Breakdown of Blog Earnings

Once in a while I do post about my blog earnings on this blog. I still do not like to post exact figures although it would give me some credibility with the blog community who seem to put those into higher regard that earn a lot of money with their blogs. Still, you would not tell someone you hardly knew how much you'd earn in your job either, would not you ?

This post describes the progress of monetizing Ghacks and will hopefully encourage others and probably give at least some readers new ideas on what they could do to monetize their blog or website.

I'm basically using three monetization concepts here at Ghacks. The first is Pay Per Click which makes up the majority of my earnings, then there is Pay Per Impression and last but not least we have Affiliate Sales.

Pay Per Click

I'm using Google Adsense which has been my major source of income for a very long time side by side with Vibrant Medias Intellitxt service. Google Adsense was on a decline ever since Google changed the clickable area of their ads while Intellitxt is on a huge rise. It gets even better, Vibrant Media pays in Euro, one of the few advertising companies that do. This is very helpful and a good counterweight to the decreasing value of the Dollar in the world. Both make up roughly 80% of my blogs earnings.

Pay Per Impression

This is something that I'm exploring lately and I had good results with Tribalfusion. They make up roughly 10% of my blogs earnings which is ok for impression based services. I read about chaining just lately and signed up for Burst Media and Vizi as well to chain advertisements.

Let me explain what that means. The companies are not able to fill out all of your inventory with ads. Good companies fill 50%+ of the inventory with ads and display default ads (or none) if they can't fill the ad spot with an ad.

Instead of displaying none paying default ads or no ads webmasters began to chain services and put them into tiers. So, if Tribalfusion can't serve the ad they send the request to Burst who fill the ad or, if they cannot, send it to Vizi to fill the ad.

This makes it possible to create a higher fill rate for your ad inventory and earn money in the process.

Direct Advertisement is normally impression based as well and this is an area where I really have to do more. I made a contact with the nice guys of Ciao who ordered an ad placement for six months but this is just a tiny deal, nothing big. The deal was made after I contacted them asking if they wanted to advertise on my website.

My plans are to create a list of possible advertisers first and write 2-3 emails each day. I don't have that much experience in writing sales letters but I will learn that as well I think.

Affiliate Earnings

This is not really working for my blog. Earnings are neglectable except for the earnings of the Giganews affiliate program which is earning a good amount of money if you consider that I mention it only in a few posts on my site.

To Do:

Direct Advertisement is the key to go. I'm at a cap with all advertisements on my site and only new traffic sources would raise the amount of money that I earn from this website. (I'm currently testing something that will drive more traffic to my blog, I will probably write about it if it is indeed successful).

The big advantage of Direct Advertisement is that the webmaster keeps all the money. There is no third party that gets a piece of the cake. It's more work though and pretty hard to convince companies to advertise on a website directly.

Looking For:

I'm looking for someone who has experience in making direct advertisement deals with companies. A few friends of mine would join the party with their successful blogs as well and you would earn a percentage of every direct advertisement deal that you make.

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