I am going to talk about monetizing your blog. That’s right we are going to talk about money in this post.

There are a number of ways to create an income with your blog. You can show paid adverting, you can sell affiliate products or you can sell your own product.

By far the one with the highest profit margin is selling your own product, followed closely by selling affiliate products.

To make a decent income with paid advertising you need to have a lot of traffic to your site and/or you need to sell the advertising directly instead of using pay per click advertising networks like Google Adsense and Yahoo! Publisher Network.

Yes, you can make money with these, if you have a ton of traffic, but nowhere as much as you can make selling your own product or an affiliate product.

Now let’s cover how you show your advertisements.

If you have been looking over other blogs, which you should do to see how they work, you have probably noticed that some blogs have what I would call “In Your Face” advertising. This is a blog that no matter where you look you get hit by an ad. All over the sidebars, the beginning of an article, the end of an article and even right in the middle of an article.

There are also blog with what I call “Soft Spoken” advertising. These are blogs where the advertising blends in so well that you hardly notice it. It comes from text links in articles, small unobtrusive ads in the sidebar and text ads in the sidebar.

This is an example of a “Soft Spoken” link, I found a great site for blogging beginner instructions that actually shows you everything you need to know to get your blog up and running.

Then of course there are the vast majority of blogs that are somewhere between these two methods.

Which of these will make you more money?

That really depends on your content.

If you are going to have “In Your Face” advertising you MUST have good content to keep the reader on the page to see your advertisements. But on the other side of the coin if all you have is scraped content (nothing original) you MUST have “In Your Face” advertising to have any hopes of earning an income.

Put yourself in the shoes of your reader. If you go to a page and you have to dig through the advertisements to see the content, how do you feel if the content is lousy?

With me most of the time I will simply click the back arrow and go away but if there is an ad on the page for something that might provide the answers I am looking for I will, occasionally, click on that ad to see what comes up. This is where you would want to use a pay per click advertising service because the people aren’t going to stay on your site so you don’t care if they get away.

Now let’s take the same scenario but the content is outstanding. In this case I will go through the ads to get to the content so you keep me on the page and I might even subscribe to your RSS feed and come back to your site again for more good content or I might check out your other articles and if they are good you end up with a reader that comes back over and over again.

They might not buy anything the first time they are there, most people don’t, but the more they come back and trust you for good information the more likely they are to buy on your recommendation. But if you are really pushing the ads everywhere you can get them, you will have to work much harder on your content to keep them as regular readers.

Now on to the “Soft Spoken” advertising, again the success of this relies on good content and keeping your readers, informed, entertained and coming back. You might not think that a text link in the middle of a post could make you any money but if you have been providing good information in your content and you have repeat readers, you have developed a relationship with them. This means that they will trust you much more than they will trust a flashy banner or a blatant ad, therefore they are more likely to click on something that you recommend.

With that said you as the author have the responsibility to make sure the product you are recommending is of good quality and actually fits in with the topic of your post. If you just start recommending any piece of garbage product just to earn a buck you will find your readership and your traffic dropping, when this happens your income drops.

So which is better, “In Your Face” or “Soft Spoken”?

If you plan on using a pay per click system then “In Your Face” is your only choice. This is because by definition with pay per click advertising you are looking to send people to some one else’s site, so you want as many chances as you can get for them to click.

If you have good content then either will work but I actually recommend you land somewhere in the middle.

If it is a product related to your niche that you know and you really like go ahead and put an advertisement in your sidebar or in an article and make it more noticeable. But remember, there are a lot of people out there like me that don’t want to have to look through an ad to see the content.

On a side note and a tip for you, if you are using pay per click ads on your site check out the ads that are showing on your site DO NOT CLICK ON THE ADS (this can get you shut down by the ad server) but write down the URL for the ad and type it into your browser. Quite often you will see that what is being advertised has an affiliate program.

Why do you want to know this?

Most pay per click ads only pay you pennies for the click whereas if the product you found is a good one and you join the affiliate program you could get paid quite a bit more! Which would you rather make 2 cents or $20?

The choice is yours and as always I recommend that you test your ads. Run one ad for a week or a 1000 viewers (which ever you prefer) see how much you made then change it for the next 1000 viewers. You can use this to test pay per click against affiliate product or affiliate product against another affiliate product. But if you don’t know which makes you more money how do you know which to use?

This entry was posted on Wednesday, April 1st, 2009 at 9:14 am and is filed under Blog Advertising. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.