It’s something I’ve long tried to get my head around. For years I’ve had my blog’s address sitting in the sig of every forum I use and I’ve been signed up with all your blogcatalogs and mybloglog style websites you can find. And despite being active on most of them over the years at various times I can probably count about 100 hits my blog has recieved from them all combined.  Yes they’ve came because they’ve been curious enough to click the link but they do not come back. This site in particular suffers badly as noone really wants to follow personal blogs unless you know the person outwith the internet. This makes monetising blogs difficult as unless you get a good amount of traffic from sites like digg or stumbleupon your relying on getting your traffic from search engines which, unless you know your stuff or are a big site already, isn’t really going to amount to much. I’ll get google hits on the more obscure topics form my blog maybe 5-6 times a week for example.

This brings me to entrecard. You advertise peoples blogs on your site and yours on thiers and this is all paid for with credits. Everytime you visit an entrecard supported site and click the banner you get a credit and any time someone clicks on yours you get a credit. Straight away it’s a different kind of advertising as it’s actually getting people to your blog rather than just showing them your link. Unfortunately most are just visiting for the credits so never actually read your blog. The upside is that your Alexa rank will most likely go down and your traffic will look good. The downside though is that whilst you have high visitor numbers your not going to have many actual visitors there to see your blog and so you’ll get frustrated at times about this.

The good thing about all those page views though is it looks better to advertisers so your more likely to get a better deal unless they hold social medie based traffic to mean very little. If you luck out and get a decent pay for impression advert then it doesn’t matter that the traffic doesnt convert as if you you show the ad 1000 times you’ll get paid for showing 1000 times. It doesn’t really matter who it’s shown to. Even the cheaper payouts work well when you start with this kind of advertisment. Only two weeks in and I’ve doubled my normal ‘income’ on this site. It’s still pennies when you get down to it but at the level I’m at with this site it’s working really well.

This entry was posted on Wednesday, August 20th, 2008 at 11:49 am and is filed under Every Day Stuff. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. Both comments and pings are currently closed.