Blogging Pays U?

When it comes to advertising on blog sites and making money from it, the keyword is simply traffic. You must have traffic. It's simply the law of averages that if 1 person in 100 clicks on an ad (on a pay per click basis) per month than you won't make much money if your traffic is say 200 visitors per month. The more traffic you have, the more click throughs you should obtain and hence the more money you stand to make.

However....

Well targeted and niche oriented blogs do better
There are simply too many blogs these days (more than 100 million and growing) for you to frankly have much of a shot at competing with the big, well established blog sites out there. You could get lucky for sure but what are the chances of that?

A much better strategy is to build a number of blog sites that have a clear niche and target audience. Why? Well, in part, it has something to do with the way ads like those provided by Google, are targeted and partly to do with gaining an audience and keeping it.

Let's take the first point first. If I have a blog that has no particular topic or target audience in mind and I blog about everything under the sun such as what I did that day, where I went on vacation etc. then the ads that appear on your site sourced from Google or wherever will be broad ranging too. Because of that, maybe your statistics drop to only 1 in 500 visitors click on an ad. You see, by being broad focused you are confusing your audience and the ad server.

Now, let's say I build a blog all about UFO's and I target that community of folks who are fascinated by UFO's AND I stay on topic I will build an audience who know exactly what I offer on my site and the ad server will target them with ads that have much more relevance to your visitors. Result - my click through rate goes up to say 1 in 50 visitors.

I discovered this simple point through analysis of two of my other blogs. One is an occult blog the other a comedy site. The occult blog attracts a smaller audience but earns me four to five times the amount in click through context ads than the other does.

Essentially - this is branding. Brand is a combination of your site's promise and the visitor's perceptions of it. In other words, it is your site's personality. Branding is much more important in blogging that most people think.

Stay on track with what your site promises to deliver and you will gain not just an audience but those context ads will be more relevant to those visitors. That means you will make more money.

Now, lets say that you build 4 or 6 niche blogs over time. Each is well branded and develops an audience. Google serves highly relevant ads to each site. Your earnings from each site goes up and overall you make a reasonable amount of cash without having to compete with the big guys.