The great blog experiment

I haven't done blogging for a while - the last time I tried, two years ago, I blogged sporadically for a few months - and earned $1.50 with Adsense.

I'm going to try entering the blog market again, and this will be a serious attempt. Here's what I'm going to do to monetize my blog:

1. Pay Per Post/Smorty​

These pay per post schemes will allow me to monetize my site a bit - earning some revenue while creating new content. I can use this to subsidize paid posters if I need to.

2. Text Link Ads​

I'm going to try out Text Link Ads, as I've heard many things about them. I'm not sure how effective/money-making they will be, but I'll try them out.

3. Google Adsense​

Of course, blogs are never monetized without the classic Google Adsense. Earlier, two years ago, I got around $0.35 CPM with sidebar links below the fold. After I get some traffic, I will try putting some units above-the-fold or in posts to attract more clicks, and thus, more revenue.



I've decided to try this experiment on Krazyness.net - a blog I had when I was running Krazy Letter. I'm going to broaden the focus of it to a "blog by a teen internet marketer" or something like that.

• Google has 96 pages indexed. PR is 0.
• Adsense showed 45 ad views last month, with a revenue of 0.
• Yahoo has 63 pages indexed.
• Alexa site rank is 11,730,824.
• AWStats reported 500 uniques and 1500 page views last month, but looking at the Adsense stats, and because 1/2 of the page views were from Estonia, I believe that they were mostly bots/etc.

I'll post up results as time goes. I have AP testing for the next two weeks, so I won't be aggressively pursuing my goal. However, I'm hoping to at least 100x my income by the end of summer (100 x 0 = 0!)
Anyways, I think a realistic goal would be around $3-5/day within a few months with my blog.

Feel free to send suggestions my way!

(I've posted up on Krazyness a marketing strategy for the site - I'm only going to promote Krazyness via free methods.)

(I also posted up this on a thread at Teen Business Forum - I'll update both DP and TBF)

 

sweet stuff

remember to advertise!!!

stumbleupon etc is good for an initial boost in traffic.

 

I am using Text Link Ads, and I am very satisfied with them.

Good luck with your experiment.

Jens

 

Cool, you have the same income as me!

I'll be checking in to see how your "experiment" goes.

 

You're doing it all backwards. You need to focus on building the blog and driving traffic first before anything. After you get the traffic, then you can work on advertising. If you have a blog with no traffic, you're not going to make any money, you'll get frustrated and quit again.

At your stage I would not even be thinking about advertising at all. I would be thinking about driving traffic and link building.

 

I will be focusing on building the blog *and* driving traffic to the site. However, last time I posted once or twice a week - something that would probably kill a blog. I got around 30 uniques/day, but not much money came out of it (which you can see is partially the ad's fault, because they're waay below the fold).

I'm going to use social bookmarking, trackbacks, comments, forums, all free methods of promotion to promote my blog. I've mentioned it a bit in my blog post
http://www.krazyness.net/2008/05/04/the-great-kraziness-experiment/

But I still take your point in hand. I think I did work more on the monetization side than the promotion side of things - Thanks for your comment ^_^

 

Sorry for the bump, but I coudn't edit my previous posts.

http://labnol.blogspot.com/2007/08/google-bans-pr-7-website-for-selling.html

I heard from a friend on TeenBusinessForum that Google will ban/derank sites using Text-Link-Ads. Is this true?

Same with PayPerPost.

http://community.izea.com/blog/2007/11/google-goes-aft.html

If this is true, I may have to think of a change in strategy.