Million Dollar Portfolio

A major source of income for many bloggers is advertising revenue. Generally, a new blogger starts out by using a service like Google Adsense and later on will add other types of programs to the site to supplement this.

I first got started advertising on my blogs using Adsense but didn’t have nearly the kind of success you read about by bloggers like Darren Rowse. It’s hard for a new blogger to understand just how others can make so much money from advertisements when there is so much competition out there.

Bloggers like John Chow make money mainly from private ad placements but this is only possible because of the sheer amount of traffic he brings in. While it isn’t impossible to generate that kind of traffic and income, it does take a lot of work day in and day out. Even with all the best SEO techniques and the highest Google results, if people aren’t interested in what you have to say, it’s not going to matter.

Blogging is all about niche targeting. Just because you want to write about making money online, doesn’t mean you are going to be good at it. John Chow didn’t start out writing about making money, he only ended up that way because he eventually became successful with what he was doing to start writing about it. Make sense? The best writers always write what they know. It’s great that you love making money…but are you good at it? Are you making enough to make someone else want to know more about how you are doing it? The fact is, you are going to be much more successful in your blogging career if you write about what you know.

Now that we have all that behind us…we can talk about the main thing here. Does advertising really work? For all the millions of dollars spent every year on advertising, is the return worth it? Services like Text-Link-Ads and Project Wonderful as well as Entrecard offer newbies an entry level way of getting ads and placing ads on very small budgets. Over time, these can become quite lucrative if you can generate enough traffic to make it worth the advertisers time.

It comes down to what’s known as CPM or Cost per thousand impressions. For every 1000 views your site gets, a cost can be associated with it depending on how much you charge for advertising. For example, A Text-Link-Ad on this site is $15 a month. Last month I had nearly 1000 page views. Since last month this blog made roughly $32, I can figure out the CPM. This is easy…because I only had about 1000 views. eCPM is $32 per thousand.  or .032 cents per view.

Not great, but this is a new blog and it is growing by the day. A text link on this ad has a CPM of $15 or .015 cents per view. As traffic increases, the CPM decreases but ideally, your CPM should stay about on par with your traffic increase because as your blog grows, so should your advertisers as well as the price those advertisers spend. It’s simple economics.

The true test of whether advertising works or not, is whether those advertisers come back. Entrecard is a great way of testing this because the cost is zero. I’ve found that I get the same batch of advertisers on my entrecards because the price is right compared to the traffic that results and that’s the ideal situation no matter what the cost.

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Blow away your Google competition
Internet+12 months=Millionaire