to work on the quality of their writing and the way their blog looks before they are ready to work on making money. An experienced blogger could monetize a blog right from the start, but most people jump into blogging with little or no experience.

Now to answer your questions about making money:

If I wanted to make money I would sign up for Amazon Affiliates and put a small, unobtrusive amazon widget in each of my book reviews on Inkweaver Review. I would put it just to the right of my book rating.

With over 300 book reviews on the blog, and fairly good traffic on my blog, I would pull in at least ten or twenty people to amazon every day, probably more. Then I would make commission if they bought a book, which might happen fairly regular on some of the more popular reviews.

Paid reviews I'm not so interested in. Possibly if a book publisher or author wanted to pay me for a review I would accept. However, right now I just accept payment in the form of a free book.

[stephen todd]

Originally Posted by uclaboyz

Seems much of interest with bloggers are with how to promote and get traffic to your blog... but not much discussion has been said about how to monetize your traffic...

I'll start:
Google Adsense
Text-Link-Ads
paid reviews

Thanks,
Steve

google adsense - my various blog sites google adsense eCPM has halved in the past 2 years - either ad blindness, ad blockers, or google just paying less to publishers for various reasons

text link ads - more especially the inlinks version for blog sites - you really need home page pagerank of at least 2 and alexa traffic stats of under 2 million for the link brokers to be interested in your blog - you also must be targeting what their advertisers want their links on as well - this is the problem - we don't know how many customers they have for any particular post topic

paid reviews - I keep looking at this, but it doesn't pay enough for me to spend my time on it

[Stu--]

Adsense trumps everything but you need the traffic. I've had success selling ebooks using sales letters but that's not strictly blogging.

I'm going to try selling my own books via Lulu on my blog soon, see how that goes.

Anyone have any success with Amazon Affiliates?

[Piratejon]

I've got my monetization done. I've chucked in ads (not obtrusive, but there). I'll occasionally write an article that will get me high paying advertisements, but that's not my aim. What more do I need to do for monetization? It's not hard. The hard part is getting the readers. Correct me if I'm wrong?

[uclaboyz]

Originally Posted by Piratejon

I've got my monetization done. I've chucked in ads (not obtrusive, but there). I'll occasionally write an article that will get me high paying advertisements, but that's not my aim. What more do I need to do for monetization? It's not hard. The hard part is getting the readers. Correct me if I'm wrong?

I say getting readers is the easy part - you can always pay for it unless you want to spend time instead.

The hard part is selling to your readers (to click on your Adsense ad, to click thru your affiliate link, to opt-in, etc.).

I sometimes write with purpose of SEO (ie. have a look at my other blog Earn Passive Income By Starting An Internet Business - How To's | Tips & Strategies).

Thanks,
Steve

[BecomeYoung]

Have to agree with Nathan. If you can get the traffic, you can find a way to monetize. Most of my blogs only get a couple thousand hits a day, but all we have to do is throw up a couple adsense ads, and voila! a couple dollars a day in ad revenue.

Now that we're start to get some traffic, we're experimenting with affiliate sales. So far we've made $70 from affiliates sales, just from two sales, and that's just from throwing a banner ad up, so that's very promising. We're thinking of putting together some sites specifically on getting affiliate sales, since there seems to be a lot of money there.

[Captured Ink]

That is great post, I think that you need traffic before you making money. But I have been contact by a company call CopaClick?

I have not even started my blog and only got two posts on there.

Has anyone heard of them. I am a little worried as its a US company and I feel that as mine is mainly UK site. It might not be worth it.

Has anyone hear them?