Part Two on Making Money With Your Blog

Remember when I wrote this post about making money with your review blog last month?  And, then I said something like, “Next week, I’ll write more about….” (Note to self: do not make promises about new posts in the future).

Better late than never?

In this post I’d like to talk about how you can best make advertising money with your site.

So, remember a few of the terms from the last post?  Above the fold, CPC, CPM, affiliate, and impressions?  (if not, go back and read).  Those are important for this post.

To start an effective advertising program on your site, you need to first define your inventory.  Your inventory is the space that you are dedicating to ads.  There are standards for banner size that you should consider. For instance, I have some dedicated space in the shape of a leaderboard (top of the page banner), large rectangle (336×280), and two wide skyscrapers (160×600), but only the first two are above the fold.  Keep in mind that if you have a huge header on your site, you’ll have very limited above the fold space, and you may not be accepted to some networks.

Next, you’ll want to consider how you want to deliver your ads.  Some bloggers just want to put network code up on their site and then be done with it.  That’s totally fine, if that’s how you want to proceed.  However, if you want to sell your own ads (more work but more money), you may want to consider a free ad server.  The two most common ones are Openx and Doubleclick for Publishers.  I’ve used both, and have found Doubleclick for Publishers to be easier (but in no way easy – it can take a while to figure out).  In a future post (see how I’m not committing to a timeframe??), I’ll write about how to best use these ad servers.

Finally, if your networks pay on impressions, you’ll want to increase those.  You can break large posts into two pages (as I’ve done here), to double your impressions on one post.  You can also utilize plug-ins that offer up suggested other posts to encourage readers to stay on your site and read more of your content.

More on ad servers in a future post…