Monetization | The Habitation of Justice

No, I’m not dead yet

Lincoln Adams | October 1, 2008 @ 2:40 am

Just experiencing some brain fog, probably because I have a tumor eating out my cerebrals so I should be put out of my misery soon enough. :tongue: I keed, I keed… I hope. :wideeyed:

Ok, seriously, I was getting ready to write a catch-all post about the financial crisis, the presidential election and why Christians are morons (somehow I can always manage to work that theme into every post I write ), but I got caught up working on the backend of my blog to fix and install a few plugin upgrades, and I’ve also been experimenting with a few new ad networks too. The in-text advertising has been working out pretty well so far (these are the ads that popup when you hover your cursor over a link), though I had to keep an eye on the kind of ads showing up so I could email support a comprehensive list of advertisers I wanted blocked. I think I did a good enough job for now, but if you see any ads for improving *ahem* bedroom performance and pictures of boinkie doinkies illustrating said performance, do be a dear and let me know, mmmk?

Regardless, it might end up being replaced by an entirely different network anyway, one that would FINALLY allow me to block advertisers on my own (instead of begging support to do it for me), and it utilizes a different approach by indexing my entire site and analyzing my content to see what ads would best suit me. Can’t wait to try it out and see how it compares.

In the meantime I’ve also been looking for a third tier network to clean up the rest of my inventory. I have two networks now and basically what happens is, if there’s no available ad to deliver to my site on the first network, it then defaults to the second network, and if the second network doesn’t have an ad to serve, it defaults as well and delivers a public service announcement instead (which I don’t get paid for). In order to maximize my earnings I’d need to make sure I’m paid for every visitor hit to my site. So far I’m making money off of approximately 80% of my traffic, so I just need to find one more network that can monetize the remaining 20%. I’ve been testing out one possibility and… *ugh* :sick: It virtually made my site look like a teenybopper’s MySpace page. Seriously, the ads were just flat out embarrassing, and for this humility I was being paid maybe 6 cents for every 1000 hits I logged. :blink:

Ummm, no. Out you go sucky underpaying network, and please, never pollute my precious blog with your existence again. Yeesh.

I’ll just have to keep looking around, and if and once I do find a solution, that’s pretty much it as far as monetization goes. The only major project left would be to get enough traffic in to reach my goals, but that’s up to God now. :ohwell:

Tags: ads, advertisers, advertising, backend, blog, christian, Christians, earnings, experiment, God, making money, monetization, monetize, money, network, plugin, testing, traffic, upgrade
Categories: Blog Fog

( Print This Post | | 72 views )

5 Comments »

Making Sense of Adsense and Blogging

Lincoln Adams | June 20, 2007 @ 9:26 pm

For the first time since I started blogging many moons ago, I finally put up Google’s Adsense on my site. This I do, 4 years after its release, with the Internet now completely saturated with these types of ads everywhere you surf, during the worst advertising slump since 2000. I’m brilliant.

Oh well. I’m obviously not going to hold my breath waiting for the money to roll in, but I do think the process of learning how to place these ads on my blog has been a good learning experience for me. Some experts say bloggers should wait until they start drawing significant traffic before they start placing advertisements on their blogs. But because monetizing your blog involves so much more than simply slapping an ad in the header, I think it’s important to learn as much as you can early on, so by the time your site does generate respectable traffic (if it ever does), you’ll have already learned the most important aspects of what makes for successful online advertising, and how you can make it work for you.

Personally, I’m treating this as an experiment to see where it might lead. If the stats show people clicking on the ads despite the low number of traffic I get, that bodes very well for the future. On the other hand, if 6 months goes by without a single clickthrough, it’s either a sign that this particular ship has LONG since sailed, or that I need to try another approach. Regardless of what happens though, the bottom line is I’m never gonna know for sure unless I try. Success is usually a trial and error process, and I’m finding that I can learn a lot more through my mistakes than if I had signed up for a $2,000 seminar that offers little more than the common sense knowledge your mother should have already taught you.

The good news is that I’m venturing into an area where you don’t automatically have to be first to succeed, just one of the guys who makes it all the way to the finish line. Blogging is a marathon more than anything else, and most bloggers eventually either give up or burn out within a relatively short period of time. If blogging is something you think you can do blindfolded with one hand tied behind your back for the next 20 years, then the future definitely bodes well for you. Endurance is the name of the game, and very few people truly have it, especially when it comes to blogging. Even I burned out and stopped blogging altogether for almost a year, and I’m the kind of guy who loves to write.

Even doing what you love though can be a laborious pain at times, but then again, nothing worth having in this world is going to come easy. It’s usually a long and arduous process, but I’m confident those who believe the laborer is truly worthy of his hire will eventually reap the rewards they’ve worked so hard to obtain.

I only hope I’ll be one of them. :wideeyed:

Tags: ad streams, adsense, advertisements, advertising, blog, bloggers, blogging, blogs, bottom line, clickthrough, common sense, finish line, google, many moons, marathon, monetization, money, one of the guys, problogging, readers, sense knowledge, slump, traffic, trial and error
Categories: Blog Fog

( Print This Post | | 1,017 views )

4 Comments »

Thief Thief!

Lincoln Adams | May 28, 2007 @ 10:36 pm

One of the growing trends I’ve been observing in the blogosphere lately has been the arrival of social networking and Web 2.0 sites that all seem to have one thing in common: they’re all designed to encourage you to store your content on THEIR networks, rather than on your own site. Got photos you want to show the world? Upload them to Flickr. For videos, there’s YouTube. For music, there’s Last.FM, iLike, Garageband and so on. For those who like to write, network or blog, we have MySpace, LiveJournal, Xanga, Vox and blah blah blah, ad infinitum. And then of course we have the specialty sites like Twitter and Tumblr and blah blah blah ad infinitum. Good grief. While I admit that all these sites have their uses respectively, it also means you’re investing a whole lotta time and resources on just about everything except your own blog. People may not even come to your site anymore because your content is now available elsewhere, whether on a MySpace server or a YouTube channel or God only knows where else you’ve been going. Web 2.0 then has not only stolen your time and content, it’s taken your traffic too, and with it a chance for monetization. As a result your blog will eventually wither away until it becomes abandoned altogether, its distinctiveness completely assimilated into the Web 2.0 Collective. Resistance is futile.

Ok, I’m exaggerating, (somewhat), but I have noticed a pattern where bloggers no longer seem to attend to their own blogs with the fervor they once had in the past, and these social networking sites have a lot to do with it. Playing on all those networks can definitely suck up a lot of your time, so much that your creative and physical energy is usually completely exhausted by the time you’re ready to come back to your own blogging home. This actually started to happen with me as well when I noticed I was actually posting more often on StumbleUpon than I was here. Bad Lincoln!! Bad!!!!!

Somehow a balance needs to be struck between utilizing these networks while also maintaining the growth of your own blog, and I think the answer lies in part by observing Facebook’s recent move to allow third party companies onto their platform. For them it’s all about pulling the features and services these companies have into their own network, providing a central location for the very best these third party services have to offer.

In a way I hope that’s what I’m accomplishing here. While I belong to a variety of networks from StumbleUpon to Last.FM (and beyond), using widgets and other plugin technologies has enabled me to pull everything here in one place, rather than watch it all being pushed out there. Even my Flickr Album can be completely viewed natively without any requisite need to go to Flickr. That I think is the key. Follow the Facebook model, and use networks and services to help to promote YOUR blog, not the other way around. Resist the Borg! Fight the power! Viva La Blog Revolucion! :shades: