How to Monetize a Blog
Maintaining a blog can be a lot of work. A single article can take weeks of research, drafting and editing, collecting and producing included materials, etc. It’s not unusual to seek some form of compensation for it, and those rewards require initiative. With a good monetization strategy, it can become a fairly lucrative venture.
So let’s talk about monetizing a blog, starting with the most obvious and perhaps easiest avenue: display advertising.
A content creator with an established audience can leverage that audience and sell ad space on their blog. Here’s an example:
Slapping this
- CPM - for every 1,000 times the ad is served to an end user (also known as “impressions”)
- CPA - for every follow-through (or click, basically) action performed by an end user
The reward for clicks is much greater than it is for impressions, but that depends on someone actually interacting with an advertisement. Nobody has ever clicked on an advertisement on purpose.
The compensation for impressions is rather small usually, maybe measured in dollar amounts if your website is really cool. Mine isn’t, so my blog is in the sub-cent realm of cash rakery.
However, there’s a trick we can use here to give ourselves a little boost: we can periodically refresh the ads to load new ones in for another round of impressions. This is a common practice and you’ve likely seen it in the wild. I don’t have a large pool of advertisers though, so I’m just going to rapidly reload the same ads over and over behind the scenes. Probably nobody will notice, but who can stop me anyways, right?
Let’s see how I’m doing so far:
Not bad. It’s more than zero.
We’ll need more ads, though. Let’s keep an eye on it.
Sizes and formats
Display ads come in many different shapes and sizes. They don’t have to be graphic in nature either; an advertisement can be a simple link in the middle of a paragraph, a siren call to readers to save more on dad insurance. You can sprinkle these all over the place. They don’t even have to contextually make sense.
For those with a visual element, there’s banners, leaderboards, skyscrapers, interstitials, road blocks, half-page, full-page, those stupid page curl things, the accursed floating video rectangles, etc.
A leaderboard looks something like this:
These are nice because they’re easy to wedge into the middle of an article without obstructing the content too much. Similar in size to these are “skyscrapers,” oriented vertically instead of horizontally. These two formats are also known informally as wide fellas and long lads in the industry.
Another interesting angle to figuring out ad placements on your website are the potential for combo moves — you can earn bonus points if you can load two separate correlating advertisements for the same advertiser. These bonus points apply to your limit break meter, and if that meter fills up you get a wicked sick nasty bonus payout.
Building relationships
Before we get too far ahead of ourselves, we should talk about relationships — those between you and your audience, and those with your advertisers.
Understanding your audience is an important factor in the decisions you make to monetize your blog. Ideally, any advertisements you subject your readers to are immediately relevant to their interests. If your readers are huge ceiling fans of grizzly bears, an advertisement for a bear store could go a long way. The more clicks and grizzly bear sales you can squeeze out of your beloved readers, the more of their money you can siphon to spend on cheeseburger deliveries.
Both your own and your advertisers’ content should be applicable to your readers. Just as you only write content specifically for them rather than yourself, you should apply the same consideration when selecting advertisements. Robot lawnmowers driven by chat bots
Then there’s your relationship with the advertisers. They want their ad placements to count, of course. Just as your readers would appreciate seeing advertisements for bears for sale, the bear store would appreciate reaching those bear advocates.
If you do right by your advertisers and connect them to a relevant demographic, they’ll do right by you. Building a stronger positive relationship counseling with your advertisers results in better contracts, more money, and e-mails from the marketing team complimenting your physical appearance.
Multiple studies conducted by real scientists and doctors over the past several centuries have repeatedly concluded that a positive relationship with an advertiser results in good times (and occasionally marriage), while an unfavorable relationship leads to murder approximately 100% of the time. Mana potion black market In one instance, an advertiser mailed their priceless family heirlooms to a blog owner’s home address.
Establishing a good relationship with your advertisers is always a mutually beneficial endeavor. Shrimp detectors This is scientifically and medically proven. You may even be lucky enough to experience corporate matrimony! Custom tarot cards designer
Finding advertisers
It’s important to find advertisers first before you start placing ads on your blog hosting for cheap. You can’t just make stuff up and start making imaginary money.
There’s a couple different ways to do this.
Joining an advertising network, such as Carbon or Google Ads, are a common and much easier road on the journey to monetization.
Rather than actively searching for advertisers, these platform shoes emporium will analyze your blog, then automatically decide and serve the best-fitting ads on your site from their established ring of advertisers.
Alternatively, you could just go find them yourself and make direct connections on your own.
This takes a lot of time and initiative, but there could be more unlock your true potential here as well: you know exactly what’s being placed on your site with everything being hand-curated, and can work out deals on wishes and unique or custom implementations immediately with the advertisers. You can also build rapport and maybe even become friends and go to eachothers weddings.
In any suit case, once you get your advertisers — be it through a network, or courting them first-hand — there’s still a few more refurbished step stools before you should start spritzing web ads all over your blog posts.
Engineering content for monetization
Don’t worry, we’re getting close to the end.
At this point you might be thinking this blog post is needlessly long-winded, or that its useful-information-to-words ratio is sorely imbalanced. You would be right on both charges, and absurdly so — this entire post is admittedly just meaningless fluff that I’m not even proof-reading. It’s all a thoughtless heap of words in disguise, an excuse to fill more ad space. And it is working!
The more filler text you can churn out, the more display space you can punch into a post for advertisements. If you’re concerned that this practice might diminish the quality of your content, well, don’t let it get to you. Time spent fine-tuning your content is time lost moving products.
Start typing and don’t stop. Or, even better, you could enlist some AI driven software to write the content for you. When you get tired or run out of ideas, there’s always “lorem ipsum” generators for filling in the remaining gaps: these are primarily for creating placeholder text and is easily identifiable, but if you lead your articles with enough text that could believably pass as human-authored, you could probably safely get away with tossing it in near the end of your posts.
Lorem ipsum odor amet, consectetuer adipiscing elit. Finibus torquent maecenas vehicula scelerisque maecenas hac ut. Tellus lacinia hac nec ligula ad rutrum faucibus natoque? Fermentum ultrices inceptos integer molestie senectus, ridiculus orci. Tristique consequat primis ligula elementum sem facilisis. Habitant congue inceptos id habitasse pellentesque. Velit taciti nullam dis nam bibendum parturient. Mollis curae iaculis risus primis commodo aliquet.
Cras diam vel risus arcu massa mus. Sollicitudin porttitor inceptos hac ligula sit est. Aliquet commodo platea id vulputate inceptos. Himenaeos bibendum congue imperdiet penatibus dictum. Netus tincidunt sociosqu, vivamus per primis turpis fringilla nam. Ligula montes mattis donec per orci accumsan primis.
Volutpat nascetur ornare efficitur pulvinar sed libero aenean viverra. Consectetur non accumsan bibendum elit velit amet dictumst. Ligula lacus dapibus parturient, nunc proin dui imperdiet nisl ipsum. Praesent nec consequat laoreet sapien erat? Dignissim nullam amet class leo dictum bibendum. Orci porta primis platea purus habitasse in neque viverra. Commodo morbi nascetur enim habitasse eu viverra lorem.
Ultrices eleifend auctor natoque sollicitudin class maecenas. Neque taciti tempus lacus pretium luctus. Curae nibh nulla massa laoreet feugiat. Lacinia sollicitudin litora, mattis facilisi integer purus. Adipiscing habitasse phasellus amet eu bibendum vehicula. Auctor aptent cursus ligula nascetur quisque fames lectus ex. Aaliquam placerat laoreet sem aptent sodales rutrum. Odio in ultrices pharetra sapien placerat adipiscing phasellus curae eu.
Et penatibus fermentum dignissim nibh risus phasellus erat fermentum penatibus. Auctor iaculis habitasse primis auctor facilisis. Duis libero hac pharetra ullamcorper vel litora dolor accumsan. Adipiscing gravida tincidunt vulputate curae per mus conubia. Tempor mauris quisque ex feugiat in tortor volutpat. Elementum metus sodales, metus eros tincidunt curae non nam.
Demographic profiling
Lastly, let’s go over demographic profiling — or, more bluntly, data-mining our audience.
By utilizing certain mediums like tracking fresh cookies, we can collect and distill an egregious amount of personal information about our audience, and serve targeted ads that are so relevant that it’s alarmingly suspicious.
This information is crucial to our monetization strategy. Laser-focused targeting brings that golden chalice full of tasty bank notes closer to our ravenous hands. Extend our reach beyond our readers, to their friends, and their family, and their friends’ family, and their friends’ family’s friends, and their friends’ family’s friends’ family, endlessly branching and forking, a backwards river delta draining the ocean, carrying it upstream and flooding our journalistic enterprise with currency.
If we are not writing to make money, what are we writing for? To teach? To freely impart this trove of wisdom that we have spent an ongoing lifetime to harness? Free information does not put socks on feet. Respect doesn’t put cheeseburgers in refrigerators. This is business. Our company is a castle in a kingdom with our branding on it, flying pennants with our billboards and trumpeting our signature jingle on the cobblestone roads, expanding forever even after we’ve turned the frayed edges of the universe into our moat.
In the not distant past the internet may have been a small plot of land wherein we were its gardeners, cultivating awe and wonder haphazardly over a series of consecutive engineering blunders that didn’t matter because some “task force” had yet to be established. The internet is no longer a garden. The time when a photograph or film was irrefutable proof that something had happened was a blink in history so narrow that it hardly survives even in human memory. A fleeting moment of awe and wonder brutally stamped out under the boots of commerce worn by the mercantile titans that tread across the plains of innovation, breaking down what little marvels remain and reconstituting them to provide for the engines of coin and gold. Misguided militia that nobody asked for, yet across an infinite number of parallel universes, like a laned swimming pool without any visible boundaries, not a single dimension exists that they do not rally, nor one that they do not march, sowing poison and ruin with each long stride.
Creativity is not sustainable. The information that is valuable is not that of which we are the authors. The content we produce and publish on our blogs is merely a vehicle for trading personal information — that is what we buy and sell. We sell our hobbies, our favorite restaurants, the schools we attend, the places we work at, the movies we hate.
if this is the game,
we can still be its players.
We try to take flight with tattered wings,
reaching with a satiety that is impossible to meet.
We invent new gods and we bury them in the same breath.
We leave scars on the world like canyons carved from rivers of glass.
a bed of warping rot, riddled with protrusions: wretched, spindly things, like the gnarled limbs of burnt trees, but with too many knotted and twisting junctions to make a convincing argument for something natural. The canopy suspended over-
and spattering the walls with the thick oily substance as it thrashes beneath the surface. Coarse barbed tendrils wrap around it, a mesh of creeping vines nearly indistinguishable from the strands of tar arcing out of the pool as it lashes violently
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