Important: Advertising Blogger recommends that you use the rel=”nofollow” attribute on any links or banners you may sell on your blog. This will ensure that you are in compliance with some search engines’ guidelines. See the end of this post to learn how to use rel=”nofollow” on your advertising.
So, you want to make money on your blog but just aren’t sure if you have enough traffic to do it? Or is your blog finally seeing a good number of daily visits, but you don’t know what the right monetization method is for you?
Well, I have good news for you, dude: in either case, selling your own advertising on your blog could probably make you some extra money. While your blog might not be able to pay your mortgage every month, you may be surprised at just how much you can make by selling links, banners, buttons, and reviews on your blog.
While there are dozens of possible ways to sell advertising on your blog, the most popular methods are selling links, banner ads or buttons, and paid reviews of other sites. Other webmasters and bloggers are always on the lookout for good advertising deals on other blogs!
Paid Links
In this form of blog advertising, a webmaster pays you to link back to their relevant site in your sidebar. This is the easiest kind of advertising to sell and set up, and usually the least expensive to purchase, as well.
Banners and Buttons
Selling banner advertisements and buttons on blogs has become more and more popular, and is a form of advertising that offers more publicity for clients. The banners and buttons could be placed in your blog’s sidebar, header, or even within the content. You can create the banners for clients yourself if you have design skills, or do as most bloggers and just have your advertiser provide you with their own banner.
Paid Reviews
Paid reviews are generally the most expensive form of advertising on a blog, and involve writing a post about a product or website to share with your readers. This form of blog advertising also takes the most time to sell and produce, and usually requires some halfway decent writing skills. Some big bloggers with large audiences make hundreds and hundreds of dollars off of a single paid review!
So, what should I charge?
Selling advertising on your blog is generally a market-driven phenomenon, so you’ll be able to find out quickly how much people are willing to pay for an ad. While some A-list bloggers sell links, banners, and reviews for hundreds of dollars, many smaller blogs sell a link for five bucks a month and a review for twenty bucks.
When you do figure out the maximum price that people are willing to pay for advertising on your blog, set yourself short-term goals to gradually increase your prices as your daily visits go up. There’s nothing wrong with starting out small and slowly increasing what you charge as your blog becomes more valuable to advertisers!
About the rel=”nofollow” attribute
Nofollow is an HTML attribute value that tells search engines that a link shouldn’t influence rankings in the search engine index. It is against the guidelines of many search engines for people to buy links just to try to manipulate their positions in the search engine results, and adding rel=”nofollow” to the links and banners you sell will ensure that you comply with these guidelines.
Advertising Blogger recommends that you add the rel=”nofollow” attribute to all links, banners, and buttons sold on your blog, as well as any links present in paid reviews.