In most cases, the main source of income for a blog is advertising. However, knowing when to add advertising to a blog is crucial to the growth and authority of the blog. Blog advertising can take many forms, and I will list the most common forms of advertising in blogs below.
- PPC (Google AdSense, Setupad, and Monetag)
- Affiliate Marketing
- CPM (usually in the form of banner ads)
- Private Advertising
- Sponsored Articles
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When should you add ads to your blog?
Looking back three years ago, when I first started blogging, I made a mistake. At that time, my blog was filled with ads from many different advertisers. As a result, many readers were annoyed by these ads. This led to complaints from my readership, and after three months of hard work, I only made a few cents, which was really frustrating!
Later, I learned from my mistakes and deleted all the ads, focusing on creating high-quality content. Unexpectedly, this move really brought about positive changes. Slowly, I have a group of more loyal readers who like to visit my blog because my blog has these advantages:
- The loading speed is fast, so you won’t have to wait too long.
- There’s no clutter to distract them from the content.
- The information in the blog is very practical and can really help them.
When my number of readers gradually increased and there were about 3,000 visitors every day, I carefully added a small amount of advertisements in some key positions of the blog. As a result, within less than a month, the blog became one of my main sources of income, and it did not scare away those loyal readers. Why is this?
In fact, the key lies in whether the ratio between the number of advertisements and the number of readers on your website is reasonable.
Let's analyze why advertisers place ads on blogs. They just want to show their products or services to potential customers, and they are willing to pay only when the blogger can bring them a certain number of potential customers.
For example, if your blog has only been online for a week and only has 10 visitors a day, and most of them are your friends or other bloggers, then such a blog is of little value to advertisers. Next, let's look at the different advertising methods mentioned above and see how effective they are for blogs that only have 50 to 100 visitors a day.
1. Impact on PPC
Let’s first look at the currently popular PPC model, taking AdSense as an example.
The rule of AdSense is that if someone clicks on the ad you display, you will get the corresponding compensation. From my own experience, I can get at least 0.01 euros per click (I use euros as an example here), and the average is between 0.05 euros and 0.20 euros. Of course, sometimes you can get higher compensation if you are lucky, but this is rare because the highest-paying AdSense ads appear on Google's search results page most of the time.
Let's assume you get paid 0.20€ per click and have 100 visitors per day. If there is a 336×280 ad above the content, you can expect a CTR of about 3% (which is a reasonable estimate).
In this way, you can get about three clicks a day, which means you can earn about 0.60 euros a day, which is about 18 euros a month. But you have to consider one thing. When you first start blogging, most of your readers are people who know you, and they may visit your blog repeatedly. These people will not always click on your ads, and may even find your ads annoying, which will affect their reading.
So, are you willing to grow your blog slowly and possibly lose some readers for the sake of 18 euros a month? My answer is "no"!
2. Impact on CPM
The CPM advertising model pays you for every 1,000 impressions of your ad on your website. That means you get paid even if your readers don't click on the ad. You must have heard that some ad networks pay you $1 to $3 per 1,000 impressions, right? But what they don't tell you is that this is actually the maximum you can get per 1,000 impressions. The actual average is much lower than this, and it also depends on the referring country and region where your readers are located.
Generally speaking, the average cost of CPM advertising is about $0.50 per thousand impressions. Unless your blog is very popular and has hundreds of thousands of page views per month, you may be able to get a higher payout.
Here are 5 CPM advertising programs that can help you make money from your blog.
Let's assume that you have 100 visitors per day, which means you can only make about $1.5 per month. What's worse is that many people who could have become your subscribers will lose interest in your blog and stop following it because they see that your blog is full of irrelevant ads (such as those lottery jackpot ads).
Therefore, CPM advertising is only suitable for websites with large traffic. I started to try this form of advertising only after I had more than 5,000 unique visitors per day.
3. Private Advertising
One advantage of private advertising is that there are no middlemen to make a profit from the price difference. You can negotiate cooperation directly with advertisers and get corresponding compensation during the advertising period. Assuming that you have 100 visitors per day, how much do you think advertisers are willing to spend on your website every month?
It actually depends on the niche of your blog. If your blog is about a niche field like soldier boots, even if you only have 100 visitors a day, you may still attract some advertisers because the competition in this niche is relatively small. But if your blog is about new technology and only has 100 visitors a day, it may be difficult to attract advertisers because there are many similar blogs that can provide advertisers with better cooperation conditions and opportunities.
Therefore, private advertisers will only be willing to place advertisements on your blog if your blog can bring a large number of potential customers to them.
Through the above analysis, I believe you can see that the wiser approach is to run the blog well first, create more high-quality content, and then consider how to make money from the blog when all conditions are ripe. Every time a new blogger in China asks me how to make money from blogging, I always tell them "look at the example of Google." What I mean is that every great cause must first have a clear main goal. For blogging, first of all, the blog must be valuable to readers and can really help them, and then consider making money.
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