How To Make Money From Your Website Or Blog (Sorta)

When I first started messing around with websites the internet was a much nicer and easier place to make money than it is now.

My dream was to become rich by making a stupid site every time I thought of an idea– especially a really spammy idea– see my mesothelioma post for more on that.

You know those infomercials or websites where the guy has the Bentley and the house in Turks and Caicos and the stable of bad bitches? I wanted to do that and be famous as like “the slumlord of the internet”.

Easy payments.

3 simple steps. Etc.

I even had a swarthy sidekick.

Basically I just wanted to exploit trends and since my real job involved marketing and monetizing much bigger websites, I thought i’d do a much better job on my own sites.

So I bought the Domain WebSkum.com and decided I would put all my scummy sites in this Webskum network and start looking at property in T&C.

Ok. My dream never materialized. I’ve never made more than $1,000 a month on Google Adsense but all ads and revenue included have hit $1500 before. The swarthy sidekick is gone, and ironically works for a real ad network.

Now I’m here “giving away the store”.

Tip #1: Don’t Do Affiliate Ads

Unless you have a laser targeted site (An Affluent User Oriented Exotic Car Site– let’s say) with 100k monthly uniques and a custom affiliate deal with an honest and deep pocketed company, say Porsche, it’ll rarely back out vs. even something like Google Adsense.

Example:

Let’s say that Google Adsense averages $1.05 eCPM— this is my network’s current eCPM with Adsense.

For 100k unique visitors per month (at say, 2.5 pages per visitor, 3 Ads Per Page) you’ll make $750 from Google Adsense. Not great but… Do you think some Affiliate Manager is gonna be honest with you when his job is to improve his company’s Return On Investment? Doubt it.

Only do affiliate ads if you have a personal relationship with the affiliate manager, or if you have a giant NSFW site and you’re running adult friend finder or dating ads. I once managed a network of sites that made $50,000 one month from Adult Friend Finder ads. I’m sure those days are gone now but who knows.

Tip #2 Find A Vertical or Site Rep Network

Your site is about sports: there’s a network designed for you. Your site is about Food– there’s a network called Gourmet Ads. You’re better off going with a Vertical network since most of them don’t require contracts the way a site rep network does, like Gorilla Nation (I used to work there).

But, if your site is in a hot vertical you could see $10-15 CPM, so take your 750k impressions from earlier and your $750 is now $7,500 per month— not too shabby.

I know some webmasters who make $40-50k per month.

Tip #3 Sell Hardlinks Or Clicks

Just because you don’t have a ton of traffic doesn’t mean you can’t make money–it just depends on what your traffic is about. I’d rather have a site with 50k targeted monthly users than a babe site with 250k monthly users.

So if you have a small up and coming site on a certain topic other sites might be interested in buying text links from you, at $15-$200 each for their own SEO purposes. Let ‘em do it. Putting up a link takes 30 seconds. It’s easy money compared with the CPM game.

If you have a lot of clicky users, sell ads on a CPC basis.

Tip #4 Get In Touch With Corporate Sites In Your Space

If your blog is about Electronics or Gadgets find the marketing manager of an electronics online retailer and make yourself available to him.

Tell him for $200 a month you’ll jizz all over whatever crapcan product he has for sale, twice a month— a TomTom GPS Device For $155 Shipped?!! GET OUT OF MF-ING TOWN YOU JIVE ASS TURKEY!

A site called Woot.com did that on a large scale and took a serious investment from eBay and partered up with Yahoo shopping.

The guy who started that, yeah he’s probably living my dream in T&C with my babes and the whole nine.

Tip #5 Optimize Your Own Site’s Ads

There’s a lot of networks and optimizing products springing up that want to take over 100% of your inventory under the guise that they’ll “optimize” it for you (and take a cut).

Unless you optimize it yourself first you won’t know how much upside one of these services can bring you.

Do this:

1. Get a free Ad Manager (google ad manager works pretty well for a web based solution; OpenX is about the same for a hosted solution)

2. Sign up for a few networks.

Out of the 100s, here’s a couple of the best ones in my experience, to save you some time:

- Revenue Science

- Tribal Fusion

- Google Adsense (duh, I know)

- Burst Media

-CPX Interactive , if you have an account manager

3. Drill down the eCPMs by 48 or 72 hours (or a week, etc) and then enter those CPMs in the same Order Type in your Ad Manager. Then let it roll for another 3 days and update: Then sequence them thusly.

Request an account manager with all of these except Google. They will help add better campaigns to your bucket.

Or yanno, if you wanna take  over the world and have at least a dozen or so sites and look good in a Hawaiian shirt, email me.

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Reader's Comments

1. 

   Recently, there has been a good deal of investigation by the
   American FTC against blogs and website developers
   for not publishing their advertising profits, or potential
   connections with advertising networks.

   What are your ideas about how this could impact
   the blog community?

   Reply to this comment
2. intolihok on 04 Nov 2009 12:51 pm