Flame Scorpion

Blogging can be an easy way to make some money online by sharing your knowledge. You don’t need any programming, designing, or tech skills to get started. You need to have some experience and be passionate about a subject. You start writing articles, tips, tricks, insights, your own experiences, share the posts with all your friends interested in the subject and traffic will come someday. Then, the easiest way to monetize this content is to place some ads around. When the blog audience grow, the revenue streams can be many, but for starters, contextual advertising might be the single option. At least for those who think they are not prepared to get into affiliate marketing, or who do not find good products to promote.

Google Adsense is the highest paying contextual ad network. Some topics and niches can get better results from other networks, but they are only particular cases. Most website will generate bigger revenues from Google Adsense ads. That’s because they have by far the most advertisers who are already used to pay big bucks for search engine traffic. Despite this fact, bloggers ( including me ), always complained about poor revenue coming from ads, compared to other sites. The metric to define the display ad performance is RPM ( Revenue per thousand impressions. I think it was used to be called EPM before.

Depending a lot on the topic, the type of people that visit the website, websites usually get between $1 and $10 RPM. However, blogs are always in the low part of the graph, most of blogs failing to reach even 1 dollar for every thousand impressions. It is true that since more and more websites were added in the program, the revenue started to drop constantly. But even when the average adsense payment was high, blogs usually did 3-4 times worse than other websites. For example if a normal website have $5 EPM, a blog usually had $1-2 EPM. Why is happening ? When readers come to a blog, they are so focused on reading the article. They focus on the text and completely ignore ads and everything else. An important factor why they have a easy job doing this is because most blogs look alike: content on one hand, sidebar on the other. On a normal website, they need some time figuring what on the website is what they are looking for so there is a bigger chance they will stick to an ad.

So, is Adsense dead for bloggers ? Is still worth it ? If you just want to place one ad in the header, one in the sidebar and one after the article, then you might forget about it. You need so many visitors to make real money that it is not worth. If you manage to get 100,000 page views a month, then you must be doing a really good job. Why you should waste all your time for a $100 dollar check every month ? You will either find other ways to make money from your traffic or you will stop blogging.

Last year I had the same problem. I had a blog who got a lot of traffic, mainly by mistake. I had a domain name that was exact  keyword match for a popular movie. It was a subject that I had no interest in. Someone helped me and wrote few articles and then traffic started to come, in waves. Then, I was mad because I was making so few money from Google Adsense. At that point I thought what can I do to put an ad somewhere where the readers simply cannot ignore. And it struck me: in the middle of the content. I did some wordpress coding and I had an adsense ad displayed after the second paragraph of the content. Result ? The Adsense revenue on that ad was 8 times bigger than any other ad on my page. Then I removed all other ads and left only this one. The revenue was 5 times bigger with only 1 ad, than it was with 3 ads before. That’s a big increase. So I managed to get some good money from the traffic that I had no idea how to keep oo monetize.

Then, I build a plugin based on this technique, that I called Revenue Maximizer. Will let any wordpress user to add an adsense ad, or any other offer ( affiliate link, banner ), right in the iddle of the content, where the reader cannot ignore. The plugin is freely available on wordpress plugin directory.