Monetizing your blog

We've discuss in which ways you can monetize your blog, and what the pro's and cons are of the different forms of monetization. Here's the full transcript:

Hello it’s another Tuesday and another Press This. We’re here this week with my friend Todd Garland who runs Buy/Sell Ads and basically makes me a lot of money. We’re going to talk about how you can make a lot of money. Thank you Todd for being here.

Thanks Joost.

Can you do a quick introduction of yourself, who you are and what you’ve done?

Sure thing, so my name is Todd Garland and I run Buy/Sell Ads as Joost said. Basically I created the site and manage the site day in and day out and help webmasters like Joost make some money from their site.

Yeah you’ve succeeded quite well in that. I used to hate selling ads and now I love pushing your around to sell them.

That’s the problem a lot of people have, they just don’t enjoy selling ads. I like to think of Buy/Sell Ads as we kind of do your dirty work. I’m glad it’s working for you.

Yeah it is. I wanted to talk to you about monetization because obviously you’ve been doing a lot of that. What is a good place for people to start to think about monetizing their…when should peoples start thinking about monetizing their blog? Should they do that straight away or should they build up a following first?

It is definitely important that before you try and create the master spreadsheet, figuring out how much money you’re going to make from selling ads in your blog, I think it’s important to have a little bit of experience first to be honest in building a successful website.

When I think of building a successful website, what I really think about is figuring out how to build a site that attracts visitors to come back to your site often. So these are quality sites exactly like your Joost where you’re publishing quality content, you’re engaging with your visitors and you’re creating this tremendous following.

So when you’re thinking about monetizing a blog, if you’ve created a community like that before and you’ve figured out how to really drive traffic to your site, I think that is when you break out the spreadsheet and figure out your monetization strategy. But if you’ve never done that before my advice would be to just go out there and create a site without trying to make any money off of it and just trying to capture some sort of audience. Try to create that meaningful content that will allow you to at some point monetize it and then worry about figuring out how you’re going to make money off of it.

Okay and now I’ve done all this. I built somewhat of a following, I get a couple of thousand page views a month let’s say, where should I start? What should be the first thing to put on and try to make money from?

Now I guess this kind of gets into which types of advertising you should be putting on your blog. At first, I think the true sign, let’s say for example you’re not creating a new site and you’ve already established one site and have sold ads. So you’re starting this new site, I think the first indicator that you can actually sell ads on your site is when an advertiser contacts you directly and says I would like to buy an ad on your site. At that point that is when you know you’ve got something you can sell.

Typically, at first, these will be banner ads. So despite what everybody says about display ads and banner ads, if they’re on a quality site and they’re quality ads targeting the right users on that site they’ll sell pretty well. I mean we’re not talking about millions of dollars here right. But we’re talking about a nice supplemental income. Or for some people their main source of income.

So I think the place to start is with banner ads. You can also start out with Google Adsense and to be honest I really don’t like Adsense. The reason why is just because of the way it looks, I think it doesn’t look good.

True it makes your blog, if you do it in a way you can actually make money off of it, it makes your blog look like an ad farm.

Yeah totally. So what is nice about Adsense though, what I will say after I just tried to trash Adsense is I will say Adsense is nice in the sense that it’s plug and play. So you can go out there and install their ad code and be making money the next day. Whereas, if you’re doing banner ads then you need to wait for someone to actually buy one. So sometimes Adsense is a good way to test the waters a little bit.

But in terms of becoming the main source of income for a site, I don’t know, it’s like having an Adsense on your site is like having a crappy banner ad. Like it just looks bad and it tells your users that you really don’t care about them. So that is kind of my stance on that.

I tend to agree. So Jethro is asking a good question in the chat room already. He’s asking I’ll start with banner ads, should I start with a flat rate or with CPM advertising?

Sure so CPM is I guess it is one of those terms in the industry that has been standard for years and years. It got its roots from the TV media world. The problem with CPM is it really isn't a great way to measure or to fix your rates for what I would consider a smaller sized publisher. So one that is making less than $5,000 a month off their site.

To be honest, I think flat rate is the best way to go because with flat rate you get to say okay I’ll give you this ad space for $50 a month, take it or leave it. If you get into like nickels and dimes when you’re saying okay it’s going to be a $1 CPM or 50 cent CPM or whatever then typically the ad buy on that type of situation would be like for a week or for a smaller test period. But with a flat rate you get to find those advertisers who are willing to make that 30 day commitment upfront. They end up being much more serious.

Yeah I was doing flat rate even before I joined Buy/Sell Ads. I was doing pretty well but it cost me a lot of time to sell those ads. For those people not lucky enough to be accepted by Buy/Sell Ads as a publisher what would be your advice to sell those things? Should you promote them openly on the website, like we sell ads here and these are the rates? Or should you not give out those rates immediately?

I think it’s important to be transparent about your rates. There is nothing I hate more than being part of an enterprise level sales process where there is no price list and you feel like you might be getting worked over on the price. So when it comes to selling ads on a fixed monthly rate on a smaller site, I think it’s really important to just say on your site this 125 x 125 is $50 a month.

If you’re not part of an ad network to sell those ads you can use something just as simple as PayPal subscriptions or something like that, if you have PayPal where you are.

Yeah and if you don’t you’ll probably not have a lot of people buy banner ads from you. You mentioned one of the magic words there again, 125 x 125 that is one of the standard ad sizes and probably the most popular one on blogs together with the 300 x 300 if I’m correct.

Yeah it’s 300 x 250 exactly that larger size.

Yeah so what sizes would you recommend for people? The 300 x 250 has always looked a bit obtrusive by me and a bit large but perhaps that’s what the advertisers want.

Yeah, I’m not going to lie and I have to tell you the 300 x 250 is my absolute favorite size. The reason why it’s my favorite size is because advertisers love it. It is not like the new IAB ad sizes that came out that are like half the size of the page. So it’s not totally in your face. I agree it’s a little bit in your face but that size ad unit tends to perform really well for advertisers. The other nice thing is we get to have some rotation in there too. So we’ll sell multiple ads, we’ll sell to multiple advertisers for that one spot.

My next favorite after that would be the 125 x 125 and the reason why I like the 125 is that it’s not only a good branding play because it’s always visible but it also gets a good enough click through rate to typically justify the spend on it. I know at Yoast.com I mean we continuously sell out your 125’s because they fulfill that need for the advertiser both the branding aspect and the click through.

Joost there is a great question in the chat that I just saw. It was from Jethro once again. He said personally I use the OIO Publisher plug in to manage my advertising. I set it up and forget about it. All I have to do is approve ads when they’re purchased and I keep all the money. Why would I use Buy/Sell Ads?

Is it okay if I answer that question?

Yeah absolutely go ahead.

With OIO Publisher the difference between OIO Publisher and Buy/Sell Ads is that with Buy/Sell Ads you’re getting that network value as well. What that means is not only are people finding your website and finding they should advertise on your website directly on your website, they’re also finding that through us.

I don’t necessarily know if we put it out there and brag about it much on our site but we’re sending proposals out every day, sending recommendations and stuff like that. So whenever an advertiser comes to us they don’t always know what they need to do. They’re not always going to know that they need to advertise on your site specifically. And Buy/Sell Ads is a place where we kind of bring that together for the advertiser and bring them to specific publishers.

Now I’m speaking as Buy/Sell Ads here but in reality that’s very true of most ad networks out there. So that is what you get that added value from that ad network.

It has helped me get larger advertisers to because they don’t normally hop around to all the small blogs to see where they can advertise. So advertisers like Mail Chimp and like that only came to me after you guys started doing my advertising. So it is absolutely true and I can vouch for that.

One of the funny things I see is if I look at the statistic for the advertisers that some of them get insanely or in my opinion pretty good click through rates on 125 x 125 banner ads, where I’m expecting people to get like a 0.0 or 1%. The funny thing is the ones with the best rates always cancel.

it’s funny how that works out. It’s always interesting because I guess another value add of ad networks is they tend to help manage advertisers well. So whenever I see cancellations go through I check out the ad and see what happened and sometimes I’ll see this click through rates that are so awesome I can’t believe the person is cancelling. So sometimes it is also important to educate the advertisers on the other end as well. But yeah it is definitely interesting some of the advertisers who do end up cancelling.

We went by this pretty quickly but Buy/Sell Ads actually does allow your site or requires your site to be approved by you guys before you take a site into the network right?

Yeah we try to keep the quality high. That doesn’t mean if you were to go through our inventory right now you wouldn’t find some sites that are questionable. We’re always cleaning out inventory from past mistakes shall we say. So yeah one of the things we try to do is keep the quality high and we approve each and every website before it can list with us.

Yeah and so when, to complete Jethro’s range of questions, what is your take of publishing deals? My current rate is, let me think, I don’t even know what my current rate is…

25% it is 25% across the board for everybody.

Yeah so in my case it means of the $300 an ad costs each month you get $75.

Yeah if you had an ad for $100, you would get $75 from that. without trying to sell Buy/Sell Ads too much a couple of things I will say is within that the credit card fees are included so that goes right down to 20% right away. Credit card fees can be anywhere between 3.5 and like 6.5% especially through PayPal.

So for people they have to decide whether that 20% is worth it. What they get with that 20% from Buy/Sell Ads or any other ad network is us dealing with your problems. I mean you don’t want to be arguing with an advertiser back and forth about pricing, negotiating on every single sale, and all that. So for some people it’s worth it and others it’s not and that’s kind of how we cut it.

Yeah absolutely. People are asking how they should set these rates because that’s probably the hardest thing in advertising. How do you set a rate for a blog like mine?

A lot of times we basically look at other sites that are kind of next to yours, whether it be in Buy/Sell Ads or elsewhere and figure out what advertisers are willing to pay for those sites. So a lot of it can be experimentation. I’m not going to lie. That is why with Yoast recently we changed the price, we raised the price because we were consistently selling out and we said okay so these advertisers are willing to pay “x” let’s see if they’ll pay a little bit more.

So there is a little bit of science in there because you try and factor in the number of impressions, the number of RSS subscribers, and kind of the popularity of the blog. Some of it is some guess work, some trial and error in finding that sweet spot of a price that works for the advertisers.

Yeah it’s a combination of branding and page views of course because some sites people just want to be associated with the brand that’s there.

Yeah exactly.

Whether that is actual value or not it’s not something I’m going to discuss right now. It is a difference because I see people with way more page views then my blogs that sell for way less.

Yeah exactly. You’ll find that’s very true with a lot of the higher profile sites I would call them in our network. They can definitely command higher pricing because of the value of their brand. For example, I would consider Yoast.com a brand right so you can command that higher price.

So do people need a certain and that’s the last question I’m going to ask you about Buy/Sell Ads before we go…but do people need to have a certain number of page views each month?

In all our public material we say 100,000 impressions but that’s not actually true. What we look for are sites that have a following, sites that are producing quality content, and they’re not manufactured page views. Sites that have some sort of community that we can help them sell ads to.

It makes it a lot easier. We have a community we can sell ads to here as well. So we’re going to run some ads to pay the bills here.

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We’re back with Todd and Buy/Sell Ads and we’re talking about blog monetization. One of the other things I was wondering and what you see happening more often these days is RSS ads. Is that something you’ve experimented with?

To be honest, RSS the tracking is so difficult to do in RSS ads that the way we were thinking of dealing with RSS was just to make it similar to our fixed 30 day rates so they would be more like sponsorships. That being said…

That does make a lot of sense. It is even easier to boost your RSS readers then to boost your page views it seems.

Yeah. Since RSS is consumed in so many different formats I think for a lot of ad networks it’s a tricky thing to sell and measure and justify. But we’ll hopefully be there soon.

Have you ever experimented with displaying banners or something like that in RSS feeds?

Me personally no in terms of Buy/Sell Ads. But I noticed in my own personal daily life and the feeds I read I definitely do see some ads here and there. The one that comes to mind would be the Tech Crunch RSS feed there are always some large ads there. I think those ads do really well for the advertisers there.

I’m just guessing but just because of the fact that they’re so visible and prominent no matter how I consume my Tech Crunch RSS feed.

They’re just always there and nobody bothers to strip them out, yeah. So we have RSS ads, you have basic banner ads, stuff like Adsense. Now the obvious other way of monetizing your blog is doing affiliate marketing and that is another trade. But do you think that doing both affiliate marketing and banner advertising at the same time is a good idea? Or is that something you should be a bit weary about?

Yeah there is definitely a trade off involved. If you’re selling banner ads on your site and you’re also integrating some affiliate ads into that you do run the risk that your affiliate ads will start to cannibalize your direct ads, your direct banner ads you’re selling. So that is definitely something to take into consideration if you’re adding affiliate ads to your site.

I think affiliate advertising can work out better if you’re figuring out how to do something more custom and not just using an affiliate banner.

Do you think you can make more money doing affiliate then doing banner advertising?

I can’t answer that question just by saying yes or no but I’m sure if you’re clever about it and creative with the way you’re marketing those affiliate ads that you can make quite a bit of money.

A good example I would use would be for example let’s say on your blog you include a photo on every blog post at the top. If below that photo you join one of the stock photo resellers, like Photolio.com, and said this photo provided by Photolio.com and that was an affiliate link I bet you would do better with something like that then if you had a Photolio banner in your sidebar. I think it’s about getting creative.

And to show that actual value is related to what you’re trying to do there. Another question you said you got a lot which I find quite interesting is should I give banner ads to people on mobile devices? You see more and more using special WordPress themes for I-Phones and stuff like that. Should they put ads into that? Or are you a better publisher if you don’t and just give them a faster loading website?

So here is the thing, any time you’re selling an ad on your website or your website that is displayed for mobile or any time you’re selling an ad anywhere in this world it is going to distract someone. That’s the point. It’s supposed to get in the way, hopefully in a more polite manner but it’s supposed to be seen that’s the purpose.

So if I were going to a website on my mobile device and saw a big ad at the top if it was an ad relevant to that content maybe I wouldn’t mind it so much. But as a publisher think about how you can monetize that. There are certain things you know about this user on your site (a) they’re using a mobile device, most likely an I-Phone.

Yeah in my case almost always an I-Phone.

Yeah and (b) they must be somewhat tuned into your site and content because they’re going to it from their mobile device. So that is a valuable user in my mind. I guess the answer is yeah you can probably make decent money off that.

Funny enough I got an email from this company today called and I’m not trying to endorse them here or put an ad out for them, it’s called Mobify.Me.

Yeah I heard of these guys before.

I was checking out their site and what they do is really cool. They help you gain more intelligence on your mobile visitors and help you put your content in a format this is much more easily consumed. Obviously, something that is going to go along with that eventually is that advertisers will be able to target specific users based on their phone.

For example, let’s say you’re a Blackberry app or I-Phone app and you can put an ad up there for your I-Phone app for someone already on an I-Phone that’s awesome that’s pretty good targeting. I definitely think you’ll start to see more mobile ads very, very soon. Whether it’s from us or someone else, I’m pretty sure you’ll start to see blogs integrate mobile ads very soon.

Yeah I’m curious and when you raised the question I was like hmm this might actually be a good idea. I know I’ve got quite a few people visiting my website, especially on their I-Phones. Yeah it could be a cool way to monetize but, of course, you’ll need quite a few page views to actually make money off of it.

Definitely.

So it’s probably something that is only there for the bigger sties. So the chat room is asking where people should place their ads on their site. Mine are in my sidebar obviously which is what a lot of people are doing. But what would be the most ideal spot for a banner ad?

There are a lot of typical places where you’ll see a banner ad. Like you said, one place is going to be in the sidebar. The other would be in the header of the site. To be honest, I don’t typically try and get publisher to put ads in their headers just because it’s one of those sections of the site is ignored more often than not.

Another popular spot would be in the actual post right below the title. I know a lot of people do take issue with that ad location because it is a lot more obtrusive then the ones in the sidebar. But I always say if there is a quality ad there that relates to your site it is not the end of the world. That location does fetch a decent amount of money for a lot of publishers.

So if I wanted to make more money out of Yoast.com where should I be putting my ad?

All right I’m going to Yoast.com right now and so I would put one in there below the title, in post below title is what we call it. But keep in mind it’s not for everybody. Like not everybody wants an ad there no their site. I think what is important is any time you put an ad on your site or put an ad location on your site you really need to ask yourself if you want your visitors to see an ad there. That is what is most important at the end of the day that you’re keeping those visitors loyal and coming back to the site.

Yeah and in my case I would probably lead to more RSS subscriptions which is what I actually want, it might be a good idea.

The other place Joost is you should tattoo an ad on your arm in the picture on the top right there.

Yeah that would be a real expensive ad placement, I can tell you that.

Another thing that is interesting is like you see the background on your site Joost with the nice field and the trees and windmill in the background?

Yeah.

I think it would be cool to if let’s say there was a product in that background so it was integrated well so that it wasn’t like oh this is the Toyota Rav 4 here or whatever, but if you had some sort of product integrated into that illustration nicely that wasn’t too obtrusive that could be interesting as well. That would be more of a sponsorship then an ad though.

Yeah I thought about that but nobody has offered to give me (32:50 – inaudible) yet to do that. So that is a bit of an issue. We’re going to pay some more bills here and then we’ll get back and take more questions.

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So we’re back and another great question from Jethro was what do you think of stuff like Pay for Post or Paid Links?

We all know that text links that is sold for SEO is bad news. The last thing you want to do is have your site penalized by one of the engines. That being said I do think its okay to sell text links as long as when you’re selling them you’re deciding on an advertiser by advertiser basis whether or not that link should be followed.

I don’t think you should tell anyone you sold that.

Yeah you definitely can’t say you sold it. If it’s a product you would actually recommend I don’t think it’s the end of the world. I know that opinion will be it’s easy to debate. There is endless debate on paid links.

Yeah I usually tell people don’t do it because it makes your life a lot easier to not do it. Yeah it’s a hard decision all the time. Don’t do it for anything like what is called text link ads or something like that because that is an easy way to get your site banned at the moment.

Yeah most definitely. When it comes to something like Pay for Posts it is kind of the same territory right. I think a sponsored post might even be going a bit further then a text link because a text link doesn’t really distract or disturb your visitors. A paid post is kind of like a bigger interruption.

I don’t even have a problem with sponsored posts per se as long as people do them for products they like.

Yeah I agree. I don’t want to sound like I’m flip flopping here but it is kind of the same as text links. If it’s a quality company that you actually use or you would want to use or something you like then I don’t think it’s the end of the world for sure.

Okay. Smashing Magazine does a lot with Pay Post, aren’t you guys doing Smashing as well or is that not you?

No they’re not through us. But if they do paid posts they do a very good job disguising it. To be honest I haven’t noticed one on their site. So that’s cool.

I don’t think they did. We’ll ask Vitaly next week, he’ll be a guest next week so that is a nice plug for our show next week, which is going to be by the way next week at 2 p.m. Pacific and 5 p.m. Eastern and 11 p.m. Central European time.

Now I’m going through the questions because I can see we’ve still missed a few. There is a lot of spots you can buy ads where it’s applications and not blogs. Does it really matter what kind of content you have to sell advertising around?

No I don’t think so. I mean as long as there is quality content there is a visitor there on the other side you can monetize. If a user is engaged in your site, goes to your site often you have quality stuff there then chances are you can monetize them. It is click through rates are going to be different and vary depending on the type of content of the site, etc. but we don’t really have a oh we do it for applications and not for blogs. If anything I think you’ll find more blogs then web apps and Buy/Sell Ads for sure.

How important is it that you…actually in Buy/Sell Ads you have the option to refuse certain advertisers right?

Yes.

How important is that?

I think it’s really important. I think it’s important that the ads on your site fit in well with the site. I think it’s important that they would be appealing to your users. I think it is just about having relevant ads there right. You’ll see a big difference when you’re visiting a site that has relevant ads versus one that doesn’t have relevant ads, a big, big difference. It’s a noticeable difference.

When you have ads that actually fit in with your site and are right for your users those ads can sometimes actually add value to your site believe it or not. I know a lot of people would argue with me on that but it’s true. If you’ve got an ad for Mail Chimp like you do Joost on your site, I think that ad adds value to your site because they’re a quality company.

Oh I do too. I even think when we had this discussion I think 2 episodes back with Brent Csutoras who is a social media expert, he said like okay sometimes these ads actually help you look like a decent website.

Totally.

So yeah I do agree with that as long as you get the good ads and not the crappy badly designed banner ads. The good thing is in the WordPress and design communities where you are mostly as well, I think, the ads are usually pretty good looking.

Yeah we definitely have some designers designing ads in our network that are less talented then others but for the most part they’re pretty good ads.

Would you say that it helps to get a well designed ad?

Yeah especially in the web design and development niche that we’re in totally. If the ad has a sweet design and then you click through and go to the site and it has a sweet design I think designers especially are much more likely to use your product.

That’s why we all have Apples right?

Yeah, I mean I’m definitely guilty of that. When I’m choosing whether to use Web app A or Web app B to be honest if the features are comparable I’m going to go with the sweeter interface, the sweeter design just because it’s more fun to use.

Yeah absolutely. So Todd it’s been a real pleasure to have you on.

Thanks for having me, I really appreciated it and I had fun.

Okay great. We’ll talk more in the future I guess and at one point we’ll have to bring you back on. So I said next week we’ll have Vitaly Friedman and he runs together with a couple of other guys Smashing magazine. We’ll be talking to him about how to smash WordPress into bits and pieces. So be there next week at 2 p.m. Pacific, 5 p.m. Eastern and thanks for listening, bye-bye.