2010 Reminder: Test the Monetization of Your Blog

Monetization can get lost in all the blogging activities we have to juggle. Let’s face it, there’s a lot that goes into blogging. Content, marketing, and building relationships take up a lot of our time and it can be easy to forget about monetization. But if you want to make money with your blog, you can’t ignore, well, the making money part

I believe that content and traffic comes first, but after you generate a healthy content and traffic base, there comes a time when you must focus on optimizing your monetization. Otherwise, you’ll leave a lot of money on the table.

So, at the beginning of a new year, I thought I’d remind you to look at your monetization tactics and see how you can improve on them. How can you get conversion rates and make more money with the same amount of traffic? I’ll share two examples from my sites.

There are various ways to approach the monetization process but basically it boils down to testing. In other words, try different ways to make money. Then, let them run at the same time and after a couple weeks, analyze the results and pick the best method.

Testing AdSense

I’ve been testing the AdSense ads for a dating blog I co-own with my sister. The blog reached a respectable level of traffic a few months ago, so I started optimizing the ads since they were the blog’s primary income source.

In my first test, I created two different ads and placed them above the fold and below the fold. Then, I let them run for a couple of weeks. During the testing period, ad #1 ran half the time and ad #2 ran in the other half. After the test, it was pretty clear what we needed to do to make more money. Above the fold, ad #1 made almost four times as much money as ad #2. Below the fold, both ads made the same amount of money but it was very small amount.

Based on the results, we kept ad #1 above the fold and discarded ad #2. The money from the ads below the fold was so low that we scrapped them to make the site less cluttered.

Giving Up on a Strategy

Sometimes you have to drop a monetization strategy since it’s clearly not working. For example, I’ve tried multiple ways to get AdSense working on my gaming blog. The biggest program was the irrelevancy. AdSense kept showing irrelevant ads even when I tried to tweak my posts. Because of this, the dating blog makes 30 times more than the gaming blog yet it has half the amount of traffic. I understand that dating is probably a more lucrative niche than gaming but not 30 times more!

Therefore, I scrapped AdSense and found a couple related affiliate programs. It’s still early, but the numbers have been better than AdSense.

Continual Improvement Through Testing

Fortunately, it doesn’t take much time to set up a monetization campaign. Most of the work is just setting up a test and that can be done in a couple of hours. Once you’ve done that, you don’t have to check it until a couple days or weeks have passed. Then, you spend a couple more hours to analyze the results, make the necessary changes, and setup a new test.

But you do have to remind yourself to continually test every couple weeks or so. Again, it’s easy to forget since you can get lost in all content generation and marketing so put it on the calendar as a reminder.

Performancing offers blog management services.

Blogging More Efficiently by Doing What Works

I often meet bloggers that think that blogging is about doing certain things. They’ve read a couple blogs about blogging and find out that there are many different blogging activities they can do. So they create a checklist and methodically try to complete every activity on the checklist. These activities may include:

• Twitter marketing
• Guest posting
• Blog commenting
• Submitting to article directories
• Creating list posts
• Doing interviews
• Writing humorous posts

The problem with the checklist approach is that different activities will yield different results. Guest posting may send more traffic than blog commenting. Or list posts may attract more links than interviews.

As you manage and promote your blog, if you’re watchful, you’ll see that certain activities will be more successful than others.

Once you’ve made that realization, you should move more time and effort to those successful activities.

Sometimes the first thing you do provides very good results, so there’s not much reason to spend a lot of time on the other activities.

The 80/20 Approach

Instead of the checklist approach, I suggest the 80/20 approach.

With this approach, you spend 80% of your time on activities that have worked well for your blog. If being active on Twitter has brough a sizable increase on your RSS subscriber base, then you spend a lot of time of Twitter. If funny posts have been well received by your audience, then you set aside much of your time to create those posts.

With the rest of the time, you use it to try out new things or the activities you like that don’t provide the best results.

The 20% is there so you don’t get bored. It seems to be human nature to try new things. Plus, by trying out new things, you could find an activity that works even better than your current best activities.

Different Activities for Different Blogs

One thing to note is that certain activities work well for some blogs but not for others. Just because article marketing works for your pet blog doesn’t mean it will work as well for your travel blog.

This means you should spend time testing different activities to see which ones work for each blog.

For example, I used to do a lot of article marketing but I found that it didn’t work that well for many blogs. For many niches, article marketing is very saturated and overdone. Your articles don’t really get much traffic because there are so many competing articles.

But I submitted some test articles for a new blog in the gaming industry. These articles did well since surprisingly the gaming industry is not active on the article directories. Therefore, I spend most of my marketing time doing article marketing for the gaming blog.

To recap, through testing figure out which activities work well and then spend the bulk of your time and effort on those activities. This strategy will improve your blog as quickly and efficiently as possible.

Performancing offers an authority builder service to help you discover which activities provide the best results for your site.