I have long said that ad sales is not a valid goal for most bloggers. Don’t get me wrong, you can earn some extra money selling ad spots on your blog, but to really rake in the cash you need a big audience. What you can do with your not so big blog, however, is get spinoff results. I didn’t have that many readers when I got my first freelance gig (for The Blog Herald incidentally, coming full circle now, aren’t I?), and I certainly didn’t have great numbers to lean on when Syntagma signed me up for redesigning their network templates.
The lesson here is that you can get spinoff from your blog way earlier than the ads are starting to pay for your coffee habits.
Do you see any ads here on tdhedengren.com? No, you don’t (if you do then I’m hacked - or have gotten a wicked offer I just couldn’t refuse). That’s not because I despise ads or anything, I just don’t think I’m getting enough value out of them for this site. A couple of bucks each day, that’s nothing compared to what I earn when doing design work, my other spinoff service that helps pay the bills.
That asks an interesting question, by the way. Am I a problogger by definition?
Let’s look at that one. My blog makes $0/month in direct earnings, actually, it just costs (hosting and domain). However, I do get frequent design requests, and I’ve got more freelance writing offers than I can nor will want to handle, with my editorship at The Blog Herald as well as Devlounge being the most outstanding ones.
I’m not making money out of my blog, but without it I wouldn’t be making the money I am today. Problogger or not?
Spinoff services is the key to a serious income using your blog, in my opinion. It won’t make your blog successful, but just sitting around waiting to break the $100/month barrier, so that you can move on to the $250/month goal, and so on, isn’t going to pay the bills now is it?
Ads are fine, but think spinoff services as well. If you are good at what you’re doing, you’ll find yourself getting clients and customers at a much higher rate than the Adsense dollars are trickling in.
True. Google has all but killed ads on sites/blogs with less than 500k pageviews a month. I live comfortably off my network but most value comes from a handful of sites and it certainly wouldn’t support the kind of operation run by b5 — with the help of a few VC millions, of course.
The old SEO + ads model is finished for most blogs now. To really succeed you need a readership that attracts brand ads not direct-response ones, and that’s a lot of PVs.
That’s another thing. When will bloggers understand that direct sales is the only way to make serious money off ads? Yes, yes, I know all about that it is hard to sell ads, but I’ll tell you, putting yet another crappy affiliate program in there isn’t time well spent either. If you’ve got the niche, you’ve got a lot of possible advertisers. Sure, it’s not big money unless you’re a big player, but then again neither is Adsense or affiliate stuff.
Then again not all of us are sales people, and it is hard to find people to perform that service for you.
Before the Google hit on blog PRs it was possible to run a series of niche blogs with text link ads and make a decent living from them. Now it’s more difficult but still possible.
It’s satisfying to see Google’s own income dropping, partly because of this, and their share price losing 40pc.
I don’t know about satisfying, but fair perhaps? Personally, I think the whole Google-centric is a bit scary, and the businesses relying on Google search results (or any other similar for that matter) are very vulnerable to me.