There ya go…75K, in just a single web visit.

Fuzzy Math, I think they call it.

God I love Southpark : )

http://www.southparkstudios.com/clips/165196/

Then again, my marketing budget probably wouldn’t allow it.

This kind of story exemplifies the problem of using the mean (average) as a substitute for the median (typical value). I doubt even the Volokh gang make $75K/year.

While this is true there is also the number of blogs in the sample to consider. For example, if there are 1,000 blogs then to get an average of $75,000/year you’ll need some really, really big earners if most are pulling in a few thousand a year or less.

Also, they may not have a representative sample of blogs. If they pick one’s people know about, by-and-large, then they may very well be over-sampling large blogs and thus also oversampling blogs with nice little incomes.

At least in firefox, there’s a gap between the ads on the top of the page and the beginning of the content. You end up with a whitespace gap at the top of the page which makes the ads fairly easy to ignore.

You should test using inline advertising which highlights some key words for you. When a reader mouses over the word, it pops up advertising links. I personally hate them but the proof tends to be in the results of your testing.

The reason people suggest moving ad copy to the left is simply an old-school layout concept. In the west, the eye reads from left to right. As long as you have more than one line of text on the page, the eye has to come back to the left. If you have longer content that finishes further down than your general ad copy goes, you end up with unused white space on either side. This happens quite a bit in content with comments. In the ‘comment’ template, throw in an ad block at the bottom of the comments.

Create a new navigation banner with drop-down menus for your site features. The navigation you have for site features takes up quite a bit of good real estate on the page. By condensing these elements, you free up some additional space….

As mentioned in other comments, this site’s contents as well as visitors are not highly “monetizable.”

Google Adsense, while popular, is far from the only way to monetize a website but tends to be the default ad service for sites that do not have a natural related service or product.

I have some blogs, but the blogs themselves are not set up to make much money directly. They DO feed other sites that make revenue.

Sites that rely on social media and/or regular readership ( subscribers) are tough to monetize, especially with contextual ads. Readers don’t really click on ads. But surfers do. Said surfers come from search traffic for the most part.

If you write well and enjoy writing, you can make money blogging. However, it might come from a subject you are not passionate about. Or it could come from a subject you ARE passionate about, as long as it can be monetized and you do the research.

You might find that people search for and buy “widgets” for example. Then you do basic keyword research and niche research. You find a niche that is popular and semi- competitive but doable. Maybe you decide to write an entire blog about how widgets work and reviews of said widgets. There are many companies who run affiliate programs for these widgets. They will pay you 50 bucks a sale. Some of these widgets are even “free” for your visitors. You start reviewing specific widgets, using affiliate links in your posts. Of course you optimize your blog titles and all that good stuff to rank in search. Then you go out and get 1000s of backlinks. You vary the anchor text but get some variation of your main keyword(s). You might even discretely buy a few links on authority or high pagerank sites.

You start getting search traffic for your keywords, which match your contextual, banner, and text ads perfectly. Your blog post about ” New Blue Widget Model XL3″ now has Adsense ads for “free blue widget model XL3″, ” compare blue widget XL3 prices,” and so on. Plus you also have a banner that leads to the most reputable online widget dealer that also pays high commissions. And your actual post has affiliate text links. The banner and text links also use cookies of 7-30 days or more. If the visitor clicks through and doesn’t buy anything that day but goes back later and buys- $$$. This works especially well for 2 major sites- think auctions for 1 and bookseller for the other.

Every time you write a new post you add new content to your site and more keywords for people to find your site. You get deep links to every post, then you also link internally to previous or related posts. All with the proper text off course- none of that “click here” or ” see this post I wrote before” nonsense.

That’s one way to do it anyway.

Some of the bigger social sites and just really well known blogs make money in private ads. Also a lot of the big money earners are really not monetized well at all or even good for monetizing. They get by on sheer volume. For example, LOLcat and other blogs really don’t make much money at all considering how popular and well known they are. There are blogs and networks no one has ever heard of that make more money on a fraction of the traffic.

Kevin, your (mis)use of the word “to” instead of “too” is a perfect example of “Murphry’s Law”–one will inevitably make a grammatical or spelling error when posting to correct such a mistake made by another.

http://www.southparkstudios.com/clips/165192/?tag=Butters

: )

I don’t know how your ads are set up, but links to things that are particularly related to that might do well here. I know that links to books relating to police power would get me to click because that sort of stuff does end up in my amazon basket. I am sure you have a long list of books with that theme that should be regular selections on your amazon banner. Even books about general government growth, power, and abuse would be well received by your readers. I am thinking in terms of classics like Bastiat, or modern writers like James Bovard, Peter McWilliams, or Richard A. Epstein. Or, even more popular authors like John Stossel and Andrew Napolitano.

Similarly, I’ve been lucky not to need one, but I would probably click through on ads from lawyers who handle police abuse and injustice cases, just to see that there are some who do. To be honest, more than once I have read stories here and literally thought, “When these clowns have pulled their boots off the back of my neck and are hauling me in to pass the rest of the railroad job to the prosecutor, it sure would be nice to know the name of a reasonably local lawyer who handles this sort of case.” I can’t be the only one here who reads your posts and has a “there but for the grace of a criminal with a poor memory for addresses go I” moment.

My point is, your audience comes here generally to learn about a certain class of issues and maybe the advertising could be more focused.

In addition, google tends to generate a lot of content-specific ads that are really just comical, given the real context of the site. Half the ads on a raid-gone-wrong story will be for police training or police job hunt sites. So, your readers are looking at a story where the authorities busted down someone’s door and then killed him before discovering they were at the wrong place and then we look up and see a “wanna be a cop?” ad (some of them with pictures of the boys in their full SWAT, wannabe-ninja/soldier, raid gear). I just snicker.

#20 | The_Chef | October 6th, 2008 at 12:01 am

Adam | October 5th, 2008 at 4:58 pm

Libertarians are cheap. They don’t click on ads – in fact, they have plugins in their browsers to disable those ads.

Pray tell does FF have such a plugin?

Adblock Plus

Adam | October 5th, 2008 at 4:58 pm

Libertarians are cheap. They don’t click on ads – in fact, they have plugins in their browsers to disable those ads.

Pray tell does FF have such a plugin?

Just kidding. I’m too cheap even for that.