I know its early days but I feel that adsense my not not be the answer to my money making prayers.

I’ll probably hang in there for a couple more weeks and see if things pick up, if not I’ll investigate other options.

Anyone with ideas of how I could monetize a documentary blog, feel free to let me know :)

I never wanted to have adds on my blog, I liked the design too much. However once I got past 500 uniques per day I thought it was about time I cashed in a little.

I’ve had AdSense displaying for a week and made $20. Not bad, but I will be looking at some of the other suggestions in this post and the comments, thanks guys!

People do not click through on ads much on either site. Even if product is click on it should get some money but not as much as if they actually (gasp) were to buy something.

I dont’ know if that is what some of you mean by direct sales.

I have used adsense for the past month and I have a link in my email to groups that I belong to somewhat related to my blog topic. I only post to those groups once in a great while though as my presence decreased over last 6 months while I focused on yahoo answers.

I do post my blog link whenever appropriate.. Maybe I am to educationally oriented instead of $$$

In last month I have made a measly 1.24 from adsense and probably 1/2 that is because my son who also blogs click on a couple of ads to see what’s going. he has one that is for guitaras and cameras and has been very active on photo websites for years so he has done better with adsense than I have.

I am not convinced that ads are the way to go but I am going to try some of the problog tips and also fellow bloggers tips.

HAHHA today I am attending one of those free make money on the internet pitches with free lunch.. we will see what they say too.

One thing I wondered was my son said you can pay for traffic to your site and I haven’t explored that yet… anyone have any luck with paying people to visit? if so would you pay them to visit yoru store or your blog?

Good luck to all of you bloggers.

Great blog. Very informative, and the comments are great too.

I think I recognized the owner of this blog was at the TED 2008 conference!

Anyhow, I don’t make money with Google ad sense (but I only tried for a week). I am sure it is because I don’t want to impact the design of my blog. I never return onto web sites that have many ads. I don’t know how others do.

But do people clic on ad and why?
Dave Morgan (AOL Global Advertising Strategy) blogged about a study that they did to investigate who clicks on ads:

I quote him:
“What did we learn? A lot. We learned that most people do not click on ads, and those that do are by no means representative of Web users at large.

Ninety-nine percent of Web users do not click on ads on a monthly basis. Of the 1% that do, most only click once a month. Less than two tenths of one percent click more often. That tiny percentage makes up the vast majority of banner ad clicks.
Who are these “heavy clickers”? They are predominantly female, indexing at a rate almost double the male population. They are older. They are predominantly Midwesterners, with some concentrations in Mid-Atlantic States and in New England. What kinds of content do they like to view when they are on the Web? Not surprisingly, they look at sweepstakes far more than any other kind of content. Yes, these are the same people that tend to open direct mail and love to talk to telemarketers.”

A link to the study:
http://blogs.mediapost.com/spin/?p=1085

So in sum, web marketing seems to capitalize on a niche group.

I have a google page rank of 6, more than 700 average regular feed readers on a culture blog, and yet no clic ever.

Of course contextualizing the ads make a lot of sense through channel and ad units, however it also depends on the niche and the demographic of your readers.

Because I have a relative good number of rss feed reader, I sometimes do reviews, but only if it melts perfectly with the content of my blog and if the product is interesting. Two in one, these reviews are great!

Cati

Please visit my blog and see how to make money

I’m using Adsense at AspireNow and a custom ad program that I administer. This is starting to bring in some revenue. I’ve found that Amazon has been largely a bust, so far. CJ was disappointing, so I recently switched to Clickbank.

On my blogs, both http://ARRiiVE.blogspot.com and http://aspirenow.blogspot.com, I’m just using Adsense. I’m sure that as traffic grows, I’ll bring in other alternatives.

Cheers!
Scott

P.S. – You might want to join my Plaxo group on collaboration. Obviously, you’re good at getting it! I’d love if you’d contribute your thoughts and ideas: http://advancedcollaboration.plaxogroups.com

Apart from that, I like to use Linkworth and just started direct advertising too.

Revenue from those I’m using has already become a “family joke” regarding the fact that I’m “counting cents” I guess the main issue in my case is the content, I’m blogging about current events, especially related to Venezuela and Latinamerica and also on history, biographies and books reviews and I guess those aren’t quit commercialy attractive topics for my readers since I’ve noticed that there are plenty of items and services offered trhough the ads that are actually related to my content but people just don’t click on them. I’ve been trying different locations for the ads with the same result…

Either way, I’m trying to be patient, I enjoy blogging a lot so this won´t dicourage me from doing it but it would be even nicer if it paid off; I guess sooner or later it’ll take off and I’ll see the “family joke” removed from our conversations and we’ll have to find something else to laugh on…

I’m starting to do reviews from reviewme.com, I wrote my first review and it will post either tonight or tomorrow, once I proof read it again, with another in a few days.

I signed up for text link ads but need to check on the status of that.

I haven’t tried Chitika yet but since you rave about it so much, I want to give that a shot.

That’s all, at the moment but I’m looking for more ways to bring in some real income.