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13 Ways for Bloggers to Make Money with Advertising

Posted By Darren Rowse 9th of September 2011 Advertising, Featured Posts 0 Comments

13 Ways for Bloggers to Make Money with AdvertisingRecently, I posted my “How bloggers make money MindMap” on Google+. I’ve had a few people ask for clarification around the Advertising section, and what all the options there mean. Here’s a summary:

1. Ad networks

These are services like AdSense and Chitika but also smaller or more local ones like NuffNang (which operates out of Australia and Asia). They can probably fit in some of the other categories as well, as they use different models to deliver their ads.

2. Cost Per Impression (CMP)

This is where you sell space for an ad and get paid based upon how many times it loads. Usually you get paid per 1000 impressions of the ad. The rate varies a lot, depending upon topic. There are lots of very low, “remnant” ad networks out there that pay you a pittance per impression, but if you have a higher value niche you can get better money. I’ve been paid up to $40 per 1000 impressions.

3. Cost Per Acquisition (CPA)

These ads pay out only when someone takes some kind of action after clicking the ad. The action might be a sale but could also be them signing up for a service, leaving an email address, etc.

4. Cost Per Click (CPC)

This is what AdSense used to be: every time someone clicked your ad, you’d get a certain amount. Now AdSense do a combination of CPC and CPM ads—they mix them in.

5. Sponsorships

This is what I do on ProBlogger. I sell ad spots on a month-by-month basis to sponsors for a fixed amount per month.

6. Text links

When you sell a text link on your site, the person buying the link is usually doing it for search engine ranking purposes. As a result, Google frowns on these and you could be risking your own search rankings by doing it. I don’t do this, as I see it as a little too risky, but some bloggers still do. Proceed with caution.

7. Pay per post

Also known as sponsored posts (advertorials), this is where you’re paid to review a product or to promote it in a post. Bloggers have varied ethical stances on this. Generally these days you are required to disclose that you’re being paid for the post.

8. Job board/classifieds

If you operate in a niche where people are buying and selling products or there are jobs that people want to advertise this can be a nice source of income. You need to be able to attract both advertisers and those they want to see the ads to make it work, though—so you need traffic and profile.

9. Newsletter advertising

This is a growing area for me. Some advertisers love to have their brand included in emails that you send to readers. We find bundling some onsite sponsorship banner ads with inclusions in our newsletter is a good way to sell space to advertisers.

Some ad networks (like AdSense) have ways of doing this but you can also sell sponsorships in your RSS feed directly. We use a WordPress plugin called RSS Footer to add an advertisement in the RSS feed of ProBlogger.

Here are a few more ideas that I should add to the mindmap…

Ad networks like Kontera offer these, and I think Chitika and a few others do, too. They are ads that appear in your posts, turning certain keywords into little ads (they usually change the color of the word and/or underline it to make it look like a link). When someone hovers over the word a little ad pops up with a description of a product that they can buy. Some bloggers find these ads convert well, but others find them intrusive.

12. Video advertising

If you publish videos, you might be interested in Youtube’s integration with AdSense, which allows you to earn money from ads that appear in your videos.

13. Image ads

Yesterday +Scott Fitzgerald alerted me to ImageSpace Media, who have a system that adds advertisements into your images. These are similar to the ads you might see in Youtube videos that pop up and that can be minimized.

There are of course other typs of ads and ads that fit into multiple categories above. What types do you use, if any?

About Darren Rowse
Darren Rowse is the founder and editor of ProBlogger Blog Tips and Digital Photography School. Learn more about him here and connect with him on Twitter, Facebook and LinkedIn.
Comments
  1. Nice and clean guide for noob man. I’m sharing this in my language if you don’t mind.

  2. Very useful… Thanks for sharing bro:)

  3. Darren,i really love reading to your posts,its your blog that inspired me to blog.I recently started to monetize my blog via adsense.Its great to see other methods of monetizing.

    I am very much interested in monetizing images,but still my blog is not very old and popular,so i won’t irritate readers.I will try imagespace media at some later date.

    with regards,
    pradeep

  4. where to get Cost Per Impression (CMP) ?? i have sites which has 500 uniq visits per day i want to use it.

  5. Great tips! I just started blogging, so, I need all the help I can get! I’m still waiting for the network traffic though, time to read through some of your other blogs about this!

  6. Hey Darren thanks for share this article. but i want to know one thing can you please share something about sponsership ads ? please

  7. Really nice post on how to build ways to monetize. I just really started getting into RSS feeds, so I def gotta try the RSS footer. Thanks for the info!

  8. Love this! Up until recently I had not really thought seriously of using my blog to generate money other than as a result of gaining more business via the respect and authority I have built via my content. However, this and one other post has inspired me to look more deeply into finding ways to monetize my blog.

  9. I find these useful. I hope to be able to incorporate these into my site one day! Thanks for sharing the post and the tips!

  10. Great list! Love your blog man.

  11. I hope to be able to incorporate these into my site one day! Thanks for sharing the post and the tips!

  12. Hey, thanks for the great article… I was told to follow this site if I’m going to grow as a website developer / blogger… so here I am. Interestingly, I just relaunched my site this past week, and included an advertising page for the first time. I appreciate your ideas… they will help me tweak it to be more effective.

  13. Enjoyed your blog. I’ve had an active site for two years with a good solid following, but I’ve yet to figure out how to incorporate adsense, sponsors or anything else that might create some income. Are there some easy tips on how to get it from square one to square two? Like ads for Dummies?

    Love reading your posts
    Helen

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