A few days ago, Dave posted about a question that’s on a lot of peoples’ minds: when is the best time to monetize my blog? The problem is, if you ask 1000 different webmasters this question, you’re liable to get 1000 different answers… but based on the comments people were making, I think this is an issue which warrants further discussion.
The main reason Dave and I are against putting up ads early in a site’s lifespan is because it can easily dampen your growth: if 100 people visit your site and 25 of them like it enough to come back, how many loaded up the site and left immediately because your site looked like a spam site? Once you’re established, then a few people leaving isn’t a big deal… but at the start you need as much traffic as you can get!!!
Ultimately, I think you need to ask yourself some tough questions:
1. If you put ads up, how much will you earn?
If you have only a few thousand visitors a month, then your earnings could be as low as $10-$15 a month. Sure, you can work out a revenue mix which would pay out more, but then you also have to put up a lot of ads which increases the damage done to your growth rates.
A good formula would be to assume low numbers like 3% CTR on adsense ads, and a 5 cent payout on each click. As far as we can tell, people will accept ads from an established site or an already successful person more than from a new blog run by a newbie blogger - that’s why the A-lister blogs can get away with posting Reviewme ads almost every day, while adding tons of adsense and affiliate ads to boot, yet still grow.
2. What would the money be used for?
After you’ve figured out a rough idea of what you could expect to earn, you seriously need to ask yourself how badly you need the money - if it’s just a few bucks a month, then you should wait by default, but if the number is fairly meaningful like $100+, then you need to do some soul searching and figure out where the money will go. If you’re planning on using the money on a night out with your buddies, then you should hold off for more traffic - but if you can use that money to enhance your blog through a new design or advertising, then it may not be a bad idea to put ads up earlier.
3. How many will ads hurt your site?
For the most part, putting up ads too early is like robbing Peter to pay Paul, so you really need to run some numbers. If you have an estimate on the high and low end of how much money you should earn, figure out how much your site is growing now and roughly where it should be in 3 months, 6 months, etc., and figure out how much you could be earning then. To cap it off, run some more numbers and figure out how much longer it would take you to grow to those levels if your growth slowed by 15%, 25%,35% and even 50%.
If the lower percentages don’t hurt too much, then it may be time to do some experimentation and put up a single ad unit or affiliate product, and just see what kind of earnings come out of it. If you put up an adsense block and get .25 cent clicks, then you can get a better feel for what your site can earn with a full rollout.
Ultimately, the choice is yours. My personal choice would be to wait until your site has reached critical mass (growing steadily without advertising or promotion) before rolling out advertising unless you absolutely have to.
With our site, we grew around 200% in April - but we still have a way to go. If the growth continues, we should have a good idea of when to monetize by the end of May, but even then I don’t seriously expect to be advertising until late summer or fall.
April 29th, 2007 at 7:35 pm
How do you guys recommend promoting blogs? So far, my internet security blog is failing because I don’t know how to promote it. It has quality content, I’m just not sure how to get it to end users.
April 30th, 2007 at 7:18 am
[…] The other day, Spaceman3750 asked for more help on actually building readership to your blog on this post. That reminded me that I haven’t given a promotional tip for awhile, so I’m going to have to get my act together and start posting these more often! What the people want, the people get! Keep in mind, all of these techniques bring in small amounts of traffic…but when you add a whole bunch of small amounts of traffic together, it’s a large amount of traffic! Also, these are largely dependent on you having great content; if your content isn’t absolutely stellar, work on getting it up to that level before trying these promotion techniques. […]
April 30th, 2007 at 7:20 am
Theres a tonne of different ways to promote your blog, the way we started ours was finding sites in the same niche as ours with top commentor plugins and commenting very actively on those sites, as well we’ve had some sucess with mybloglog where we’ve found if you visit other peoples blogs some of them are kind enough to visit yours..
Ultimately eventually someone see’s some content they like on our site and then we get a link, after awhile our articles start getting some SE traffic and then it starts to roll.
Right now I’d say we’re at the very begining of this process, for you it will probably be much harder since your running off a blogspot sub domain and your market is much more saturated, which means converting visitors to regular visitors will be much harder.
I’m not really sure what to tell you though, reading through your content it looks good but it also seems like your just pulling details from major sources and posting them, most people really serious about internet security probably won’t pay to much attention to content like that.
Do you have any sources where you can get news and write about it before anyone else or at least at the same time as everyone else? If so you might have some luck on sites like Digg if you can post an article on something before it goes mainstream then you should be golden.