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The Adverblog – Finally starting to make blogging pay

Some readers might remember a short flirtation I had with introducing advertising to this blog. It didn't go down well with the readers, and I tended to agree with them. I want this blog to remain a personal thing. But there are opportunities to earn money from blogging, and I've been experimenting with them recently. That's where the Adverblog comes in. It's a blog entirely dedicated to paid advertising.

So how does one make money from blogging? Well, it's all about SEO. SEO (Search Engine Optimisation) is what you do to make your site come up in search engines like google. The higher your site comes when people search, the more traffic you get to your website, and the more money you make from however you are trying to convert your visits. It's a numbers game, and one of the most important numbers in the equation is how many other sites on the Internet link to your website. It's not that simple, though. The links carry a weight. A link which is simply randomly placed on some site which google doesn't respect isn't worth much. But a link from a page with plenty of similar keywords in the title, URL and text from to the page you are trying to promote, especially from a site which google considers has gravitas is worth.... well, how much is it worth? Turns out a fair bit, and blogs are the perfect vehicle for this.

Blogs have been recognised as a powerful marketing tool for some time and this kind of professional blogging has been going on for a while. Google loves blogs, indexes them nicely and blogging software like wordpress is well set up to create an SEO friendly, categorised, fast growing and well indexed website very quickly. Banner advertising, even PPC contextual link advertising stuffed into content. It's all looking a bit dated. More and more expensive and less and less effective. The kind of advertising I'm talking about here; custom advertorial- is on the rise.

I've been experimenting with a website called Pay Per Post recently. They have a large number of advertisers who sign up and are willing to pay bloggers real money to create a post on their blog. PPP have thousands of bloggers signed up too. Each post earns the blogger $5-$20 US. The process of getting your blog approved takes a while, and not all blogs will be accepted, but once it is you are able to choose from hundreds of advertising 'opportunities'. These opportunities give you an idea of what the advertiser wants. How many words to write, the website to link to, any images, what category to put it in, all that. Once you've created the post, which generally takes a few minutes, it gets reviewed and if it meets all the criteria, you get paid by paypal. You can only accept 2 opportunities per blog per day, but it definitely makes it possible to make some money.

In the past few weeks I've averaged around $150 per week. It's not going to buy me a yacht, but that level of income will pay the costs of my office here in Chamonix. And it's a damn sight more than I've ever made from adsense.

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