Don’t Monetize Your Blog too Early

Have you ever read a title to a post and said HUH?  Ok…I realize that this might be the advice that most of you don’t want to read ut…….BUT give me a minute of  your time and you will see that it makes sense. 

The internet is awash in a sea of crappy blogs with no content but many they look pretty and they have killer ads on them.  They have so many darn ads on them that it’s really not even clear what kind of a blog it is. 

The picture at the left might give you an idea of what “ad overkill” looks like.   I’d be willing to bet very few of these sites draw a return visit let alone actually make any money.  

 They drew you in once, they had you…but couldn’t close the deal because there was NOTHING there to read.  Repeat customers are the best customers and quite frankly without content…they won’t be back.

Does your Blog look like this?

What prompts  you to put a blog in your feed reader?

Let’s shift gears for a second and picture the blogs that you read on a regular basis, the ones in your feedreader.

What brings you there?     What made you want to read it on a daily basis? 

The answer is very simple…they filled a need or a desire.  

They are loaded with content that attracts you and makes you want to return.  

Without question they Bring Value to your blogging experience. 

Benefits of not Monetizing Early

No question the lure of the dollar is strong….but by foregoing the initial advertising there is a good chance you will be much better positioned to make money in the long run. 

How many internet entrepreneurs start a blog or a website, load it with adsense and then wait for the money to roll in?   These are the bloggers who quit after only a few weeks because they are doing it for the wrong reason, they want to make money doing nothing, they’ve fallen for the lure of easy money.    They aren’t likely to be long term entrepreneurs.

If you build it….they will come. 

By not monetizing early it will allow you to:

Build your Blog:  Place stronger visual and mental emphasis on your content, which ultimately determines the size of your reader base.  You can concentrate on Building Your Brand!

Build your readership: You can use the premium real estate on your blog to entice a visitor to stay.  Popular posts, Recent Comments etc will draw them in and get their interest.

Build PageRank.  If you have great content then other bloggers in the blogosphere will be much more entitled to link to it….and as you know incoming links are a key ingredient to building pagerank.  If you ever want to build organic traffic via the search engines then pagerank needs to be your friend and content gives you an extra bonus in the eyes of the googlebot.

Build your brand:  Can anyone not recognize ShoeMoney’s logo?  How about John Chow’s smiling face?  They’ve built a brand and now they can command nearly any amount of money for advertising.  The traffic that they generate would make LA feel inadequate.  Do you want to eek out a few bucks in adsense a month or do you want to be posting income reports like John Chow’s? 

 Traffic is only the first step (and the most important to a beginner) if you want to build long term success.   The next question is what to do with all of that traffic once you do build it….and I will be covering that question in a series of posts in the next few weeks but for now John Chow has a great article that discusses the concept in more detail.

To summarize….concentrate on building a quality blog, build your content, build your pagerank, build your readership.  Once you have achieved these things….then you can focus on optimizing your advertising to earn the most money possible from your traffic.  That in itself is an art form.