CPC Advertising Is Lame For Most Bloggers
There are many other CPC programs, such as Yahoo! Publisher Network and MSN Adcenter. CPC advertising is one of the most popular methods of monetizing a blog, but CPC advertising is also one of the worst ways to monetize a new blog. If you have a new blog that only receives a few hundred visitors a day, you will not earn more than a few dollars a day.
When I first started blogging several months ago, I asked John Chow how many visitors I should average before I placed Adsense on my blog. What was his response? One-thousand pageviews per day. This is far more than most new bloggers receive even after several months of consistent blogging.
You must also remember that CPC ads are annoying and distracting to most readers. In the infancy stage of any blog, you don’t want to risk alienating new readers.
That is why you will not find any Adsense ads on my blog. I said goodbye to CPC advertising several months ago and hello to private advertising; since then I have made more money from my blog than I ever did from Adsense.
Private Advertising Is Where It’s At
Private advertising simply means working directly with your sponsors and advertisers to feature their companies or products on your blog. I receive all my advertising revenue through PayPal. There is no middle man, such as Google or Text-Link-Ads. You also set a fixed price for your advertising, so you never have to worry about being banned from Adsense or YPN for click-fraud.
Private advertisements are also much less visually intruding than other CPC ads. They blend right into the site’s design and layout. You will notice I have one 468×60 advertisement banner at the top of my blog, one 468×60 ad at the bottom, and ten links and another banner on the sidebar. At the current price of my ads, that equates to around $500 a month in private advertising sales. Obviously, I am not blogging to “make money online,” but it is nice to have some extra spending cash from my blog.
If I really wanted to go all out on monetizing my blog (which I don’t), then I would start doing more paid reviews, sponsored posts, and trying to marketing e-books and other affiliate products. My blog, instead, is a great place to network, meet, and help like-minded individuals.
The other great thing about private advertising is the even if your blog is relatively new and not wildly popular, if you offer private advertising, some company or individuals might sponsor your blog just because they especially enjoy your content and see promise in you as a blogger.
If you are a new and growing blog, think about yourself as an investment to any potential advertiser. They might be getting your private ads at great deal if you increase your readership significantly in that time period.
You Don’t Need An Ad Broker To Sell Ads
Many bloggers rely on the services of ad brokers like Text-Link-Ads and Adbrite to sell their blog’s advertising. The fact is that even though these brokers provide a great service by matching up the advertiser and publisher, they are not needed in order to sell your private advertising.
Every ad on my blog I have sold myself and not through a third party agent. The biggest benefit of selling ads myself is that I don’t have to split the ad sale with anyone else – I keep 100% of my ad sales!
If you really market your blog and it’s advertising, you will never need to work with a third party agent. All of my ads are sold out 95% of the time and I spend minimal time trying to sell my ads.
How Do You Start Selling Your Blog’s Advertising?
I wrote an article awhile back about How To Sell Your Blog’s Advertising. I recommend you read it, if you haven’t already.
It is actually quite simple to get started selling your blog’s advertising. The hard part for some people is to set their own prices, but I always believed in first selling below the competition and then slowly raising your rates once your blog starts to experience some growth, success, and a higher PageRank.
Conclusion
Hopefully, through this article and my previous article about how to sell your advertising, you’ll see that you don’t need Adsense, Text-Link-Ads, or any other third party to start monetizing your blog.
Even though Adsense doesn’t work well on relatively new blogs, it’s not completely bad for low traffic sites. Just in the past three months, I have had three sites that have made me over $3,000 from Adsense. That’s a story for a different post though.
My hope is that newer bloggers stay dedicated to blogging even if they aren’t earning very much money in the beginning. In my opinion, earnings is perhaps one of the least important ways of measuring a blog’s success.
Good article Nate! I agree with you, currently I am serving google ads, and making few dollars a day.. sometimes more.. sometimes less… maybe I should delete them all to..
I’ll have to go back and re-read your prior post. I started off using TLA but you make some great points.
I’ll need lots more traffic before people will want to buy featured links on my site!
Hey Nate, good post!
I feel the same way about Adsense, it seems that a blog needs massive amounts of traffic to make any money with them. I’m sure that the theme of the blog has a lot to do with it also. Bloggers and people who want to make money online are generally not interested in clicking Adsense ads IMHO.
Don
While private advertising is a great way to get more consistent results, having CPC ads till the time you actually get those advertisers on board is probably the only way to make some sort of income.
Also it depends on what you’re blogging about, the more distinctive your niche the more higher CPC you will get.
Don’t get me wrong, I make some OK money with private sales. Just not ready to say bye bye to CPC yet. 😉
I totally agree about ditching CPC and going with private advertising deals, although I’ve spent a lot more than “minimal” time trying to get advertisers. (But I see some good tips on that other post of yours, so maybe this will change 🙂 )
Again, private ads still need traffic, and most of the private deals still made with about 500-1000 uniques a day…
Affiliate sale however can bring some money on low traffic sites.
I agree with the Adsense not making money where Private Ad Sales will. I made most of my money from Private Ad Sales on my last blog, but I wouldn’t just give up on Adsense. I made about $60 in 4 months from Adsense, which isn’t much, but it is better than nothing.
I actually emailed sponsors of similar blogs to mine and got a few sponsors that way. I also found someone to buy my blog (who has since just sat on it and not changed a thing). You need to be aggressive when it comes to getting sponsors. I also had a sponsor email me and wanted to buy a link. After I put the first link up, I asked her if she had any of other companies interested in putting links on my site. She bought 2 more links.
Also, Text Link Ads needs to change their policy as they would not approve my previous blog, but I had a lot of offers for advertising. They could have made some money off of me.
Interesting comment, “at the bottom”. Maybe you should make a post about what is your best strategy to get private sponsor, i will definitely like to know more about getting private sponsor tips from you.
Very good post nate! I think that you can make a good amount of money from private advertising if you do it right and if it is reasonable. I will be trying this the next google PR update.
“Just in the past three months, I have had three sites that have made me over $3,000 from Adsense. That’s a story for a different post though.”
Please tell us about this later on, I’m interested.
I might save that story for the e-book. 😉
I recently closed a private advertising deal, and I am very happy about it
Great write up. I see some people are also starting to offer their own “reviewme” style reviews. I definitely think private is the way to go an am currently focusing on building up some respectable traffic before I consider it 🙂
I appreciate the higher customer service provided by private advertising. There’s a direct relationship with the owner of the blog and the advertiser. Better communication in that relationship also.
I’ve just taken advantage of TLA’s $100 discount coupon to place advertising on a few blogs, and sent my publishers introduction emails.
Two of them actually offered to do private deals for the following month.
As far as advertising on my site, I’ve been building up a list of sites I think would be interested in sponsoring me. Once my user base picks up I’ll be targetting them via email. Hopefully this method is effective.
Thanks for the info Nate, its definitely something to think about. Although I still think it would be pretty hard for a new blogger to start selling private adds especially without a broker, but I’m sure its possible. There’s also a lot of ways to make your adsense blend into our blog very nicely.
Great post anyway.
Simon
Hi,
I would like to know where can I find private advertisers? Those who are responsible?
I'm still trying to figure out the best way to determine how much to charge. One of my sites has about 225k pageviews/mo but I have no clue what to charge anyone. I've had advertising requests but never jumped at them before because of this…
Very nice article. I sometimes have people email me and ask what i charge but have no idea what to tell them.