I’ve known for awhile that, if I really want to make a go at blogging, there needs to be some compensation involved. With this in mind I set out to see what could be done, as a new comer with few visitors, to set up some potential revenue streams. Once a blog gains some staying power in terms of both content and traffic it is easier to gain acceptance with some of the advertising networks with more stringent guidelines.
I see monetization on a blog as a multi-front effort that can be broken down into several areas.
- In Post – Here we have affiliate links to products that are mentioned
- Around the page – Contextual ads and buttons in the header, footer, sidebar and between posts.
- Mobile – ads targeted to mobile visitors
- In the Feed
- Email Subscription Ads
- Search Page Ads
I am not suggesting that anyone fill every available space with advertising. As a new publisher several doors were closed to me. I was rejected by both Yahoo Publisher’s Network and text-ads.
For Mobile ads there are two primary options. These are Admob and Adsense for mobile. Since I have a plugin that handles making my site mobile friendly and it has admob already integrated that is what I chose to use for my sites. I would be interested in hearing feedback on these two options.
For advertising in feeds there are also two options. I do not consider Adsense for feeds to be an option since it appears to be in a perpetual closed beta cycle. This leaves Pheedo, which focuses specifically on advertising in RSS feeds, and Bidvertiser, which serves contextual ads as it’s primary platform but is running feed based advertising as an open beta. I ran Pheedo on a blog with 11k subscribers for a few days and have not switched to bidvertiser. The switch to Bidvertiser was mainly due to the fact that they have a WordPress plugin. Pheedo required that I either burn the feed with them, or modify every one of my rss templates. I will see how Bidvertiser performs over the next week or so and then determine where to go from there.
Options that are currently being testing on this site:
- Adsense – [ad#adsense-ref-text]
- Amazon Associates
- Pheedo
- Bidvertiser
- Admob
- Feedblitz
- Google Custom Search w/Adsense
I chose to limit this list to category based and contextual advertising networks, with the exception of Amazon.
Plugins:
- All in One Adsene & YPN
- Ask Apache Firefox Adsense – This one is kind of cool. Only those that meet the guidelines for payment are actually shown the ad. So windows users in IE get the ad, Firefox users and Non-windows do not.
- Adsense manager – This does much more than adsense. It’s a good way to keep track of the ads that I’ve set up in adsense and then I can insert them where I choose.
- Bidvertiser ads for feeds (Download plugin after adding feed to publisher account)
- WordPress Mobile (Admob ads) This is the most reliable mobile plugin I’ve tried.
I’m still on the hunt for a great plugin for handling Amazon links. There are a few that are promising but I haven’t narrowed it down completely. I’m leaning strongly toward a combination of the following two plugins. AmazonSimpleAdmin and AVH Amazon (Wishlist Widget)
Note about ads in feeds: On initial inspection Pheedo seems better in many ways than Bidvertiser for inserting ads into rss feeds. The ads seem to appear more often and seem to be from higher quality advertisers. This subject will be revisited in more detail at some point in the near future.
Image by Tracy O
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