Blog Advertising & Making Money by Blogging

I have mentioned several times here that reviews of products & services are an important part of a blogger’s revenue stream. Although there are several options available to bloggers, blog advertising to the serious bloggers are a true way of standing out in the crowd.

You have to do your homework well before you advertise on blogs. From my personal experience I look into 5 important aspects. You can form your own selection criteria, but knowing these could help you make a more informed choice.

Before I go into the criteria, here are the 2 reasons why I am so serious about blog advertising:

• Blog Advertising has a viral effect – if you are able to choose your blogs right, within a strong & a network of people who are held in high respect among the blogging community, you are more likely to be referred from one blog to another. This viral effect could help you get new & serious visitors very fast.
• Generate back links – back links are very important when you are planning for a good SEO strategy. A recent article why back links are important for SEO shows that it helps to improve the Page Rank & the search positions.

So what do I look for in blogs when you think of Blog Advertising?

• the credibility of the blog in terms of its content – I personally follow the blog for sometime, reading every post, reading the comments to see how serious it’s readers are & then form my opinions on whether to advertise or not
• the credibility of the author – I do my research on social networking sites, Google the name to know about the author & read as much of the author’s work as possible. I try to identify if the author has been through the same phases of blogging as I. And only when I find the resemblance, I become confident that the readers would likely be my readers too
• the blog statistics – this is commonly available from Compete or any similar data source. The few statistics that I look for are the (a) daily visitors (b) average page loads (c) number of comments left by readers (d) the average time readers spend on the pages & (e) the frequency with which the blog is updated
• the blog design & the advertising that shows up on the blogs – if the blog is too crowded by ads, I would rather not show my ad. The type of ads are also important – whether it shows more affiliate ads that are currently in demand, or is it too niche for my blog
• whether the blog allows other reputed bloggers to post or whether it is a personal blog – very often popular blogs allow other members of its network to publish on that blog, while others maintain a solo performance. Both have their own advantages & disadvantages but the fact that a blog is open to publications from its members attract me more simply because they always have influence over a bigger audience

I often write to the owner for discounts & in case there are no advertising at all, I have also written to find out the author’s thought on allowing me to show a sponsored ads. They have often worked out well for me, getting me information that was not available anywhere else.