Every blog starts humble- well, at least most do. If you have a niche, and do a great job, well, next thing you know, you’ve got a million dollar business.
Here is what 247WallSt.com decided were the top 25 blogs- based on their financial value- take a look:
financial values on blogs.
Gawker, Huffington Post and Drudge report are at the top of the heap- but don’t let that stop you. There are opportunities untapped- just find your niche and jump in.
Once you have a big audience, the question becomes how do you make it make you money?
The answer is to sell out- or at least sell space on your site. There are multiple options for where to get your ads from, and the preferred plugin to manage it is “ad sense manager” which is a bit of a misnomer since it supports a whole bunch of other sites:
WordPress › AdSense Manager « WordPress Plugins
Version 3.1.x now supports AdSense, AdBrite, AdGridWork, Adpinion, Adroll, Commission Junction, CrispAds, ShoppingAds, Yahoo!PN and WidgetBucks.Automatic Ad Code Importer for all supported networks. Widgets & Sidebar Modules compatible (as used in the popular K2 theme). Automatic limiting of Ads to meet network T&Cs (Google 3 units/page)
Can’t tell you which ad network to go with- since much of that depends on the kind of audience you attract- but, it’s one way to make a living by blogging.
There is always Google ad sense, but, what if you want to sell even more ad space?
AdBrite is a way for publishers to add revenue to their site.
AdBrite – How AdBrite Works
AdBrite’s aim is to provide our publishers with the most control, best service, and highest payout possible.
Step 1 – Choose ProductsThrough a single snippet of HTML, AdBrite can serve any combination of the following ad formats:
* Text and banner ads with customizable layout
* Full page ads – A high-paying full-screen ad on the third pageview of your site, shown only once per user per dayStep 2 – Attract advertisers
Anyone visiting your site can buy an ad directly on your site by clicking “Your Ad Here.” You’ll also be listed in the AdBrite marketplace, and represented by our busy in-house sales staff.
Step 3 – ControlYou can choose to review each ad before it appears on your site. You can set the price for ads bought directly on your site. You can even have AdBrite show another ad network (your Google AdSense ads, Burst, etc.) if we can’t meet your minimum revenue requirement.
For really high volume sites, you can look to other ad placement services like Doubleclick which is now also owned by Google.
One thing you have to be aware of: once you ad advertising from a remote server, your page load times can start slowing down, which can lose you readers and reach. Some really successful sites can sell their own advertising and serve the ads internally, but you have to have a really targeted audience that advertisers want to reach.
The next Websitetology seminars will be held, Monday January 21, 2008
8:30am to 5 pm
Location Nehemiah University, 750 S. Main Street Dayton OH 45410
If you are wondering if you should take this seminar: http://websitetology.com/?p=91
Sign up for it here: http://websitetology.com/?page_id=247
About half of my posts on The Next Wave site seem to get trackback comments by a site “University Update” – the only thing is, there are no humans involved with “University Update”- it’s just a bot stealing my content.
I mark each trackback as SPAM- but, I can’t get my content off their site. Why do they do this? To aggregate content for search engine optimization- and then to hope to score some cash from Google Ad Sense click throughs.
Once again- if Google wasn’t so powerful, and if so many lame sites didn’t pay out huge cash to get hits through buying ad words, we wouldn’t have this problem.
The bots- scrapers, are talked about at length in the following CNET article which quotes Lorelle VanFossen who writes extensively about WordPress.
Please don’t steal this Web content | CNET News.com
automated digital plagiarism in which software bots can copy thousands of blog posts per hour and publish them verbatim onto Web sites on which contextual ads next to them can generate money for the site owner.Such Web sites are known among Web publishers as “scraper sites” because they effectively scrape the content off blogs, usually through RSS (Really Simple Syndication) and other feeds on which those blogs are sent.
One of the questions that comes up often in the seminar is about what constitutes “Fair Use” and how much to use via the PressIt function of WordPress. My answer isn’t great, but I believe it works: always cite the source, don’t put it on your site unless you contribute something to the meaning, or understanding- making it more useful than it was in it’s original version.
This is where scrapers fail- they just copy and steal. Google should easily be able to see the original publisher- and be able to identify sites that are entirely made up of stolen content and vote them off the island- the problem is, that’s how Google makes a lot of money- and according to their ethos- getting filthy rich isn’t considered part of their “do no evil” mantra.
As P.T. Barnum was reputed to say “there’s a sucker born every minute” – there are people who will have you believe that you can make thousands of dollars by gaming Google adsense with a WordPress site and their “Package” of tools.
Most of what they include is available for free online- themes, plug-ins and even the advice.
The sad fact is, there are a lot of people that would rather pay money for a get rich quick scheme instead of taking a course that will teach you how to build legitimate business with a WordPress site.
And of course, Google has smart people working at eliminating click fraud and splog (SPam bLOG) sites from their search results.
But, if you can’t resist, here’s a link to that easy money:
Wordpress Elite – Powerful Blog Management
” You Can Now Easily Create a Niche Blog Empire Using WordPress That Spits Out Five Figure Adsense Checks Like a Winning Slot Machine on Steroids! “
Just remember, slot machines are still programmed to keep most of the money for the house.
If you’ve ever wondered where the little tidbits in the gray boxes at the bottom of your dashboard come from- you should read this post by Owen “RedAlt” Winkler- which explains it.
» Planet WordPress and the Dashboard Feeds
Planet WordPress is a site that aggregates feeds from a number of users who have contributed to the WordPress Open Source project, or who provide good sources of information on WordPress, its themes, or its plugins. Planet WordPress produces a feed that is displayed in the Dashboard of most WordPress installations.
While I can’t say I read all the feeds on it- very often I get some good leads on new cool WordPress functions, plugins, themes etc. there.
I’ve guessed that it could become a paid advertising channel in future releases of WordPress, to help fund WordPress.com and pay the people who put in the many hours to keep WordPress great. It’s an interesting concept- and could give Google Ad Sense a run for their money.
Although we believe that a blog is a website- and a website can be run with blog software- Internet users are quickly finding their way to blog based sites (some may not even know it).
If you’d like to read more about it- here is the link- we’ve grabbed one small quote:
Pew Research Center: A Blogger Portrait
the Pew Internet & American Life Project found that the blog population has grown to about 12 million American adults, or 8% of adult internet users and that the number of blog readers has jumped to 57 million American adults, or 39% of the online population.
39% of the Internet users knowingly are reading blogs! How many are visiting sites without knowing that it is run by a blog? Probably a lot more.
Advertisers are also aware of this, and have begun buying ads on blogs because of their highly focused readership and low cost per eyeball. We’ll have more on that in the coming weeks- but here is a post to consider: Blog advertising a quick tutorial.
Until you start getting a lot of traffic- you won’t be ready to sell ads on your site, but- maybe you might consider placing some ads to bring that traffic. However, if you are “the expert” on any one thing- you may just have the “Right” readers that someone wants to reach. Selling ads, not just Google Ad Sense placements, can be profitable- if you have an audience someone really wants to reach.
Consider this:
If you think blogs are not a viable ad medium, consider this: Many blogs are achieving “big media” reach. The celebrity gossip blog Perez Hilton, for example, or DailyKos have 500,000 readers a day, which is a quite a “big media” reach.
Read the full article The Value of Blog Advertising | MarketingProfs.com for more information. It also has tips on what to put in your blogad.
We’ll look more into advertising on blogs in the near future here- if you have questions about how to do this and can’t wait, give us a call.