A number of Posties at the Pay Per Post Forum began discussing whether or not blogs can make money using Google ads. I think the answer is: It depends on your topic. But, for the majority of blogs the answer is no. In the long run, you will want to use a different advertising method to make money. (In the short run, you should run AdSense, but I’ll discuss that elsewhere.)
I think there are many reasons google ads aren’t great on areal blog. You can read advise about ad placement, ad color yada, yada, yada. But placement is not the main problem. The problem is niche: Most blogs just don’t have a niche focused on any marketable consumer product or service. And contextual ads — like google or Kontera- work best on web pages that are connected to a marketable consumer product or service.
Let’s look at how content of a typical personal blog comes into being: Something like the Virginia Tech shooting occurs. You blog your reaction. Candidates are gearing up for the Presidential primaries. You discuss that. You are aware of a fierce local school board election: you blog that.
Say it’s a great blog and you even get loads of visits!
So, you decide to monetize and install Google Adsense. Google tries to analyze your text. Based on the text, it’s algorithm tries to guess what products or services your readers might want to buy. Shoes? Mortgages? Diet products? Credit cards? Advice on SEO? What? Sure your readers may fall in some niche- but is it a ‘niche’ from a marketing point of view?
Unless a particular blog gets a huge amount of traffic, and they just really love to click on irrelevant ads, your blog not going to make any money on Google AdSense ads. And, if you get a lot of traffic, you’d be better off with something other than Adsense.
Now, there are blogs that can make money from Google ads. Do you want examples? Visit Technorati Popular Blogs and click on a few blog links, you’ll see the gadget, or SEO oriented blogs do run some google ads. Look at the ads that appear? The AdSense match the blog content and advertise high priced gadgets or advice on how to make money blogging. Some advertiser, somewhere, is willing to pay for those clicks.
But I can show you blogs that would not make money with adsense. Visit these popular, high traffic political blogs: Huffington, Instapundit or Daily Kos. You don’t see google ads, do you? Yes, those blogs have niche audiences, but they are political niches. Google can figure out if the visitors are mostly Democrats or Republicans, but they can’t figure out what their readers might want to buy today.
When you see no Google ads on those blogs you can be pretty sure that popular political blogs have analyzed their revenue streams and figured out they do better running non-contextual ads.
So, what about your blog: Google ads are likely to work well if you have an identifiable niche that is somehow associated with a consumer goods or service sold on the internet and you stick to that topic fairly consistently. How do I know this? I make $200-$600 a month with google ads on a knitting blog. (Knitters knit in the winter and I make more money in the winter.)
Now, I don’t advise you blog about knitting. Knitting is not a high margin topic, and advertisers won’t pay much per click. I blog about knitting because it’s my hobby. To make halfway decent Google bucks, I watch my google ads. If the Google context ads straying from knitting, I make sure the next blog entry uses plenty of knitting vocabulary. (Knit, purl, yarn over, psso. You find a knitting term; I’ll mention it. Google is pretty smart. It knows certain terms translate to “knitting or hobby”. )
So, how do you use my technique to make a little money on your hobby site? Or on a niche topic you want to blog about? Well, first pick one that is somehow associated with marketable products. Ycould also make some money on a blog about pets — because there are online pet products stores. You could make more blogging about higher end consumer products: cameras, cars, fashion, dieting or fitness. You could make money blogging about mortgages, credit cards of financial products. All of these niches are associated with marketable products that sell on line.
Next, to make money on these topics, you need to focus on them, and say something relatively interesting about that specific topic. You can stray a little.
But if you stray a lot, and your blog is about ” family, kids, politics, life, the universe and everything”: Google ads will not be your best choice for ads. To make money on that type of blog, you will need to build loads and loads of traffic, and then find suitable non-contextual ads like Blogads, briteads, textlink ads or something similar.
I do have a niche that I stick to, in my “selfhelpforibs.com” (ForMyTummy.com) blog. This is a niche that is crowded with offers of services that use Google AdWords.
Sometimes the topics stray, but I use a WordPress plugin called Another WordPress Meta Plugin. This plugin creates Meta Description and Meta Contents fields below the editing space for a post.
While it’s mostly for SEO, I believe it helps pull in the context ads as well. You rightly point out the importance of categories for tagging.
I have been relying on the META tags, but will add categories for IBS to all my posts, and see what happens.
Thanks for the tips.
Good article, it is difficult to know how to monetize WordPress in the best and most effective way. I have tried several plugins and different themes and added Clickbank too, but each had their own limitations.
You’re dead right about the ‘niche’ though, it does have to focussed and the previous post is a good example of that.
I’ve just written a review about monetizing WordPress effectively including Clickbank too using the most up-to-date themes and plugins available entitled Google Adsense on WordPress and it’s definitely worth a read, it may help someone along, it has me…and I wrote it!
Jim
Great article…..and great insight into what possibly works.this is great to see that people are still making money from blogs. the famous blogs are big business (anyone remember the purchase of Weblogs Inc by AOL in 2005). Reason for AOL buying Weblogs INC was to create a huge online presence for AOL.
how to earn extra money from home is getting harder and harder though, blogging was one avenue i believe early on but not now.