Diversifying Your Revenue
There has been so much talk lately (lately meaning all of 2005) on how to maximize your Adsense positioning for higher revenue and not enough talk on other ways to maximize the revenue of your sites. Too often do we find a subject for our blogs only to give up on it because the Adsense revenue wasn’t there for it. Adsense/Yahoo doesn’t work for all blog topics. It certainly doesn’t work for some of the sites in this Network, but that doesn’t mean that the topics aren’t worth writing about.
Two great examples that I can think of off the top of my head are Boing Boing and The Superficial. Both sites offer content that is horrible for contextual advertising, so they basically avoid it. Boing Boing offers it on individual pages, but it is so miniscule that it might as well not be there. Each of these sites makes more than enough per month to make any person happy because their traffic is so large.
I watched The Superficial from the beginning and admittedly it started off real slow as any site would and he could’ve easily abandoned it after a couple of months because it was not producing that much money. However, he stuck with it and saw that he could make money through BlogAds and CPM ads instead of Adsense.
The reason people harp on the fact that you should pick a topic you like is because writing on something you enjoy is much easier than writing on something you don’t and usually the content you produce will be much better. Given enough time I think any topic can find a way to produce revenue, you just have to expand your knowledge of online revenue sources.
Safety Reasons
The best reason though to diversify your revenue is because you don’t want to get caught with the proverbial “all your eggs in one basket”. Nothing worse than one day waking up and seeing that your sites has dropped significantly in all search engine rankings lowering your SE traffic and more than likely your Adsense revenue.
It takes a little more effort a time to manage multiple streams of revenue, but in the end it is definitely worth it. With that said don’t avoid a topic just because it isn’t on the contextual ad hotlist, avoid it because you don’t think you could make it into a quality site.
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POSTED IN: Online Money
3 opinions for Diversifying Your Revenue
Michael Moncur
Oct 19, 2005 at 3:57 pm
I agree! I use several CPM networks and most of them make more than Adsense for me (since I have some high-traffic sites). It always amazes me when people treat AdSense as the only revenue source.
j
Oct 20, 2005 at 1:13 am
i used to not like the superficial because i thought the writing was dubious, but it’s grown on me. it’s not always funny but it’s very consistent.
Scrivs
Oct 20, 2005 at 2:35 am
One of these days I will jump in the CPM game once I have some sites under my belt that I feel would be worth the time to uglify a bit for the money.
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