Category Archives: Advertising

Making Money Online: Scaling Traffic for Profit

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I was recently talking to a friend of mine about how you can make money online. He does a podcast, and was looking for sponsorship. I was telling him that even if he could get a CPM rate of $10 for every thousand plays that the show gets, with the thousand plays per weekly episode, and selling three ad spots, he’d only be looking at $120 per month.

After realizing that getting one thousand listeners per episode wasn’t easy for him, nor any podcaster, I immediately wondered how well podcast advertising scales. Surely it deals with the same sliding CPM rates that blogs and other forms of advertising get, and so the higher the traffic, the less money for every thousand listens he’ll get.

So estimating a maximum audience of ten thousand plays per episode, four episodes a month, and three sponsors per episode still paying $10 CPM, he would only be making $1200 per month for what, in my mind, would be an outrageously popular show.

Seems like there aren’t really any super easy ways to make money online and that it always comes back to creating a large enough audience that you can sell something, be it services, products, or advertisements, but the audience required to make a full time living off the web, is probably only achievable by two percent of those willing to chase it.

Originally posted on August 23, 2008 @ 3:15 pm

Powerful Ad Service with PerformancingAds

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Now that PerformancingAds has officially launched, I wanted to take some time to talk about my experience with it so far.

I was lucky enough to have early access to PerformancingAds as it was being developed, and a fair bit of my feedback and criticisms were dealt with early on and while I am sure I will always have more criticisms as the service develops, for all intents and purposes, PerformancingAds meets ninety percent of my advertising management needs.

Who Created It?

If you recognize the Performancing brand, then you already know who is behind the PerformancingAds service. For those of you that don’t know, Performancing is a blog with a similar audience to this one and has had writers who have always become very successful in making a living through online endeavours.

Performancing has always been home to some of the best content online, and some of the strongest secondary brands.

Ryan Caldwell has been spearheading this project, and as he has with other things he has built, he has put nothing less than his full heart and soul into making this project a success.

Why Another Ad Management Service?

One of my first questions to Ryan was always “why would you want to start another ad management service?” There are so many players in the space, and so much competition, and while I know Ryan as a success in everything he attempts, I wondered if he was taking on a niche that was just too heavily saturated.

Was there room for another advertising service in the blogosphere?

Performancing Ads

Features

Ryan didn’t want just another service promising the world and he worked hard to deliver something that would fulfill the needs of many bloggers currently trying to monetize their blogs. He would bring a bunch of great sites together in a directory, while also working hard to bring in companies willing to advertise.

Automate advertising inventory
PerformancingAds allows you to manage your 125×125 pixel advertisements on your WordPress blog. Not only making it easy to show the ads, and position them, but also adding your site to a marketplace where advertisers can easily find your site.

Take PayPal Payments
It allows you to take all forms of PayPal payment, even if your personal account doesn’t normally allow credit card payments.

Book on your own site
One of my favourite features is that PerformancingAds allows you to book ads on your own site for free, making it easy to control affiliate program ads or place ads outside of the normal payment system.

Advertising exchange system
PerformancingAds also has a traffic exchange system, where, like other banner exchange systems, you can have your ad placed for free on other sites, and in return, you allow banners to freely be placed in one of your advertising locations. Don’t worry, there is no dropping “cards” to game the system here.

Quick Payments
Also, unlike other systems, any balance in your account gets paid on the first of the month. No waiting thirty or sixty days to get your money.

Featured Sites Already Using PerformancingAds

PerformancingAds CouponThere are many great blogs already using PerformancingAds, and some have already had some amazing success, including one publisher that has already sold ten ads during the short open beta period.

Links go to PerformancingAds advertising pages for listed sites

Affiliate Program

Here is the best part in my opinion. Even if you don’t want to manage your own ads on PerformancingAds, you can still make money using their affiliate program.

You’ll earn $10 per unique sign-up and 5% of the recurring revenue on all advertiser ad buys.

That could quickly add up to a fair bit of passive income if you get a few advertisers signed up through your affiliate link. If an advertiser spends $500 per month thanks to finding PerformancingAds through you, that means an extra $25 per month in your pocket. If you found ten people of similar ad buying habits, that could mean $250 per month in income, which is nothing to sneeze at.

The Catch

Didn’t think I was going to mention any negatives, did you? I believe in transparency, and despite the advertisements I have on this site, I won’t compromise my ethics. There are some downsides to PerformancingAds which I have already addressed to Ryan. Some he can do things about, and others, he can’t.

The first issue is that you need a WordPress plugin to power the advertising service on your blog. If he releases new versions of this plugin, because it isn’t in the WordPress plugin directory, I will only know about new versions from the PerformancingAds main site.

The next issue is related to the cut that PerformancingAds takes from ad sales. They take a fifty percent cut. This to me is frustrating, and could really limit their growth. Also, with the way they currently run the distribution of revenue, they take 50% of the rate that you set. So if you put up advertising spots for $20, you get $10 and they get the other $10. For the service that they are providing, as well as the marketplace, this might be worthwhile, but I think that the split should be done differently.

I have already made some suggestions regarding this, and I know Ryan and company will take them seriously.

The other small issue is that booking ads on your own site was not very refined last time I used it, and that could easily lead to some frustrations from publishers, but I haven’t tried it out since the launch announcement.

Conclusion

If Ryan and company puts the same level of passion behind making PerformancingAds a success as they’ve done on other sites, then I am sure it will be a success.

The biggest barriers right now in my opinion are the limited number of advertisers knowing about PerformancingAds, and the revenue split keeping away people that feel uncomfortable with a 50/50 split no matter the potential marketplace size or power.

Full Disclosure: I will be working for Ryan starting in August, and I have been a close friend of his for a while now. I have had access to the service from its infancy, and have information on new features coming down the pipe, but this hasn’t clouded my judgment, at least, not all that much.

UPDATE: The revenue split has changed, with 60% going to the blog owner, and 40% going to PerformancingAds, with a sliding scale based on some currently unknown criteria.

Originally posted on July 25, 2008 @ 4:50 pm

Blog Advertising Difficulties: Blog Network Doesn’t Mean Big Money

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There is a great set of posts and videos going around right now talking about advertising and blogs, and I wanted to chime in with my two cents.

Aaron Brazell started me thinking about this thanks to a video on his blog Technosailor about blog consolidation.

Then I saw a post on Inquisitr talking about what Aaron said and Duncan added his own thoughts and opinions on bringing blogs together under one flag to sell advertising as a group.

These are both people that I highly respect, and who probably have more knowledge about the business of blogging than I do, but in this area, I don’t think they know what the heck they are talking about.

I am the co-founder of Grand Effect, a great blog network, with great blogs, written by great bloggers. We were all independent and came together for the purpose of passing traffic to each other, as well as a bit of link juice and of course banding together for network wide advertising sales.

I assumed because there would be a great deal of higher quality, focused blogs that we could get some high advertising rates, and when you bring our traffic together, we have a fair bit of page views, but still the advertisers aren’t running to our doors. I’ve shopped around the network a bit to some companies trying to gauge their response, and so far it has been a really lukewarm response.

We just don’t have the five or ten million page views that the big brands are looking for, or a tight enough demographic or the required star/networking power to make those big deals with friendly companies. We also aren’t high enough currently on the thought leader chain in the blogosphere for certain brands, making things even more frustrating as we work hard to show how powerful our brands have become.

While we have a lot to offer an advertiser that can come in with a three to five dollar CPM rate, we haven’t been able to secure that yet across the network of nine sites, and so bringing together a few blogs under a banner is definitely not enough to entice companies to sign up and tap into that combined traffic.

Also, I have found that the more page views that you bring together, the lower these companies want their overall CPM rates to be. So while a 50,000 page view blog might be able to sell some advertising space for a consistent $2 CPM, or $100 per advertising spot per month, a 500,000 page view blog, won’t instantly get $1000 for the same advertising positions.

Everyone also seems to be forgetting the time and effort that needs to go into selling these companies on buying advertising from you. This can take an immense amount of time depending on the company and it can also be difficult when the coalition is young and thus the brand everyone is flying is unknown. I always thought 9rules should have done something to help its membership make money through a network advertising service, but I realize now, in working with Grand Effect, that it just takes so much time.

You either have to develop an advertising platform, use one that already exists (thus giving them a cut) or do things manually. Development costs a fair bit of time and/or money. Using one that already exists can be frustrating because it might not have the features you want, and they’ll want their cut. Doing things manually can take huge amounts of time, and lends itself to mistakes.

How does everyone expect to manage network wide advertisements? Who will take the lead to create relationships with companies and sell them on advertising positions, and does this person get extra money? Who will handle the receiving and disbursement of advertising payments?

The information that the others have put up don’t really cover the important questions, instead lingering on about other less important things like freedom of creative control on your own blogs, and trying to quickly pull everyone under your wing in hopes of selling big advertising blocks.

Too many unanswered questions. I think people are going to jump in with both feet, only to find themselves disappointed. Doesn’t anyone plan things out properly in the blogosphere anymore?

Originally posted on July 26, 2008 @ 1:03 am

Start Planning for 2009

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Now that we have gone beyond the half way point in the year, it is time for bloggers to start thinking about next year, especially if you are dependent on cost per action revenue.

As we get closer to the fall, more and more bloggers will start to work on positioning themselves for the winter holiday rush, but I think that going ahead and preparing for the next year is a wiser move.

For fitness bloggers, getting some posts ready for New Years resolutions, losing weight during the spring and finding the best spring gym memberships, could lead to huge revenue, especially if you work from now until the spring on building these articles and resources a wide variety of in bound links.

Other bloggers can also take advantage of getting a head start on the next year. If you write about movies, you can start a guide to blockbusters due out in 2009. If you write about cars, which cars are coming out next year that people should be excited about? These articles can all be great starting points that you can continue to build, promote, and get links to for the next six months.

Don’t wait until the winter to start thinking about next year, as your competition will already have pages of content ranked well in Google, and you will lose out on having a fighting chance.

Take some time and bet on what could be popular, and you could create a huge monetary windfall for yourself.

Originally posted on June 30, 2008 @ 9:08 pm

Are Your Ad Prices Too High?

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Filling your advertising inventory with AdSense and affiliate links? Hoping that putting up an advertising page will convince advertisers to contact you and promote their products or services? They might never come, and if they do, will they pay the fees you have requested?

How did you decide on your advertising prices?

CPM

One way that I have always tried to make my advertising as fair as possible is to decide my rates based on a sliding CPM scale. The more traffic I get, the lower the cost per thousand advertising impressions gets in any advertising spot I have available.

This means that I will still get more money for advertising spots as I get more traffic, but it also keeps my rates at a reasonable and affordable level.

When I had over ten thousands page views a month, I wanted to get twenty dollars a month, or a rate of $2 CPM. Since then, I have been sliding that rate ever downwards. Currently, this blog earns only $0.15 CPM and while that doesn’t sound like much, that still comes to $60 for a 125 by 125 pixel banner in the sidebar.

Also, you have to remember that your CPM rate is per advertisement, and as such over the entire page, you might make upwards of $0.50 CPM to $50 CPM. It really depends on your audience, number and placement of advertisements, size of your traffic, and the competition for advertising spaces on your site.

CPC

Another way that I decided rates on blogs before was to try out an advertising position with my own ad first, placing various affiliate programs or AdSense, and looking at the number of clicks. If you have two hundred clicks on an ad space in any given month, that can quickly be converted into real figures that most advertisers can understand.

Most advertisers want to pay as little as possible for clicks, but if you have proof of clicks, they might be more willing to advertise on your blog then throwing money at CPM advertising where they don’t know what kind of real traffic they can expect to see to their blog.

So we take those two hundred ad clicks we talked about, and convert that into a figure of around $0.20 per click, and you get an advertising total for a specific position of $40 for the month.
Cheaper rotational ads or expensive ads?

You can research the CPC rates you might want to consider on Google’s Traffic Estimator tool, among other places, though I find that their rates are usually an order of magnitude higher than most private advertisers are willing to pay, so use your best discretion.

Competition

Another great way to price advertising is to be competitive. I have advertised on a few sites that I found with rates far lower than other blogs of the same size, traffic, and community. Bargains just beg to be advertised on, and so if you look at your immediate competition, it can give you some key indicators on what you should price your own advertising at.

Just be sure not to price yourself too low, as there are psychological effects of pricing too low that will stop possible potential advertisers from considering you, as they will wonder what the problem with your site is that you don’t value the advertising space properly.

Other Effects

Another thing that most people don’t consider when setting their advertising rates, but it can be very important to potential advertisers is the number of advertising positions you have open.

Advertisers know that the more advertising spots that you have open, the less likely a visitor will notice their specific ad, and as such, the less likely they are to make money, or build branding by advertising with you.

Some people like to go crazy when it comes to adding advertising positions, while others like to limit advertising to just one position. I have always been on the heavier side of the equation, and I try to make sure to adjust my prices to make sure that advertisers are getting the best deal possible.

It can be very hard to find higher priced advertisers for your site, and so I have never been one to chase the “super sponsor” before, but it is something I still think about from time to time.

Discounting

Discounting your advertising in exchange for longer advertising periods is almost always a smart move. It reduces the amount of time you have to spend actively searching for advertisers, and it provides the advertisers a better chance to really drive their branding home, but there are other ways you can hopefully win advertisers through discounting.

Contests have helped many bloggers become very popular in a short period of time, and usually those prizes are sponsored in some way. If you find a company that has a product your audience would really like, it never hurts to ask them if they would send the product to a contest winner in exchange for advertising. The worst they could say is “no”, and then you either try to negotiate with them, or move on.

You could also try to sell them on buying multiple types of ads, or price exclusive deals for slightly more money. Currently, I have a few different advertisements for WordPress theme makers. I probably could have asked for slightly more money from one of them and in turn gave them exclusivity during the month as the only advertisement about WordPress themes.

The only issue with providing exclusivity in such a way is that as soon as you agree to provide exclusivity, competing companies come out of the woodwork wanting advertising inventory.

Lastly, another great way of getting advertisers, if you don’t need the cash in hand is to trade for product. I have received free product from a few advertisers, and in turn provided them a spot to place their banner on my site. This is one of my favourite types of advertising because it allows me to get the product, and I only accept this type of advertising when it is something that I really want or think I would enjoy. This type of advertising is fairly guilt-free as I am promoting something I own and usually enjoy.

Conclusion

There are many other ways to price advertising, and I think most people randomly select a figure they would be comfortable with. Usually though, in the advertisers mind, it ends up being too expensive or too inexpensive that they wonder “what’s wrong”. Correct pricing can help secure you more advertisers, and make sure you are getting properly compensated.

Originally posted on May 18, 2008 @ 1:22 pm