How To Milk Your Blog For Pocket Money
It seems that these days, everyone in the world and their grandmother have a blog or a website. Someone once had this to say about blogging: “Never before had so many people with so little to say said so much to so few.” Yet, within the murky waters of all this useless blabber, there are a few websites out there that manage to actually make decent money.
Yes, you’ve seen it yourself: text-link ads on Google search pages, banners on NYTimes.com and those annoying video ads on MySpace. Those ads did not appear there all by themselves – someone paid those websites to display those ads to you, so that you will get annoyed (and, maybe, buy something). Now, instead of you being annoyed, wouldn’t it be much nicer if you yourself annoyed visitors to your blog with those ads and got paid for it in the process?
Yeah – you would say – but, I am not CNN.com, my blog consists of news about grandma’s Crohn’s disease and re-posting funny jokes and photos of cute kittens. Maybe, a hundred people a month visit and I have no idea who these ninety-nine fools are, but the hundredth one is grandma. Who in his right mind would ever consider advertising on my blog?
Well, it might sound pretty unbelievable, but there are a lot of advertisers who would love display their ads on your site. Of course, they don’t know your site by name and don’t even know that it exists. Furthermore, they don’t even want to know and definitely don’t want to waste their time trying to negotiate with every small webmaster out there. And yet, they would love to see their ads get displayed on your site – and on tens of thousands of small websites in addition to yours.
In order for these advertisers to be able to get their ads onto your site without bothering with you directly, a whole new breed of intermediaries sprung up to help – these intermediaries are called the ad networks. Ad networks automatically connect firms, who want to advertise and websites who want to display those ads – all a website owner has to do is insert a few lines of programming code that the ad network provides into his website. The ad will automatically be displayed whenever a website gets a visitor. Later, the ad network will count the number of times the ads appeared on the site, calculate how much money the ad made, take its cut and send you a check for the rest.
Some ad networks are easier to get into than others; others don’t accept just anybody – they prefer a certain kind of a website and they lure them by higher payouts. What kind of website? you might ask. Well, unlike what your girlfriend told you, in the world of websites and ad networks size actually does matter – the more visits your website gets, the more likely it is that a higher-paying ad network will accept it. In the industry, those high-paying ad networks are known as “first-tier” ad networks. I will mention a couple of first-tier networks at the end of the article – follow the links and see how many people should visit your site every month before you can get admitted.
So now you can beg all your friends to visit your site and spam your relatives and Facebook friends to click on your blog’s link – the more visits your blog gets, the higher are your chances to get accepted into the first-tier ad networks and that, in turn, will mean more money for you. It won’t be much, at least at first – but, an ad on top, a banner on the bottom and a Google text-link ad somewhere in the middle – and, suddenly those cute kitties start earning you some pocket money. Go, make your grandma proud!
If you want to read more about making money with ad networks, read our ad network review of Casale Media and ValueClick Media – two of the best first-tier networks out there.
