CREATE BLOG |
MONETIZING YOUR BLOG |
If you get truly ambitious about commercializing your blog, the final step is putting advertisements on it. The three possible scenarios are Banner ads on your site Relevant text ads on your site Relevant text ads in your RSS feed A banner ad is a picture ad of any size. A relevant text ad is a different sort of widget altogether. Supplied by Google, Yahoo!, or another company that specializes in contextual ads, these no-picture ads are relevant to the topic of the page upon which they appear. This feat is accomplished using the same basic technology that produces relevant search results toyour keyword queries in Google or Yahoo! Nobody is entering keywords on your blog page, but Google and Yahoo! crawl every page of your blog, determine the topicality of the pages, and deliver ads that match up. The theory is that relevant ads are more interesting to your readers than irrelevant ads, and therefore less disruptive of your blog’s mission.
Any blog service or program that allows the user access to its template code can run ads. Of the platforms covered in this book, that would includeBlogger, TypePad (Plus and Pro accounts), WordPress, Movable Type, and Radio UserLand. The two social networks — Yahoo! 360 and MSN Spaces do not support the placement of ads. Three types of payout are associated with blog ads; they do not necessarily
correspond with the three types of ads just listed:Time: An ad placement is sold for a week or a month, and the blogger is paid a flat fee. The price is based on the blog’s traffic; the greater the number of readers, the more the ad placement is worth. The BlogAds service is a pioneer and leading advertising broker for bloggers, and sells ad placements by the day, week, and month.
Impressions: On the Internet, an impression is one display of an advertisement. Some ads are sold on this basis, with the cost usually mea-
sured by every thousand impressions. This method (among others) is used by the CrispAds service to help bloggers monetize their sites.
Clickthroughs: Contextual ads placed by Google and Yahoo! are paid for every time a visitor clicks one. Every month, Google and Yahoo! add up
all the clicks, collect the money from the advertisers, and divide it among the bloggers on whose sites the ads appeared. See the next sec-
tion for a more detailed account of Google’s and Yahoo!’s services. To top off the blog-ad landscape, you can also place ads in your RSS feed. In
the preceding section, I advise marketing and promoting your RSS feed with as much care and enthusiasm as you promote your site. If you succeed, your readers will leave your site behind and follow your blog work in a newsreader, where your on-site ads do not appear. That’s a bummer. More than that, the migration of the blog audience to newsreaders is a crisis for professional bloggers. You can handle this crisis in two ways:Provide partial-entry feeds, forcing readers to click onto your site to finish reading the entries of interest .Migrate your ads to the RSS feed That second solution is controversial, with some influential voices speaking out loudly against it. No matter; commercialization of feeds will happen as surely as did the commercialization of the Web.