Blog Azeroth

http://www.codinghorror.com/blog/archives/000893.html

A friend sent me this link. Thought it was an interesting read and was worth sharing.

To be quite honest the money I make from blogging is not enough to fund my coffee habits so I doubt donating it would really be the best answer.

Maybe that is more a reflection of your coffee habits. > >

Lol true

I have long fought with the idea of advertising on my site and eventually ads won out. Where I won't compromise is letting the ads take over or to indulge in gold selling or power leveling. I do not think of the ads as "supporting" the site. They are there more or less to act as a "tip jar" towards my blog, wow subscription, and toys for the computer. It is NOT an income by any means.

I can remember when I was considering getting into ads how profitable it would be and wanted some numbers. So I'm going to do what I wished someone would do for me way back when...

I am involved in what I would consider 3 advertising streams. As of now I receive about 400-500 visits on a good day. Combine all 3 of those streams over the past month and I might have cleared...1.50. Might have. Then figure in most of these you need at least $25-$50 in the bank to pull out ...yeah it'll be a couple of years before I see anything from it. So if you really don't have many visits (like me), then you might consider building more traffic before becoming involved in ad. It's not something to really profit off of. World of Warcraft, despite being one of the most played games around the world, doesn't spark much interest in advertising apart from the gold sellers.

I don't see ads as a bad thing. They've become a part of everyday internet life and you either tune them out or click on them to see what they have to offer. Be glad pop -ups are "mostly" a thing of the past for advertising.

Being of such little reward, I've always preferred to keep my sites ad-free just for the clean, sleek look it retains.

just my thoughts. ; )


-Sedge

Yes i think ads look tacky and remove a feel of a site, i have a little donate button if my readers/listeners feel that they want to donate they will

Its possible to advertise without selling out. That article was a good read.

My WoW blog generates me a tad under $300/month, which is nice. The real question you have to ask yourself, is at what amount of money/month, or what type of ads you are willing to serve to your readers.

Since the primary goal for my WoW blog was to actually generate revenue, the only law I draw in terms of monetizing it is no gold-selling ads. I have ads for gold selling guides and such right now, which is fine in my eyes.

I never intended to make profit from my blog, and was willing to accept that I would be running at a loss. Why? Well, call me old fashioned, but blogging is a hobby for me, not a job, and I just outright have a hatred of advertising on blogs. Websites, I can live with, since most pages leave me with no choice, but if I go to a blog and it has messy adverts, I will generally close the tab before I even read what you have to say. About the only ads that don't drive me bananas are small 125x125 ads which are not animated (like the ones you usually see for Jinx, etc). I will rarely, if ever, click on an ad though.

At the end of the day, I can not very well run ads myself when I am so vehemently against them on other people's sites I have a job, that's what pays the bills... blogs are for fun!

The thing about ads (such as adsence) is that it takes a lot of traffic and perfect placement to bring in major traffic. One of the sites I work on manages to turn over 4-figure amounts daily from ads alone. This doesn't actually cover it's advertising budget though, but it offsets that cost significantly based on what they used to do, which was no ads whatsoever.

A good place for ads seems to be where you are missing content, i.e. you have a search box, someone does a search, and there are no results. If you put ads there that seems to work well, as a user has gone through your site, been unable to find what they are looking for, and you are then giving them a hand onto the next place to try (and hopefully getting a small tip by way of click-through)