eXtra For Every Publisher

Darren Rowse, of Problogger.net, has written a post as part of his 31 Days to a Better Blog project, in which he recommends that we all take some time and look over the advertising on our blog. You might find that you could be making much more money using a different advertiser or even just position advertisements differently.

A snippet from his post:

Pick one aspect of your blog’s ads to change and watch what happens to your ads performance once you have. I did this last week and increased the ad unit size of my AdSense ads on this blog from 300 x 250 to 336 x 280 and saw a jump in CTR without losing much in the way of readability. It’d been a year since I tweaked those ad sizes - just think about how much money I’ve lost in that time!

This is something that I try to do on all of my blogs every two or three months. People can quickly become blind to the advertisements on your blog, and so just changing the position, size or colours of those ads can increase their click through rate for a period of time.

Some people worry about moving things around and lowering the money they make, but as long as you make a backup of the files you are changing before you change them, you can always revert back to the way it was previously.

Advertising online is a tricky business, but with some time, experimentation, and research, there is no reason why any blog couldn’t make a bit more every month.

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One of the major advantages of networking with other bloggers is the tips that they will hand out. Some of the best things I have ever done to my blogs and advertising has been thanks to a small blogging community that I have joined. We help each other out with content ideas, promotion, best ad placement, niche analysis, and many other things.

Finding these little exclusive clubs can sometimes be difficult, but when you do get a V.I.P. pass, the projects you work on will see a great boost.

One such community that I am involved with that is just getting started is EasySmith. EasySmith is being organized by David Krug. David has helped broker the sale of many sites, and built up many of his own. His expertise and connections will be of great help to anyone that applies. He has helped me out in many situations, and I continue to learn a lot from him.

Here are some details about EasySmith:

EasySmith is all about sharing. Ideas, dreams, visions, and goals. It’s a community of bloggers united to help one another achieve dreams. We achieve this by developing an open pattern of sharing. Whether that’s our daily bitching about how horrible and boring web development can be, or how we didn’t make enough money to cover rent this month. That’s what we are here for.

If you know of any other such small, focused support communities within the blogosphere, please let me know. I am always looking for new resources, and avenues, as well as new ways to help out other struggling bloggers.

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I love telling people that I have a four letter domain name, but unfortunately, the people that aren’t in an online industry don’t understand why I am so excited.

Short and Easy to Remember

One of the first things that is so great about the domain is that it is short. Having less than five characters makes it easy for people to remember. If you were looking for this site, would you rather type in extraforeveryperson.com or just Xfep.com?

Type In Traffic

Shorter domains, especially ones that are real words, but even those that aren’t get a bit more type in traffic than other domains. When people first start getting used to the Internet, some of them will just type in what they are looking for and put a .com on the end of it. For example, someone looking for “love” online might just go to Love.com (owned by AOL, ew!).

Branding

Short domains are also easier to brand, in part because of the above points, but also because if I want to make business cards or other marketing material for this site, I only need to include my four letter domain.

Unique and Rare

The last important key to having a short domain is that it is unique and rare. Currently, when I go searching for a domain for a website, my first, second and third choices are rarely available. There are so many domain squatters who take the good domains in hopes of making a great deal of money on them someday that I find myself registering domains that are much longer, and less in line with my personal needs than I would hope for.

Anyone want bnintendowii.com?

Conclusion

So when you are picking out your domain, try to make it short, easy to remember, and unique. I know finding a great domain can be difficult in this day and age, but if you spend the time, you might be amazed at what you can find.

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Brian Clark of Copyblogger writes some amazing posts, and in his most recent post, he talks about spicing up blog posts, something that some writers sorely need.

Use Sensuous Language - use words to bring things to life ala “the fear crawled down my spine creating an all encompassing shiver.”
Employ High Impact Wording - use words that aren’t being used in the everyday like monumental.
Be Entertaining - funny is hard, but when it works, it can create a strong connection between the writer and readers.

Check out more examples on Copyblogger.

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Over on John Chow’s blog I found a report from Chitika (pdf) that states that the top fifty-thousand blogs brought in five hundred million dollars in ad revenue in 2006. My first thought is that if that money was evenly split, that would only be $10,000 per blog. While I know it isn’t an even split, I have to say that $10,000 per blog isn’t enough to live on.

According to a recent case study by the University of Texas and Chitika, the top 50,000 blogs on the Internet generated $500 million in ad revenue last year. That sounds all well and good but I think the methodology to come up with the $500 million number is questionable.

Chitika took their 12,000 publishers, found their Technorati ranking and how much they made from Chitika in 2006. Then they made the assumption that the blogs will run three revenue sources and came up with a revenue number.

It is an interesting article, and if you want more details you will have to check out the report, it is only three pages long.

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