There’s no money in blogging, sure there are a few that reel in the cash, but there are millions of bloggers that don’t make any money at all, or at least not nearly enough to justify the time they spend on their blogs. Try to blog for money and you will be frustrated pretty soon. In stead, treat it as a hobby, hobbies cost money. If you do it for a few years, maybe, you can turn your hobby into your job.

As soon as you stop worrying about the number of visitors and the number of ad clicks you get each day, blogging becomes so much more enjoyable, as a hobby should be. Readers will notice a positive change in your writing and before you know it, positive things will happen.

I am running a couple of different blogs, one of them never got too much attention, but these last few weeks I have been feeling very positively about it and really enjoyed working on it. Last week I suddenly got an e-mail from an editor of a printed magazine. He liked the information on my blog and wanted me to write for the magazine!

I know, it’s not the jackpot, but I got a few hundred bucks for about a days work plus very targeted advertising for me and my blog to 70000 magazine readers. Plus, they liked my writing so much, that they offered me a regular column in the magazine.

It’s stories like this that the big bloggers will also tell you: the blog doesn’t make the majority of the money, but it helps the money to find them.

There are a number of different ad types you can use on your website and each has its own pro’s and con’s. I’ve discussed PPC ads before, today we’re taking a closer look at CPM ads.

CPM ads
CPM ads are ads that pay per ad view (CPM = Cost Per 1000 impressions) so it doesn’t matter if your visitors click on the ads. Your earnings are directly related to the number of visitors and page views you get on your website. A steady traffic stream will generate a steady income stream for you.

Different CPM programs offer different rates. A rate of, say, $2 CPM will not necessarily make you $2 for every 1000 page views on your website or blog though. The ad programs often pay different rates based on the location of the visitors. The $2 CPM offered might only apply to US based traffic, while visitors from the UK might only make you $1 CPM and Asian traffic could not be paid for at all.

If you want to optimize your ad income and the CPM ads you are running on your site are only paying for traffic from certain countries, it could be a good idea to only show the ads to visitors from the paying countries. The ad space could be used to display PPC ads to visitors from other countries. To do this you can use the free ip2nation database which lets you look up the visitors country based on their ip-address. A simple php program can then be used to display ads based on the visitors country.

Another thing to look into when selecting an ad publisher network to sign up with, is how exactly is the traffic measured. They might not count every page view, but only the unique visitors per day. A single visitor looking at 100 pages on your website could only count as a single view instead of 100. So, the ad network advertising with higher CPM rates might bring in less money than the one with lower rates. Have a good look at the details of the program you sign up with.

Finding the best monetizing strategy for your website involves a lot of testing and tweaking. You’d be amazed, how a seemingly insignificant change in your ad placement, can suddenly double your income. Before we can start tweaking our ad settings, though, we’ll have to sign up for some ad programs. There are many companies in online advertising and finding the right partner can be a difficult task by itself.

There are four major types of ads you can place on your website CPC, CPM, CPA and direct selling of ad spots for a fixed price per month. Most online advertising companies specialize in one of these methods, let’s have a closer look at the first option.

CPC/PPC
Cost-Per-Click or Pay-Per–Click ads will make you a little money each time a visitor clicks on an ad. The pay per click is generally very low, but with enough clicks this can add up to a nice income stream. Looking through my Google AdSense reports, I see many clicks that paid only 1 cent, but also some that paid a few dollars. When I add up all earnings and clicks, for the 4 years I’ve been using AdSense ads on many different websites, the average pay per click is about 10 cents, with single site averages between 2 cents and 85 cents.

The average pay per click, however, isn’t really interesting. What you want is the best possible total income, which normally is directly related to the number of visits to your site. This brings us to the better ad performance indicator: CPM or cost per thousand impressions. PPC ad programs usually show you the realized CPM value in your ad statistics. This makes it very easy to compare how well your PPC ads are doing compared to a CPM ad program. Google doesn’t allow publishers to share their ad stats, but I can tell you that my different websites, that have AdSense ads running on them, have a CPM ranging from 1 cent all the way up to $43. So, replacing the Google ads with a $2 CPM ad program would make sense for some sites, but not for all.

While with the impression based CPM ads earnings can only be raised by a rising number of visitors to your website, PPC ad revenue can easily be optimized by trying different ad placements and color schemes. PPC ad networks like Google AdSense and Yahoo Publisher Network let you manage the color scheme and ad layouts for ads displaying on your website. While most sites benefit from trying to have the ads blend in with their content (i.e. using the same text and link colors as the main content of the website and not using a border around the ads) some sites make more revenue by using ads that are, well, less subtle.

Optimizing your PPC ads is an ongoing task. The ad settings that work best today might not bring in the most clicks next week, so it is important to keep tracking ad performance and try new settings regularly. The difficult thing with ad performance tracking is the interpretation of the results. Statistical data is only useful in big numbers. Tracking the ad clicks on 100 page views is hardly going to yield you any usable data. You need to look at the data for tens of thousands of page views. If your site isn’t pulling that kind of visitor numbers in, your ‘ad optimization’ is pretty much guess work.

Eric pointed out Adgetize to me today, so I thought I’d give it a try. This ad program seems to have the greatest potential so far. You are getting paid not only for ad views or ad clicks, but also for posting on your blog. This is not a paid posting service, you just go about blogging like you normally would. You post what you want and earn points with their system.

Another big difference with services like Xavier Media Banner Exchange is that your accumulated points will be converted into cash! So, if you are getting clicks and hits from traffic exchange programs, but really rather be paid for your blog, this is your chance to sign up with a brand new service.

Adgetize has only been around for a month, but people have already been paid for this program, so it seems to be legit. Looking at how their system works, I’m not entirely sure they will last long in the advertising market. People are currently signing up like crazy and displaying the Adgetize ads on their websites to earn cash. If the program fails to attract enough advertisers, this nice program could soon be gone.
If you want to give it a try, you can sign up for their service for free and start showing ads on your site within minutes. Just go to the Adgetize website and sign up now!

Thanks Eric for pointing out the program!