I didn't realize someone could actually make money from blogging until I landed on this site! Some great resources and very knowledgeable people. My expertise is in real estate and I've been trying to monetize my blog. Here are a few stats: Unique Visitors a month: 50,000 Page Views: 160,000 The best source of income so far has been Adbrite. I had Google but unfortunately they banned my account. I had information regarding the click fraud (probably those pro housing) and was unable to be reinstated. I've installed the Amazon contextual system and that seems to bring in a trickle of money. I've also added Adengage and Chikita just today (not sure how well these will do). I was hoping to get some tips from the seasoned professionals since this isn't my expertise but I would love to learn. I've been scouring this forum for a few weeks and finally had the guts to post. I know you can't post live links on here until after a week but my website is www.doctorhousingbubble.com or http://drhousingbubble.blogspot.com - you can Google Dr. Housing Bubble and I should come up first. Thanks! Dr. Housing Bubble
Fox Lore, Thanks for the response. I applied for YPN twice but never heard back from them. Not sure what is going with that (maybe I don't qualify). I tried Burst Media and they need your site to be hosted on your own domain. I'm just looking for tips on improving ad revenue - like I'm sure many on here. I tried clickbank (not with good results), a few other affiliates with not good results, and I was going to try Text-link-ads but it seems they are down with Blogger this week? (anyone have any luck with Text-link-ads) I've also used a few pay-per-blog services and they are okay. So many programs so little time! Cheers, Dr. Housing Bubble
stubsy, Writing good content would be the number one requisite. I've been blogging for 6 months and now that the housing bubble is going south, I'm getting a lot of organic hits from Google (I have over 87 articles, some 3 pages long) and a PR4. Come to think of it, I've written enough to fill a book! Either way, I'm not very savvy in terms of seeing the potential ad revenue from the site and trying to get ideas of which programs to best use. You have a good site too and I'm wondering which of your revenue streams are best? I want to have a balance of good content for my readership with ads that are geared toward them. Obviously Friendfinder wasn't hot with financially savvy readers! The readers on the blog are very intelligent and financially conscious. Mostly it takes 1 to 3 hours per article since i also research the information and I'm thinking generating revenue is a fair trade. Dr. Housing Bubble
I wouldn't let that stop me..keep trying until they do approved your site. If google approved you than yahoo will eventually do the same.
Sounds like good advice, I'll do that. Heck, they approved a housing site from a person $2.2 million in debt - well he was $2.2 million in debt until they foreclosed on all his homes. He was able to get that much with a $35,000 a year income. I'll let YPN know about that small little caveat!
I've removed all ads on the site and upgraded to the new blogger template. I'm more concerned about the content and non-contextual ads where making some users not come back. In the end, you need to produce a product the market place wants. I'm going to try to add text links and private ads. This way I can focus on the pure content of the site. The good thing is that having 90 articles and many being multiple pages long, Google is kicking a lot of organic traffic from folks in markets where housing prices are going down. It'll be an interesting year. We'll see how the private ad spots go. I think the price is fair for a site with 50,000 unique visitors a month and about 150,000 pageviews. Cheers, Dr. Housing Bubble
Thanks. 2007 and 2008 will be very interesting years for housing. Expect more mainstream media outlets covering the housing downturn. What do you think of the new site?
You should forget about using ads like google adsense and YPN, and sell your ads directly to house brokers in the area you blog about. If your 50k visitors per month comes from the same place, get a lit of the house brokers of that region, call them, and sell your spots that way. Thats what I do with all my regional websites, and I get 10 times more money that way. Steve
Great idea. I'll put together a list and contact folks in the local area. This definitely seems like a better route to go. I've added a spot for sponsors this week as well so we'll see how that goes. I'm charging $25 per link for one month? Do you think this is fairly priced? Enjoy the holiday weekend.