I play around with revenue models for this blog quite a bit. I love testing and tracking ads, affiliate products, and ads for my own products.
By testing things like different affiliate products, and locations of ads, buttons, and banners, you can really optimize your blog for good revenue and keep tweaking until you break your current income record.
Here is my take on 3 different blog monetization methods I have played with in the last year.
1. Text Ads
It’s easy to plug in some code and run text ads on your site, but you won’t get much play until you have pagerank. And if you use a broker, you have to pay them for finding advertisers for you.
Generally I don’t like having an ad on the site that I get paid a flat monthly fee for because I can only make that much and no more.
No matter what the advertiser makes, I get what I get and it doesn’t change until my traffic and rank goes up.
That’s boring and very non-entrepreneurial in my opinion.
See why in monetization tactic #2…
2. Affiliate Ads
If you can run a bunch of traffic to someone paying you a flat monthly fee, you can run as much traffic to a high-converting affiliate product and your earnings are based on what you sell.
That’s a bit more exciting because you can, with proper testing and tracking of ads and affiliate programs, write your own check in a sense. There’s no limit except for how popular your blog is and how much traffic you get to click on the ad.
Up side: It’s easy because you don’t have to do anything but send traffic.
Down side: You have to split the sale with the product owner, of course.
Which is why my ultimate blog monetization tactic is…
3. Your Own Product
Here you get to send traffic to your product and keep all the money. It’s the same traffic. If you have or create a great product, why send people to advertisers or affiliates when you can sell your own products or services?
Upside: You make more money with this model than the two above.
Downside: You have to create something great, set up the payment and fulfillment systems, support customers, write copy, test and track copy and improve your conversions, and much more.
There’s a heck of a lot more trouble involved here, but the payoff can be extremely significant compared to your other options.
I’m no purist here, and you’ll see affiliate products written about and advertised here. One reason is because once people have bought my products, they need something else to do.
And most people don’t buy your product, so you have to have alternatives to satisfy what they feel they really need, if not your own product or service.
I think the best model of all would be a good combo of each of the three monetization methods and this can evolve over time as you find out what your visitors really like to see, click, and buy through your site.
For now I will settle for being the top “affiliate” for Authority Site Center and a decent super affiliate for the relatively few blog marketing tools I find worthy of recommending.
What you should do is make sure whatever method you choose to test, that you move things around, watch your visitors like a hawk, and keep trying to improve your clicks, referrals, and/or purchases until you have a profit margin each month you are happy with.
(You’re never happy. Once you test and track and improve your conversions you will always want to try new things to bump conversions higher. It’s natural. And addictive.)
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DaveTaylor 05.11.07 at 6:16 am
Interesting perspective, Jack. The thing is, for most people the problem with creating a product to sell is that, well, they have to come up with a product. Then you’re ceaselessly promoting the product and just as a general comment about bloggers and blog readers, they generally are turned off by aggressive promotion, so you not only have a product, but you can’t push it too hard.
I’ll tell you that my experience monetizing my blog is a bit different and my ad networks pay very well for me, esp. both Google AdSense and Kontera’s contextual ad links. Text-Link-Ads do well too, but that’s just “filling empty space” and I am sure that — as others have suggested in the SEO community — having TLA ads hurts PageRank. So that’s a vicious cycle because you get paid based on your PR, but having the ads lowers your PR. Hmmm.
Jack Humphrey 05.11.07 at 10:28 am
Dave,
I agree you have to watch “promotion aggression” which is a slippery slope with your own products, or promoting anything really.
The other part of being a respected expert with a blog is you have to go more passive with all kinds of promotion.
The ads are acceptable these days (sidebars, casual links in content) but dedicated a huge percentage of your posts to pushing your product is a no no in the blog world for sure.
Seth Godin talks about his reluctance to push his stuff in his blog (can’t find that post - it’s pretty old) so everyone is pretty sensitive to the subject if they are real bloggers.
I try not to cross that barrier with readers but sometimes you get mighty proud and want to talk about what you’re doing.
I think they can sense that you are being careful and respect that, but that’s your core readers with a sense of history.
Yeah - on the text links I didn’t even use the whole phrase “text link a*s” because I don’t want that keyword phrase in my blog!
Your “hmmm” is duly noted and reciprocated on that one.
We live in a weird world.
Matt Ellsworth 05.12.07 at 6:58 am
good tips - the create your own product thing is definitely the best bet - by far. Right now we do 2 out of the 3 methods and have new products in the works.
Franck Silvestre 05.13.07 at 4:45 pm
Amazing, your article is explaining the exact strategy I am following today.
I am an affiliate promoting stuff (including ASC), however, I just start with my own product.
I need to integrate it in my blog (picture…).
It’s much profitable since I will use leverage: Getting hundreds of affiliates promoting for me, like I am doing. Pretty exciting.