Seth Godin brings up some excellent points to ponder when it comes to monetizing blogs.
- How many ads should you run per page?
- What is most effective?
- Do my visitors love or hate my ads?
Seth says, in a post entitled “Promotion, self-promotion and [insert ad here]”
“…the nature of promotion is that “10″ is never enough. You always need to be at “11″. And when the competition hits 11, that becomes the new 10.”
I love it. The man always has a way of speaking the truth more clearly than most.
The idea is to test, of course, in order to know how much advertising your visitors will tolerate before starting to bounce right off your site.
Another consideration is that too much advertising gets in the way of others things, like list building, relationship building, and a search engine optimization tactic that is just coming into its own: [tag]visitor duration[/tag].
Got no visitor duration over 30 seconds showing in your log files? You got a problem.
It could be you are in too much of a hurry to scoot people off your site because you are monetizing too heavily with ads and not enough with reader relationship building.
Don't
Miss Out On Free Traffic!
Subscribe to the FTR RSS feed
or our
email list so you don't miss out on real, traffic driving tips from Jack
Humphrey! You cal also and Follow Me on Twitter! Thanks for visiting!
{ 1 comment… read it below or add one }
Rick Butts 08.28.07 at 11:57 pm
Jack -
I’m working on this very thing right now in a new book I’m finishing called, interestingly enough “How to Monetize Your Blog.”
The answer is like what the Supreme Court said about pornography - actually that subject was indecency.
“I can’t define it, but I know it when I see it.”
The number of ads is not the question - it is, first, is there a PATH apparent in your blog?
If your blog is you rambling on a topic, or if you just aggregate news, or go off in opinion, than probably not.
Have you noticed that Seth Godin relentlessly pounds the idea of solving PERCEVIED PROBLEMS that people have into his audiences heads?
I believe that the first step to ask yourself when you commit to monetizing your blog is, “what problem am I solving for people?.”
Actually, the PRE_QUESTION would be, “is this a problem people feel they have?”
All good marketing begins not with the product (ads) but with the customer.
This blog, and all of Jack’s products, help solve a very clear and present problem, getting more/better traffic to your blog site.
Rick Butts
http://1Cat.biz