At what point can you consider monetizing your blog?

[ses5909]

People hear about all of these people who make an income off of their blogs and think that they can just whip something up and throw some ads up and they will achieve that same success!

This isn't the case though! At what point do you think someone should consider throwing some ads up or selling text links? Is it based on the page views, page rank? something else?

[Jeremy]

I would say it is probably best to wait a couple months. At a minimum it will take and handful of posts on the site before you begin to see any incoming links and it takes a while before the content begins to rank reasonably in search engines so in the first few months with the limited traffic your contextual and CPM type ads will be virtually worthless.

During this time though a reasonable thing to consider would be some affiliate programs. Now I'm not talking about plastering ads all over your site, but the more casual linking when you talk about a book you can link to with amazon or a product you mention that can be found at commission junction, etc. The conversion rate for these can be fairly low, but one click that turns into a sale will probably still be more than your adsense earnings in the first 2 or 3 months combined.

As far as text links go, since they are primarily purchased for SEO you aren't likely to find any buyers until the site gains some traction and gets at least a public pagerank value. Even then you will probably need to be at PR 4 before you receive any decent offers. And since the public PR is updated basically once per quarter you are looking at a few months at minimum before that happens.

So, ultimately I think people should shoot for about three months of just solid posting, commenting and linking to other sites in order to build content and gain a reputation. If you do that for a while and begin to see some steady traffic and are building up PR you probably can begin introducing some ads to the site.

Nobody is stopping you from putting ads on the site from day one, but until you're beginning to get some traffic they really won't do much for you other than take up real estate in your layout and possibly give the impression that you are more concerened about making money than helping your readers.

[pbradish]

...so in the first few months with the limited traffic your contextual and CPM type ads will be virtually worthless.

During this time though a reasonable thing to consider would be some affiliate programs. Now I'm not talking about plastering ads all over your site, but the more casual linking when you talk about a book you can link to with amazon or a product you mention that can be found at commission junction, etc. The conversion rate for these can be fairly low, but one click that turns into a sale will probably still be more than your adsense earnings in the first 2 or 3 months combined.

I completely agree with this. :D

[aquariancore]

I waited and then did it slowly on three of my sites. Building up traffic helped me procure el primo affliates.

[trick-r-treat]

I would try to make sure that my blog was really generating some interest before I tried to make income from it.

[smittenbite]

well i've only had one blog so far that i wanna make money off and i put ads on right from the start cause i wanted everything set up together. i think its good because you start off making money right away - even if its only a little bit.

plus i think once you've got loyal readers, then all the sudden you put ads up theyre gonna notice and probably think 'hey...they used to be this, now they just wanna profit off me just like all the other websites'. and your credibility goes down since it seems like now youre getting money and before you werent. so i think its best to just put em up from the beginning and get that outta the way

[dojo]

I placed ads from the first days .. but as you can imagine nothing happened. Then I removed them and now I focus on creating content and promoting it. When it will reach enough visits, I might reconsider the advertising. so far .. just content

[deronsizemore]

I would say it is probably best to wait a couple months. At a minimum it will take and handful of posts on the site before you begin to see any incoming links and it takes a while before the content begins to rank reasonably in search engines so in the first few months with the limited traffic your contextual and CPM type ads will be virtually worthless.

During this time though a reasonable thing to consider would be some affiliate programs. Now I'm not talking about plastering ads all over your site, but the more casual linking when you talk about a book you can link to with amazon or a product you mention that can be found at commission junction, etc. The conversion rate for these can be fairly low, but one click that turns into a sale will probably still be more than your adsense earnings in the first 2 or 3 months combined.

As far as text links go, since they are primarily purchased for SEO you aren't likely to find any buyers until the site gains some traction and gets at least a public pagerank value. Even then you will probably need to be at PR 4 before you receive any decent offers. And since the public PR is updated basically once per quarter you are looking at a few months at minimum before that happens.

So, ultimately I think people should shoot for about three months of just solid posting, commenting and linking to other sites in order to build content and gain a reputation. If you do that for a while and begin to see some steady traffic and are building up PR you probably can begin introducing some ads to the site.

Nobody is stopping you from putting ads on the site from day one, but until you're beginning to get some traffic they really won't do much for you other than take up real estate in your layout and possibly give the impression that you are more concerened about making money than helping your readers.

This seems to be consistent with anything I've read before and is the model I've followed with my blog. I have a couple amazon affiliate links at the bottom (probably in a terrible place to really do anything) and I've got a couple other affiliate links in my sidebar. Other than I've just tried to post decent content and get all kinds of links into my blog.

[smittenbite]

in the first few months with the limited traffic your contextual and CPM type ads will be virtually worthless.


not really i think this would be a good time to test out ad placement before you get more and more visitors so that when your blog starts growing you can immediately maximize your earnings cause you already know what works. and plus, i've made enough off adsense to buy an over priced cd already :o

[deronsizemore]

not really i think this would be a good time to test out ad placement before you get more and more visitors so that when your blog starts growing you can immediately maximize your earnings cause you already know what works. and plus, i've made enough off adsense to buy an over priced cd already :o

Without a lot of visitors, would it really be a 'good' time to test out ad placements? I mean, if I'm getting 10 visits a day, testing ad placements is really pointless because there isn't enough traffic to see any kind of returns anyway, so there really is nothing to test until you're bringing in enough traffic to see some kind of consistent returns...rather than $.10 here and $.05 there.

[pbradish]

I'm admittedly a greedy person by nature so that was an interesting process when I created my first blog. Of course, I tried to monetize it right off the bat with very little success. Eventually I learned that less is actually more when it comes to ad space, and Affiliate programs can look MUCH more professional than Adsense style advertisements.

What I'm trying to get at is, in my opinion, if you're going to try and advertise and only have a small volume of traffic to work with - use an affiliate program that meshes well with your blog's message. Not only will it look more professional, if you do happen to make a sale it will nullify the first couple months worth of any adsense revenue that you would have probably had.