This is a guest post by Simon Rogers, a fifteen year old from the UK who blogs at Teenius.com. You can connect with him via his blog or follow him on Twitter @teenius
The majority of new bloggers are in it for the money. There’s absolutely nothing wrong with that – I’m sure most of the experienced bloggers are in it for the money, too. The thing you have to balance is when you actually start earning from your blog, and this article will discuss your options.
Why is early monetisation so bad?
I know a few of you reading this article will be pondering on the above question. Well, basically, if you try to earn from your blog right at the start, one of two things is going to happen:
- You cram your site full of adverts and make a reasonable amount
- You use an “acceptable” amount of adverts and earn very little.
The truth is that in the early stages of a blog’s life, it has neither the traffic nor the authority to start earning, and those two are probably the two most important things.
OK, but WHY is it actually so bad to try and earn from your blog early on? The thing is, if you go with option one (listed above), you’ll find that due to the vast quantity of adverts on your site, people will leave a lot quicker. This won’t help your traffic one bit, and will probably slow down the growth of your blog. If you opt to go with the second option, there isn’t really much point as you’ll hardly earn anything.
So, what do I do instead?
Well, in the early stages of a blog, it’s all about growth. You need to be driving traffic and looking to the future rather than trying to squeeze every possible cent: you can do that when the time is right and you’re getting enough traffic.
You can still earn!
I’m guessing a lot of readers of this article will have a new blog, and I’m also guessing they’re getting more and more disheartened as they read more and more of this article. Well, to those people, don’t worry! I’ve got some solutions so that you can still earn!
- Affiliate Sales: Affiliate marketing is a great way to earn from new blogs. This basically consists of selling a product and getting a percentage. You’ll often get banners that you can put up on your website to advertise the product. Even if you only make one sale, you’ll probably earn more than selling advertising space directly.
- Adsense: Google Adsense is an amazing program where you get paid every time someone clicks one of the adverts. The only problem with this is that you hardly get paid anything, and because of the nature of the program it can often make your blog look ‘spammy’.
Those are, in my opinion, the two best ways to earn from new blogs. There are, however, other ways to maximise the advertising space on your blog though, my favourite of which is to use them to build traffic.
How do you build traffic through advertising space?!
Simple: give it away. Give it away?! Am I mad?!
Actually, no, I’m not. There are loads of contests all over the internet where you can win advertising space as one of the prizes. Well, the next time you see someone looking for prizes, donate one of your advertising spaces. This will get you good exposure as these contests are usually advertised well.
Conclusion
From the above points we can (hopefully) conclude that you shouldn’t dive in at the deep end searching for treasure when you launch a new blog. You should build traffic so that in the long term you can sell your advertising space for more. That said, you can still earn through affiliate programs and Adsense.
I am sure you will agree that this has been a fantastic look at early monetization of your blog. Thankyou Simon for really setting the standard high for guest posts on SOB, and for anyone interested, I recommend you check out Simons blog at Teenius.com. - Tom
Excellent tip on giving out advertising space through competition(s), never crossed my mind that idea.
But I don’t see how AdSense is better than selling advertising, as won’t any ads that look like ads have the same negative effect (if any)? If a reader is turned off and leaves because of ads, she will do it do any ad. That goes for the affiliate banners too and the ad space given away through competitions.
I do however see the danger in cluttering your new blog with ads making it look stupid, and the most important point about focusing on good content & traffic over early money/advertising is very valid.
The truth is there’s really no wrong one monetizing on blog too early. What’s wrong is plastering too many ads on a site that affects the overall quality of it.
Firstly, thanks for publishing this, Tom! :D
@Zemalf – Yeah, I find it’s a great way to build up your blog as contests gain loads of exposure for your site :)
Personally I say don’t sell adverts privately in the early days as it’s practically worthless, so there’s really virtually no benefit.
@Melvin, like you say, there’s no “wrong” way, but there are plenty of ways that will lose you traffic ;)
Great post, Simon. I agree with this post, but I agree with Melvin as well.
What I did was give away 6 FREE 125×125 ad spots and 2 free 468×60 ad spots when I opened my blog :D
That got everyone hyped up and I received some early traffic!
-Mike
Well I’m with you on this one, Simon. I think ads distracts my readers from my content that’s important, especially early on when getting visitors is so important. I’ve noticed even the top established blogs are not crammed with ads, so as to speak.
Early monetization do not kill the blog unless you stuff it with adverts. I have always though that good advertisements are also resource, and specially when the blog is new, the ads must be utilized properly, for example put it at the end of the articles as further readings…
I don’t think that there is a problem with early monetization. Over monetization can kill your blog, no matter when you do it however.
Iinto this matter i think we are both agree. If you apply the early monetization method i dont say that is killing your blog but there are real chances to reach in that point, beside come on who is intrested in a blog full of advertaing logos all over the place. If you want to earn money and have fun in the same time with the ppl you like to talk i am proposing to wait for a period before start sqeezing the money.