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Monetizing A Blog

English: Red Pinterest logo (Photo credit: Wikipedia)

Here's a good one.

How I monetized a blog in 30 days: what worked, and what didn't

The Pinterest Gods

I help my mom run a cooking blog called The Yummy Life. She writes all the content, and I make sure the site actually works. We've been at it for almost two years, and until recently there wasn't much reason to worry about monetizing it because there was never enough traffic for it to matter. Then one day the Pinterest gods decided that we deserved better and in a frantic storm of pinning, our traffic shot up to about 25,000 visitors per day...... Before the spike we were getting ~4k visitors per day. The peak of the spike brought ~67k. It then fell to about 20-25k and it's stayed there ever since. There hasn't been any downward trend in the past three weeks, and almost all of the traffic is still coming from Pinterest.

Tips

#1 - Remove as much crap as possible from the sidebar (Good, Bad)
#2 - Use affiliate links to customize the ads for each post .... create her own ads for each post. Each ad links to a product on Amazon through an affiliate link. .... the Amazon affiliate links are generating almost twice as much revenue per visitor as the AdSense ads (~$5 RPM from Amazon, ~$2.50 RPM from AdSense).
#3 - Have the ads scroll with the page
.... steps #1 and #3 combined to increase our AdSense CTR (click-through-rate) by a factor of 33 (.03% to 1%).

Bad Ideas

Google AdSense text ads
Amazon pre-made banner ads
Amazon aStore .... This month we've had 3,288 orders placed through our on-page ads. We've had exactly zero placed through the aStore.
$0.99 eBook
Publishing networks

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Platform Agnostic Is The Way To Go

Fred Wilson (Photo credit: Lachlan Hardy)

Fred Wilson has revisited his blog post Mobile First, Web Second that was inspired by a blog post of mine.

I think Mobile First, Web Second made perfect sense at the time, but that was an aggression needed to balance out the over emphasis on the Old Web we had seen to that point.

But the truth is it is not web first or mobile first. It is neither. It is user first. And the best applications going forward will be platform agnostic. As long as you use it, it does not matter what platform you use it on. And your behavior, your interactions will be collected in the Big Data world to glean insights on you - not necessarily to serve ads in sneaky ways - that can have huge commercial values. LinkedIn is a great example on that monetization strategy. LinkedIn does not make money because you visit it several times a day. You don't. How many times are you going to look at your own resume? Unless you are unemployed and are anal about that condition.

Mobile First, Web Second - Fred Wilson's most popular and most quoted blog post of 2010 - was right on for 2010. But with hindsight we have to see it was there to counterbalance Web And Web Alone, the thesis that had been ruling the space for more than a decade to that point, more like a decade and a half.

The app of today and tomorrow has to exist on all platforms - the laptop, the tablet, the smartphone - and more platforms than are in vogue today. Think wristwatch, think TV screen, think movie screen. Think platforms made possible by the gesture - NUI, Natural User Interface - going mainstream.

It is not about the platform, it is about the user.

Vibhu Norby misses the point. Although what he has said are points worth considering by those who are thinking monetization in the short run.

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Monetizing A Startup

Image via WikipediaI am a huge fan of the freemium model. Keep the basic product free, get lots and lots of deeply engaged users, and monetization will happen. But that is not the only way. Some great services charge right away. Whatever floats your boat. You can delay making money, but not forever. Shorter the delay, better it is.

How To Monetize Your Social Web Startup there really is no secret sauce to making money on the social web: you’re either selling ads or selling a product. ..... While it’s possible to generate revenue through a number of models, there are really only a few core monetization models. ..... Since ownership of mass distribution channels is becoming fragmented, advertisers are looking for targeted audiences that are most likely to purchase their product. ...... Whether it’s an information product or a physical good, there are massive opportunities to generate revenue from selling things. ..... Brand advocacy in the world of social media is something that has many marketers drooling but rather than spending all your time monitoring the conversation, try developing a high quality product or service. .... many internet entrepreneurs pretend as though there is a secret monetization model that they’ll release in the near future. There isn’t one.

Netizen VigLink Pre-Sales Report

PayCheckr Potential

Allan Hoving and I are meeting in person this evening.

PayCheckr sure got a great idea, and it has been gutsy enough to want to tackle a core problem on the web right now. It is not as fundamental as search, but is close. I am impressed with the idea. Questions remain.

1. Are you willing to expand the vision enough to truly do service to the idea?
2. Are you willing to bluntly assess your resources or lack thereof? Can your engineering team deliver? If not, are you willing to expand?
   
3. Are you willing to raise some serious money?
   

Netizen: The First Blog To Place The PayCheckr Button
The PayCheckr Promise
PayCheckr Potential
PayCheckr: Bringing Money Into Blogging?

Sparq And Tweet Ads

Image via CrunchBase

Image by Getty Images via Daylife

I was just making my rounds on Twitter and chanced by Fred Wilson's Twitter page and there was this tweet screaming at me from the top of his page. Before long the same tweet was screaming from my Twitter page.

But in between something happened. I got reminded of a blog post of mine from a few weeks ago: Monetizing Twitter: A Few Ideas.

If outside players are going to be the ones to monetize Twitter, then how will Twitter ever make any money? It does not have to make any money right away, or even in the short term, but it does not have the option to never make any money.

It is so obvious to me the killer ads on Twitter are going to be in the form of tweeets. And Sparq looks to me like is in good shape. They sound promising.

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