Monetizing Your Blog Archives

In some ways, blogs are more akin to newspapers than we’d care to admit. More often than not, todays post is tomorrows fish wrapper. Our content is often very time sensitive and may only have a shelf life of a single day. Sad but true.

So what do we do about all of those posts, sometimes thousands of them serving no better purpose than to bring in a few folks via search engines, searching for obscure terms? What is it that you do?

Time Sensitive Advertising

One way is to put heavier concentrations of Adsense on your older posts. Possibly combine that with some logic pertaining to whether your visitor is a regular reader/member or not. It’s what I do on several sites, and it works very, very nicely.

I can only show you the psuedo code for doing this on the Drupal system. Im not a WordPress or MT guy. But I would love to hear of hacks or plugins that can acheive similar results on those platforms!

For me, i use a combinatin of the time the post was published, and whether a user is logged in or not. The psuedo code would go something like this:

60*60*48 && !$UserIsLoggedIn) {
show_heavy_adsense();
} else {
show_normal_adsense();
?>

You can do all kinds of logic for this, on one site i have several different positions and sizes of adsense depending on users and time. It’s not simple, but if you’re not a PHP wizz, then it may well be worth hiring one, as this could dramatically increase earnings without pissing off readers.

The Reasoning

My thoughts are this; If a user is coming in 2 days late to a post, and is not logged in, they’re most likely from a search engine referal (you could even code that logic into it pretty easily using just the USER_AGENT string) and thus, they’re far less likely to become a regular reader than someone coming in from a link from another site. Often search engine referals come in for fairly obscure phrases, and call me evil if you like, but i’d be very happy if they’d kindly click out via my adsense.

Positioning

For me, in this particular scenario, the single best adsense position is a large rectangle direcly beneath the title of the post. Blended, naturally.

How Do You Monetize Your Archives?

There, you have an idea of what I do. Now i’d like to hear about what you do to monetize your blog archives?