I Can't Make Any Money! | OBannons Leap

I Can’t Make Any Money!

November 8th, 2007 | by Scott

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I see that line often on blogs and forums I frequent, “I can’t make any money with my blog (or site)…”

More often than not it seems to me they actually are making some money, but its pennies per day with some form of contextual advertising and they aren’t satisfied with pennies per day. Who can blame them?

There’s a lot of reasons why contextual ads may not be doing well on a given site. Everything from the display style and layout that can effect your click rates–to the actual content and keywords of the site that may be causing lower paying ads to be displayed–and a million other things that are too advanced or intricate to try to define and explain here.

In my experience, most sites can make a decent return from contextual advertising, especially with Google’s or Yahoo’s, but there are a few genres that don’t seem to have the advertiser volume to supply site owners with enough high paying opportunities to make what they want or expect from their ad blocks.

So, what to do if AdSense, YPN!, AdBrite, AdEngage, BidVertiser, etc. advertising isn’t performing on your site or blog and you think you’ve tried everything to improve the click rates and keyword targeting on it already?

Well, something I’m a huge fan of is running your own text based advertising blocks on pages. In-fact, I even do this sometimes on sites where normal contextual advertising is performing good for me and I’ll tell you why: because I can use these spots to advertise affiliate products that pay much higher commissions than any pay-per-click model will generate for me…provided I’m able to match the displayed ads to the content effectively.

Sure, I may not see the $3 or $4 dollars per day that I might have with AdSense or a similar PPC program, but if the ads I display are content-relevant and formatted well I often see great conversion rates that earn much more on a monthly basis than that $3 to $4 dollars per day would amount to.

And sometimes it doesn’t work out that way, so I’ll switch back to a traditional PPC ad network on those site(s) or pages. The point is I’m always tweaking and tinkering to see what’s going to work best where for me.

Which brings me back to a site or blog that just isn’t earning any revenue to speak of with the traditional ad networks. If you can write a little HTML, CSS (and JavaScript or better yet, PHP would be a great addition since they’ll allow you to serve up dynamic ads across your various site pages based on the individual page keywords for well targeted ads) then you can try to create your own text based advertising blocks, following the basic designs that are known to work and offered by every ad network already.

Just select plenty of affiliates with products that are related to your site/blog’s overall theme, and try to match the best ones for display on each page as best you can.

You might just be surprised at the results.

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