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5 Recommendations For Small Bloggers (Less than 10K Pageviews Per Month) Looking To Monetize

by anna on 05.03.2010


I’ve recently been posting a series on tiers View definition in a new window in online advertising networks. Maybe you heard something about it. Over the course of writing those posts what became apparent was that there was a real need for a set of my recommendations for blog owners of varying sizes who are looking to monetize, given these new pieces of information regarding how revenue is affected by ad inventory, traffic-based, and CPM tiering in networks of all kinds in the blogosphere. So I’m going to start posting some thoughts for you guys and putting them here, take them or leave them . . . bear in mind that these are ideas for people who are specifically trying to grow their blogs into businesses and/or attach them to businesses (e.g. using them to market some other form of business), rather than people who specifically blog for fun or “community.” I have personal thoughts on the use of ads for those kinds of blogs as well, but that’s not really the point of this blog, so if you want to know about my unsolicited advice in those cases, you can email me and I’ll happily unleash a torrent of verbal diarrhea on you. UPDATE: Alternative network resources for people who want to meet hosting fees, etc., but aren’t necessarily professional bloggers: check out these lists here and here (ignore the first ad network name, though), and also check out Project Wonderful (hat tip: Maria Melee).

  1. Running Network Ads Are Not Worth It At This Stage.

    If you are currently at a traffic level less than 10K pageviews per month, then in my opinion, putting network ads on your blog is not worth the space and the editorial guidelines with which you will have to hassle, provided your ultimate goal is to turn your blog into a business. This is for a couple of different reasons: (1) your blog sidebar real estate’s value and (2) the value of gaining experience in selling ads and growing a list of blog advertisement sales leads. Some people are tempted to put network ads on their blogs at this stage to lend your blog credibility to outside observers. I have done this myself, and I do think there was a time in which this was a valid move to make. I think that time has passed, and here’s why: it is comparatively easy to get into a blog advertising network these days. It may still be difficult to be accepted into certain networks (cough — Federated Media — cough), but many networks will let you in once somebody drops out, and there are few quality control guidelines barring people from entry. Therefore, you are not getting any kind of professional stamp of approval anymore by running a network-affiliated ad on your blog they way you might have done at one point.

    More importantly, you are going to get a lot more money and a lot more valuable experience by going out and convincing a small business to buy a sidebar ad from you. All you have to do, at this traffic level, is convince a small online business to buy one sidebar ad for $25 a month to beat a BlogHer ad contract, and they are probably the best paying network at this point, with the possible exception of Federated Media and I’m not even completely sure about that because Federated does not have many (if any?) blogs on its network that have traffic levels taht low. So, just do it. You’re going to be in much better shape in the long run: these days, and in my opinion, a blog stands out more by exerting control over over both its editorial and its advertising content.

  2. You can’t just put up a call for advertisments and call it a day. When BlogHer first announced they were taking a bigger cut of their commissions about a year or so ago, I announced private ad sales and put up an advertising sales page. Then I forgot about it. I got some bites every now and then but no sales. This is because nobody really responds to things like that. You have to chase sales down, they don’t usually come to you. Even when you have good traffic, the sales pitches you get tend to be bad. Example, I occasionally get unsolicited ad offers in my email now, and I’ll get all excited until I realize that the people have not even looked at my media kit yet. The other day I got one from a payday loan place that was looking for advertising space. I hate payday loan places, naturally, but I directed them to my media kit anyway. The guy wrote me back, “leveling with [me]” that what he was looking for was a sponsored post, and that even a negative post about the payday loan industry would be fine, provided I didn’t malign his company specifically. I wrote him back and told him that, for $5,000, I’d be pleased to write a post about how morally abhorrent I found the payday loan industry, that disclosed a sponsorship relationship between myself and his company. And that for an additional $5,000, I’d be happy to write a post about how I’d brokered this deal between myself and his company. He never wrote back. His loss, because it would have been AWESOME product placement. But anyway, those are the kinds of unsolicited deals you get offered when you hit about 75,000 to 100,000 pageviews. At 10,000 or less, you might not get any yet. Don’t get discouraged. This hit home for me at Mom 2.0 when I heard Design Mom (300,000+ pageviews) say she kept all her solicitation emails so she could email them with ad offers. We ALL have to hunt down potential advertisers, it’s the name of the game! Look for small Etsy shops that will appeal to your readers, people that advertise on blogs you read, people that read your blog who have online shops, people you know who sell online, eBay sellers, etc. for prospects. Those are people who might be good prospects for buying your ads.

  3. Be tenacious with your advertising solicitations. If you figure that you’re going to get $20 per month from BlogHer (or a similar ad network) for running ads on a blog at this size, then you need to set about getting a sidebar ad at the price of $25 per month. The $5 extra is your commission for finding a sale, along with the experience you get in hunting down prospects. You need to work on a media kit and a pitch letter. You also need to compile a list of contacts to solicit. And then you need to keep asking places to advertise, even when they are turning you down left and right. Many, many places will turn you down. Many. Keep asking. You only need one, expect like 99% to not even return your email, that’s normal. Even if the one that finally agrees has to be begged, and it’s an ebay who is your brother-in-law, and you have to design the 125×125 button, it still counts. Because once people have seen that you got that one ad, then they’ll think about buying one at some point. you get one, then another one will be that much easier to find. And every month you do this, it will get easier and easier.

  4. Treat all of your readers like gold. This should really be true at all levels, but it’s especially true in the beginning, because many of the people who find you in the beginning are the ones who will end up being your biggest evangelists and who will shape your readership the most. I cannot emphasize this enough. The early days are the ones in which you will have the most time in which to interact with your readers and make them do your dirty work for you. I know you want tips on how to make money, but when you’re just starting out, a lot of what you can do is community building, long-term stuff. You have to be in it for the long con. Build relationships. Make friends. Build a community around your blog with people you really like. Not everybody will stay, but make sure the ones who do are people that you really like, because they will end up getting more people that you really like to show up further down the road.

  5. Think about other opportunities for monetizing. At low traffic levels, your ability to sell a display advertising opportunity is limited. However, if you can demonstrate that elusive “influence” that people are always talking about, you can do a bunch of stuff. Throw a party at a conference, and you can get tons of sponsors. Organize a an event View definition in a new window for your real life friends with a small business sponsor, take lots of pictures, and set it up in your media kit as a sponsorship opportunity for anybody who wants to get involved. All you have to do to sell these kinds of things is convince one company to do it and boom! everyone else will think it’s a thing.

How about you guys? Suggestions from the peanut gallery?

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Understanding The BlogHer Ad Tier System: Part One

by anna on 04.26.2010

This is the first in several posts explaining the statistical evidence I have found that suggests there is a tier system that — together with traffic — governs how much money publishers on the BlogHer Ad network make from running advertisements on their blogs. For a review of what I’ve discussed already on the topic, you can start with a post that questions how bringing a very high traffic site onto the network might impact other posts here. Then, you can read my kind of convoluted metaphor for the money-making scheme here, and my more general introduction to all the issues involved from the last post. Today, I’m going to show you how the tier system can be shown just by looking at how my own statistics have changed over the course of my time serving BlogHer ads for about a year and a half.

What I Have Learned About Tiers View definition in a new window In Online Ad Networks Over The Course Of The Past Week

BlogHer is not the only online ad network that uses tiers. Tiers are used by many (if not all) online ad networks to package small sites with big ones in order to create a more “effective” CPM rate and, therefore, be more attractive to advertisers and big ad agencies. For example, a premium, high traffic site like ThePioneerWoman.com is where big brand names are going to want to advertise, but it would be tough to sell a package of ads to an advertiser with all premium sites like this. Why? Because ThePioneerWoman.com is only going to be running ads at very high CPM rates (like $12 CPM or more, say). So, to be attractive to a big brand, the advertiser will package ThePioneerWoman.com with a small site, so that they can sell the “pack” at a rate of like $8 CPM, and the advertiser gets some hits on ThePioneerWoman.com, and some on the smaller sites, and the network gives PW the CPM of $12, and the little guy the CPM of like $3, and pockets the difference.

That’s one kind of tier. A CPM tier.

Then there’s a tier for available ads, which is what we’ve been talking about with BlogHer. From looking at stats, it is my *theory* (again, just a theory, because without anyone admitting it, that’s all I can say is that this is a theory) that there are several different tier systems at work at BlogHer: one for CPM rates, one for available paid ads, one for who gets house ads, and one for who gets defaults. And possibly more. It is also my theory that the tier system is not tightly controlled by anyone, but can be altered for various reasons. My subsequent posts on this topic will explain how I arrived at these conclusions, beginning today with a look at my own stats, and the conclusions one might make from them. Bear in mind that my stats actually provide the weakest of the evidence for tiers: only after looking at the numbers for many other people did I become totally convinced of the tiers being real, like I said before, it’s just too much to do all at once, so I’m still going to just start with my own numbers.

My own traffic

There are a couple of things about website traffic that constantly change — one, your traffic changes throughout the year for various reasons — your blog grows, online traffic ebbs and flows, maybe your posting changes. And two, how many ads are sold changes throughout the year, because of the fact that ad budgets (as Blogher is so terribly fond of pointing out) are funded in a cyclical fashion. Because of this, it’s really tough to compare things in terms of dollars and cents from one quarter to the next. This is why I started looking at the percentages of unpaid ads I was running now versus before. Below is a graph that shows what percentage of unpaid ads I was running throughout my career as a BlogHer ad network member. Just so you understand, in this case, a high percentage is a bad thing, it is a high percentage of ads for which you are receiving no money — these are public service announcements, remnant ads (“leftover” ads that didn’t run from the previous month, this doesn’t really happen anymore but it did back in 2008), or completely blank ads, or house ads (technically you might receive some compensation for these ads but the rate is very, very low, so I’m counting them as “unpaid”). You want a low number here, because any time you serve an unpaid ad, you’ve got crap on your site that you’re not being compensated for, and you are still being held to the storied BlogHer editorial guidelines and all that jazz, and running BlogHer headlines, and all that jazz, even though you’re not being paid.

OK, so that’s kind of a volatile graph, but you can see that I was running a bunch of unpaid ads at the beginning, and then eventually I went down and stayed down pretty steadily for a while, and then went back up, and then kind of went back down, like halfway down and stayed there until they booted me off the network. These kinds of fluctuations are usually explained by the “cyclical nature of advertising sales.” In the interest of addressing those arguments, let’s consider that graph according to quarterly boundaries, noting that Quarter 4 (October, November, and December) is traditionally the most lucrative quarter for advertising because of the holiday season. If it’s a lucrative quarter for advertising, then my unpaid percentage should be going down, because there should be more ads on the network — provided that the fluctuations in this chart are only being caused by seasonal changes to the ad market, that is.

abdpbt View definition in a new window.com/personalfinance/wp-content/uploads/2010/04/q4overlay1.jpg"

If a revenue decrease were as simple as seasonal changes, there wouldn’t be these kinds of inconsistencies. You wouldn’t see a sharp increase in unpaid ads during the holiday season like I did in Q4 of 2008, and then see them flatten out in Q4 of 2009. If anything, you would see them decrease during that time, and then increase afterwards, when things got bad, and the curve would look similar both years, only changing in tune with the economy.

So what accounts for the sharp differences in the graph? Let me see if I can illuminate things by telling you a few things about what happened during that timeline, both on this blog, and elsewhere in the BlogHer Ad Network, and you can draw your own conclusions.

In late April of 2009, I was chosen as BlogHer of the week. The next month, my percentage of unpaid ads changed drastically. To be exact, it went from almost 61% unpaid ads (that means that only 39% of the ads I was running were actually giving me revenue) to about 28.5% (meaning that about 71.5% of the ads I was running were paid). The next big spike in my percentages occurred in January of 2010, when my unpaid ads jumped up to about 53%. That was also the month that Ree Drummond joined the BlogHer network. In February of 2010, I wrote a post questioning whether our revenue had been going down because of this move. That month, my percentage went down again, to 36% unpaid ads, right smack in the middle of Q1 (the worst of the financial quarters).

When it’s one person, it might be dismissed as coincidence. My next posts will make it seem more difficult to do that.

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The Hashtag Model: Monetizing And Mobilizing Via Get-Togethers, Both Locally And On Twitter

by anna on 04.05.2010

photo via Design Mom

Monetizing the Mommyblog: An ABDPBT View definition in a new window Personal Finance Series

This is the sixth in a series of posts on the topic of monetizing mommy blogs featured on ABDPBT Personal Finance. The models I’ll be discussing have not yet been implemented on a large number of blogs, and thus the use of them is still pretty experimental. You can try these at home, but for the love of God, please BE CAREFUL. You can read all of the Monetizing the Mommyblog posts here.

Photo By Design Mom

Today’s model of monetizing is probably the most controversial one I’ve addressed so far, but I learned more about Twitter parties when I was at Mom 2.0 in February, and I thought it was worth sharing some of them here. For those of you who aren’t familiar with Twitter parties, basically they are an organized discussion/event View definition in a new window that take place at a special time on Twitter, where everyone is invited to follow along by using a hashtag (you can find hashtags by looking for the # sign in front of a term on Twitter, usually at the end of somebody’s tweet). Personally, I find Twitter parties supremely annoying, but apparently some people must like them because people continue to throw them and participate in them, so it occurs to me that I might be missing some of their appeal.

The information for this post is taken from a panel originally entitled, “Creating Experiences Combining Online and Offline Campaigns for Maximum Impact and Results” at Mom 2.0, which featured Rachael Herrscher (Today’s Mama), Jyl Johnson Pattee (Mom It Forward), Allison Czarnecki (Petit Elefant) and Jenny Lawson (The Bloggess) as panelists. The first three panelists regularly use get-togethers (whether local, on Twitter, or at conferences) as a means of making money and bolstering their blog’s community (The Cambria Cove Suite is an example of one of Allison Czarnecki’s sponsored parties, and you can read more about it here). (Jenny Lawson’s inclusion on the panel was — I believe — to get more people to come to the panel; however, the ostensible purpose was to have her speak to the utility as a mobilizing force across geographical distances, as demonstrated by her success with creating the “Red Dawn Moment” of getting “WOLVERINES!” to become a trending topic on Twitter. You can read about that movement here, but the basic idea is that Jenny got people to start randomly declaring “WOLVERINES!” on a mass scale, at random times, and for no immediately apparent reason except for the “joy of it.”) Below are some observations, issues, and tips if you want to get more involved in the Twitter party phenomenon.

  1. Throw Parties For Small Businesses In Your Area. The basic idea behind The Hashtag Model is that you bring your online life into the world offline by hosting events using local sponsors. For example, early on, Rachael Herrscher (Today’s Mama, put on an event with a local business in her area. She got them to sponsor the event and then she invited all of her local friends and contacts to attend. The idea is that all of the attendees will go to the party, have a good time, and then associate the brand with that good time. Also, because it is a local event, the business has now achieved positive advertising placement with people who are able to patronize their establishment. This kind of a get-together is by necessity something that is limited to people who are geographically desirable to the small business, so the party has to take place locally and not on Twitter. However, with a small business that is online, you could potentially organize the same kind of thing to take place online or at a conference full of people who spend a lot of time online.

  2. Throw Parties At Conferences. The Social Luxe Lounge at BlogHer 2009 was a successful pre-BlogHer pampering and social event thrown by Allison Czarnecki (Petit Elefant) that featured blogging awards, free manicures and pedicures, drinks, food, and generous swag View definition in a new window bags (while supplies lasted). The idea behind The Social Luxe Lounge was the same as that of the Cambria Cove Suite, but on a much larger scale, for more bloggers and with the help of more sponsors. By all accounts, the Social Luxe Lounge was a huge success — and I was actually at the Social Luxe Lounge myself, and it was a great party. The unifying principle is the same: get a group of people together, create a positive experience that they will forever associate with that brand. In addition to smaller sponsors, the Social Luxe Lounge was sponsored by Swiffer, and it appears that they were very happy with their placement. Another Social Luxe Lounge is planned for BlogHer 2010.

  3. The Appeal of Twitter Parties — Still Somewhat Obscure. The idea governing the Twitter party is the same as its real life counterparts — create a conversation/event, sponsored by a brand, that will lead to a positive brand experience for people involved. I get the theory, and I get why people who throw Twitter parties would want to participate: the brands like it because it’s a positive association on Twitter with their brand, and possibly exposes more people to their brand, and the bloggers sponsoring it like them because they get paid. What is less clear to me is the appeal for people participating in the Twitter party without getting paid — I do think there are giveaways involved on occasion offered to people who follow these Twitter parties, and perhaps if you are a huge fan of an involved blogger, it would be a draw, but other than that I cannot really understand it. I’m hoping that people who like Twitter parties and have more experience with them will chime in here and let me know why I’m wrong.

  4. Negative Associations. Naturally, I couldn’t keep my mouth shut about some of the situations being described on this panel and being touted as valuable to sponsors because they create a “positive brand association” for them, given my observation of several negative outcomes for these kinds of things in the hands of social media. In order to explain how they create these opportunities, the women on the panel had said that they liked to take the conversations they were already having and then figure out how to weave in a brand to that discussion. The example they brought up was some discussion about beet jello (yes you read that right) that they had been having with another blogger, and how the blogger had brought beet jello for them to try. They said, for example, that they could have used Jello as a sponsor for this, as a conversation on Twitter, or whatever, hypothetically. So then I said, “But, the social media campaigns you’ve brought up as examples all have negative associations with them that I can think of off-hand (the Social Luxe lounge was a success, but the “swag hag” rumors about BlogHer 2009 will always be associated with it and parties like it; the beet jello anecdote they told involved them all feeling like they were going to throw up after eating a bite of beet-flavored jello, etc.) — how do you pitch this to sponsors? How do you pitch a positive brand association when there are going to be negative ones as well?” What they said was, “It’s social media, and you never know what is going to happen,” which is fair. I think the real answer is that these brands would rather that they have some input in the conversation, even if they know that there will be some negative fallout.

What do you guys think of these kinds of events? I think there’s a clear return on investment with the real-life in-person get togethers, but I’m a little bit more skeptical of the Twitter parties. I did notice that they’ve started implementing these kinds of placements in the Real Housewives franchise, most recently with the party thrown by Jill on the Real Housewives of New York City and sponsored by Saks Fifth Avenue. My guess is that we are going to start seeing more and more of these kinds of events.

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