Steady income from ads and PPC
by Sapphire (April 4, 2006)
My affiliate sites are still struggling, at least partially because I’m not giving them the attention they need. But my 5 blogs that rent adspace and PPC are starting to bring in a steady $35 per month. That’s nothing - a utility bill - but all of them put together have something like 9,400 visitors per month. $35 for 9,400 visitors - raise the number of visitors to 25,000 combined per month, and the ratio comes out to $93 per month. But more visitors should mean higher ad prices, so really, it ought to be more than that.
Will it be enough to touch my $4,000/month goal? It’s possible. Some bloggers do that well. I haven’t even touched some of the major ad networks like BlogAds yet - they might be able to bring a lot more cash than I realize. Or maybe I need to dump ad networks altogether (eventually) and sell links and adspace straight up.
What I like about selling adspace is, it seems more controllable to me than affiliate products. Affiliate programs can screw you over, disappear, or change terms. So can ad networks, but in the worst case scenario, you can always just start managing your own ad sales. One of the main reason I’m running the ad networks is to see what performs on my sites, so when/if I start selling my own adspace, I can show people some stats for ads similar to theirs.
All that said, I think I need to work on my affiliate sites a bit. Bring them some traffic, give them a chance to get rolling. Can’t hurt to have more than one avenue of online income.
Posted in Ad Networks, Blogging, PPC
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August 23rd, 2006 at 6:02 pm
I think that affiliate programs are more profitable than selling adspace. At a penny or something a click it takes a long time to reach one 20 to 40 commission. Maybe you should try a combination. One thing I know is the more tightly you target the better you’ll do.
August 23rd, 2006 at 6:03 pm
Well, when you sell adspace, it’s not a penny per click here and there. With AdBrite on this site, I charge around $20/month for an ad. So that is like a decent affiliate commission.
But I have an affiliate site that makes commissions between about $50 and $150, when it makes them (which is rare, due to low traffic). So clearly, raising traffic to that site would be the quickest way to some decent income for me right now.
But the ad sales are paying for my hosting, domains fees and other expenses, so that’s something.