Make Money Blogging - Private Ad Sales Update

If your goal is to make money blogging then you’d be wise to pay attention to this article. I have been working on this blog for going about 11 weeks now and in my opinion have made significant progress. I have been working online for a few years now but I am a self admitted rank amateur when it comes to the make money blogging scene. I had never blogged before in my life until 11 weeks ago.

My intention wasn’t to actually make this blog a primary part of my income but rather use it as a scorecard for my other ventures and learn to blog too. I’ve always wanted to do it and finally started one. My entrepreneurial itch didn’t allow me to leave the blog unmonetized for long and I am happy to say that I am starting to actually make money with this blog.

This will be a nice addition to my niche site and Ebay income streams.

Ways to Make Money Blogging

There are a number of ways to make money blogging, a few of the most common are listed below:

• Paid Posting
• Google AdSense or similar network
• Affiliate Marketing
• Ad Sales

If you pay much attention to some of the larger blogs, they consistently generate the most revenue from private ad sales. This has always been my preferred source of income from this blog and that has been my goal from the start. I have been building the blog, growing my traffic, improving my pagerank etc all in the name of producing a product that offered value to the readers and in turn making it valuable to advertisers wanting to advertise to these readers.

Private Ad Sales

I opened up my blog to advertising on January 31st….just about 21 days ago as of today. I decided to add a few ad zones and “test” the water if you will. The ad zones I set up are readily apparent to you if you look:

• 468 by 60 banner at the top of the 1st post
• 125 box at the bottom center of my 125 zones
• 125 box in my blogroll widget

I have it set up currently that you can purchase these zones for 7 day increments up to 28 days total. I also priced them quite reasonably to test the water and allow me time to continue building my brand.

I am happy to say that I am 100% sold out currently. If the whole truth is known then this is actually the 2nd rotation of being 100% sold out since January 31st, just 21 days ago. The income isn’t significant yet as I have my ads priced quite reasonably to get the ball rolling.

I currently am only charging 5 dollars for 7 days for a 125 box which in my opinion is incredibly reasonable for a blog with 15k visitors and 30k pageviews a month. When I feel comfortable with it I am going to raise prices appropriately until I find the sweet spot. Also bear in mind that I currently am only offering for sale 3 locations on the site, I have another 8 125 boxes that I can sell as well as text links.

Revenue Potential

If you do the math then it breaks down like this:

• 5 dollars a week per ad zone would result in $200 dollars per month.
• 10 dollars a week per ad zone would result in $400 dollars per month.
• 20 dollars a week per ad zone would result in $800 dollars per month.

Add text link sales, sponsored reviews and affiliate income and you can quickly see this could be a couple thousand dollars per month.

I want to be clear that in order to climb very high up the revenue ladder, yours and my blog will have to have some good looking stats to make it attractive to advertisers. I will report as I go but I am thinking a PR4 and 20k plus visitors combined with a sub 50k Alexa should get it done easily.

For an 11 week old blog I am really very happy with progress so far and where we are at in the food chain. Still a lot of work to do but it’s been fun.

Conclusion

Private Ad Sales are one of the very best sources of income in my mind for blogs with any kind of traffic. If you’re interested in selling ads on your site and you think you would be attractive to advertisers…..check out the Ad Server that I am using, they make it easy and drive customers right to your site. Show Your Ad Here is the site I use and I highly recommend it.

Before I close I want to make sure you don’t misunderstand this article…I am not even close to where I plan to take this blog but I am happy to see the progress clicking along my plan coming together almost exactly as planned to this point.

I also am testing out a site currently that claims to be able to sell text links without any penalty from Google…so that is worth checking out. Make sure you grab my feed and watch for my review in the next few days.

How about you….how’s your monetization going?