Most bloggers have tried some sort of advertising as a way to make money, but how many of you have paid for advertising to promote your own blog?
Recently I have experimented a little with the banner ad you see here. I have gained some interesting results which I thought I would share with you:
I’m by no means the first to advertise a blog, John Chow famously would use adwords placed on blogs with cheeky messages to promote his own blog.
Unsurprisingly my results fall into good and bad. My design skills only stretch so far so some of the blame has to rest with my meagre artistic ability!
- Costs range from $10 up to $1000 a week
- BUT It is possible to find a good fit for your blog in the $10-$20 range if you ask around
- The higher prices do not necessarily translate into better results!
- You need to place your ad on a blog that matches but does not 100% overlap your own audience
- Investigate carefully your exact ad placement AND what will happen if the site sells another ad after you – you don’t want to be pushed down below the fold after paying
- Experiment with ad copy, ad format, site category and landing page for best results
- Closely compare the cost per click against Adwords, in my case only one blog provided better ROI than Google
- In my case conversions and bounce rate beat both my previous Squidoo Squidoffer and StumbleUpon advertising experiments
- There is branding benefit from 125x ads but don’t take that into account in your ROI calculation as it is hard to measure. Just assume any advertising helps get you better known.
The final conclusion I have come to is advertising is worthwhile IF you track everything and only keep those that work. It does not replace getting good in-content links from fellow bloggers, but does compliment that strategy well.
Have you advertised your blog? Let us know your thoughts in the comments …
