Making Profits From Your Blog Empire

PROFITING FROM YOUR BLOG EMPIRE

Generating Profits

Your Blog Empire, in order to be profitable, must generate sufficient income to cover not only your actual costs, but to pay you for your time and expertise.  The costs you can keep under control by intelligently managing the money you spend on promotion and bandwidth.  Potential customers you manage by attracting and keeping interested readers.  But to make a profit, you’ve got to make a sale, and there are two ways to accomplish that: selling clicks or coffee cups. Building a blog empire can actually become an interesting hobby.

The first method, selling clicks, means placing ads, like banners, on your site.  When your customers click the ads (or occasionally when they simply view them) you collect a payment from the advertiser.  In this case, your customers are companies to whom you sell access to your readers.

The second method, selling coffee cups, is not limited to ceramic drinking devices, but to anything you sell directly to your readers.  In this case, your readers are your customers, purchasing from you products that advertise your site or information only you can provide.

Selling clicks is the easiest and most popular of the two methods, so let’s take a look at it first. But first, let’s take a look at your readers.

Readers don’t love ads.  They don’t love banners.  They don’t love intrusive, flashing distractions and you’re not going to please them by placing ads on your page.  Thus you must take the advice Machiavelli offered his prince six centuries ago: “While it may not always be possible to be loved, it’s critical to avoid being hated.”  That advice, delivered in a political context, holds true in an advertising one.  It’s critical that if your ads do not attract readers to your site (and it’s a guarantee that readers are not coming to admire your banners), you should at least make an effort not to drive them away.

That’s a problem, because those ads which are most hated by readers are those which are most profitable to you: popups and java applets.

Popups we all know and hate.  They are ads that open a new browser, usually displaying the advertiser’s own site or an ad with a link to it.  They cause your page to load more slowly (especially if your reader is on a dialup connection) and they aggravate a reader who is not interested in the object advertised.  Multiple popups on a single page should be avoided at all costs – if you open 6 browser windows on your reader’s desktop, it’s virtually guaranteed that reader is not one you’ll see again.  Of course, most modern browsers and several specialty software products are available to banish popups altogether, and if your readers have them, your popup campaign will probably be strangled in its cradle.

The second hated ad-type is a java application that floats across the screen, necessitating that the reader close it before he can read your page.  It’s an aggravation (most of them scurry around the screen, making them difficult to close) and an aggravated reader is not one receptive to your content.  He may even decide your page is not worth reading before you have an opportunity to make a good impression. 

Avoid the temptation of featuring these kinds of ads. The reason these ads are more profitable than unobtrusive pay-per-click ads is that they are more effective – your reader must interact with the ad in order to get to your content.  But the reader’s reaction may be to avoid your content altogether.  In that case, you have lost both a reader and a potential customer