Sunday Link Love

Aug24 in Links by admin
10 Comments

As you know I am currently running a series entitled ‘Make Money Blogging‘, With that in mind, this weeks Sunday Link Love post consists of post that are based on the subject of making money from your blog. They are not all recent posts, but are still very useful.

Feel free to post your favourite links below!

Make Money Blogging: Selling Your Ad Spots

Aug22 in Making Money Online by admin
12 Comments

This is the second post in my series about how to make money blogging. You can find the rest of the posts here:

  1. How To Make Money Blogging
  2. Make Money Blogging: Selling Your Ad Spots

As I mentioned in my first post, one of the most popular way for blogs to make money is by selling Ads directly on their site. The problem with this however is that it is not always easy to sell all of your Ad spots, this leaves wholes on your blog, which are usually filled with Affiliate Ads where income is not guaranteed.

The first thing you need to decide on when selling Ads directly on your site is the fee you are going to charge, you don’t want to charge so much that people cannot afford to buy your spots, on the other hand you don’t want to charge so little so that you are not making any money. It is a difficult area to judge, there is no set rule for deciding what fee to charge. I have picked out a couple of articles that may help you along the way:

  1. The Economics Behind Selling Blog Advertising
  2. Adspot Pricing For Blogs Exposed

As a general rule I would suggest looking at blogs that are at a similar level to you and use that as a marker.

Once you have decided your price you then need people to buy them, chances are you will not get many people coming to you for your Ad Spots, you usually will have to go to them, be pro-active.

There are several ways that this can be achieved, the first one that I use is to look at my competitors blogs and see who is advertising on them, I then contact those advertisers with details about my Ad Spots. Chances are, if they are buying advertising on a competitors site, they will be interested in advertising on your blog.

The next step I use is to roam around blogs and sites within my niche, looking for blogs that I think would benefit from advertising on my blog, I then contact the owner telling them the benefits of advertising on my blog, as well as the details of my ad spots.

Finally, if I have not sold all my ad spots for the month using the previous two methods, I head over to the ‘Digital Point Forums Link Sales Area‘, and post up details of the spots I have available, this usually helps to fill any remaining spots.

You should now be able to sell all your ad spots directly. If you don’t feel that you have time to personally manage your Ad spots you can also use programs such as:

They help to take the pressure off of selling your ad spots, you can then direct people to your ‘Buy Ads’ page and let them buy ads that way.

I want to know if you have tried any of these methods, or if you have a method that you find works for you?

How To Make Money Blogging

Aug20 in Making Money Online by admin
13 Comments

This is the first post in my series about how to make money blogging. You can find the rest of the posts here:

  1. How To Make Money Blogging
  2. Make Money Blogging: Selling Your Ad Spots

I recently posted the preliminary results from my bloggers survey, with the most eye-catching stat being that on average bloggers are only making around $20 a month from their blogs. Obviously there are many bloggers making more than this, but there are also many that are not earning anything.

I am obviously disappointed that many people don’t seem to be making money from their blogs, so I will be running a small series on my blog over the coming weeks, which I hope will help to rocket your blogs earnings.

As part of my series I would like to have two blogs to use as case studies, so if you fancy being featured in my short series then feel free to contact me with details of your blog. I will consider any niche of blog.

So let’s start learning how to make money blogging:

Today I want to look at the methods available to bloggers to make money blogging, below I have outlined the earning systems that I believe work best on blogs:

  • Direct Ad Sales
  • Affiliate Ads
  • Contextual Ads
  • Sponsored Posts
  • Text Link Ads

As you can see there is a pretty wide selection available, which means that every blog should be able to use at least one or two of them. Lets look at each one in more detail:

Direct Ads Sales

Direct Ads Sales are one of the most popular choices for bloggers, usually they take the form of 125×125 banner ads in the blogs sidebar, but many bloggers also sell banner ads in other areas of their blogs, such as above and below blog posts.

There have been an increase in programs looking to help with the sale of Direct Ads on blogs, some of the most notable are:

I will produce a post about how to sell all your Ad Spots during this series.

Affiliate Ads

Affiliate Ads on blogs can come in a number of ways, many bloggers use them in their sidebars to fill empty Ad spots, others recommend products and services and link to them with an affiliate link. Others simply advertise products passively in blogs posts. Affiliate Ads can be a very powerful way of making money with your blog as there is usually a higher earning potential per click. I have had success with Market Leverage but there are many other affiliate networks available.

I will produce a post about how to make the most from Affiliate Ads during this series.

Contextual Ads

I believe it is fair to assume that Google Adsense is the most popular Contextual Ad Network on the Internet and I am sure many of you will know how it works. For those of you that may be new to this, Contextual Ad programs such as Google Adsense, display Ads on your site that are relevant to the content of your blog.

I will produce a post in this series about how to maximise your Adsense earnings on your blog.

Sponsored Post

This is a method that I am not overly keen on, but many bloggers use it to earn some decent money from their blogs. Many use this to Ad to earnings from Affiliate and Contextual Ads as it does not earn so much per month. There are networks such as Pay Per Post and Review Me that are popular amongst bloggers.

Text Link Ads

Many bloggers have a featured links section on their sidebar, they use this to sell Text Link to other blogs. This is a good way of earning a little extra cash from your blog, blogs with a higher PageRank or high traffic stats can earn some good rates from Text Link Ads. You can sell the Ads directly or you can use a program such as Text Link Ads.

I have now outlined the most effective methods available to make money from your blogs. I would like to know what method you think is best for bloggers?

Sunday Link Love

Aug17 in Links by admin
8 Comments

Hope you enjoy the links, what is the best post you have read this week?

Bloggers Survey #1 Findings

Aug13 in ProTycoon News by admin
7 Comments

As many of you will know I ran a small survey of bloggers to try and get some statistics about bloggers. The survey is still open if you want to get involved, you can find details here: ‘The Bloggers Survey #1‘.

So I thought I would give you a few updates on the bloggers that make up the blogosphere. I will run through some of the stats that I have gathered so far, you may find them useful when working on your blogs.

Q1. How Many Blogs Do You Run?

  • 42.9% – 2-3 Blogs

The rest are spread between 1 blog and 5+ blogs but the majority of bloggers surveyed run 2-3 blogs. This means that bloggers are sharing their time between blogs and can leverage the power of each blog and share it amongst the others. It also means that bloggers are in a good position to network with other bloggers as they have a large target area.

Q 3. What Blogging Platforms Do You Use?

  • 71.4% – WordPress

This is a stat that I expected, I have seen a big rise in the number of bloggers that are moving to WordPress. If you are running a blog about blogging then you may want to lean slightly towards your WordPress readers as there is a chance that there is more of them.

Q 4. How Long Have You Been Blogging?

  • Average of 3-4 months

This is a stat that slightly surprised me. I have decided that it is down to either the fact that people who read my blog are newbies that are still learning about blogging or many bloggers don’t last past the difficult first 6 months. What do you think the reason is for this stat?

Q 8. How Much Do You Earn Blogging? (Per Month)

  • Average of around $20

This is a lot lower than I was expecting, it is something that I am going to be focusing on next week, to help us raise this average. I will provide some guides on how to increase your earnings via your blog. So make sure you subscribe to not miss out.

This is just a snapshot of where we are so far in the survey, I will leave it open for a few more weeks. Once I feel a fair number of bloggers have taken the survey I will close it and produce a small ebook of the results. Which will include links to the blogs that participated.

I would like to know some of your feelings on the results so far?

If you have not participated and would like to, please see: ‘The Bloggers Survey #1‘

Your Blogging or Your Life

Aug11 in ProTycoon News by admin
14 Comments

As many of you may have noticed I have not done any updating this week, this is because I decided to take a week out. I have been working really hard on all of my sites and blogs over the last month and have put a lot of other activities in my life on hold.

The last week has made me realise that I need to spend less time working online and focus on the things that are really important in life. I spend a lot of my time blogging, reading other blogs, updating my other sites, checking stats and advertising. The combined time of all these activities mean that it takes up a huge chunk of my week.

The result is that I have decided to stick to just one blog, this one. I currently have two other blogs and a number of money making sites. I am now going to sell all of those and focus all of my energies on ProTycoon.com and free up some more time to actually have a life.

I know many people who find it really easy to manage a number of sites and don’t let it control their life, but at the moment I feel like there is a lot of pressure on me to update and maintain my sites.

I want to know how you manage your time blogging? Do you set time aside for blogging activities?

Also if anyone is interested in purchasing an established blog, or any of my sites contact me for details of what I am selling.

Performancing Ads Launched

Aug5 in Making Money Online by admin
15 Comments

PerformancingAdsPerformancing which is a large blogging community last week launched their their new Ad Network, Performancing Ads. The Ad network is focused at bloggers by focusing on the 125x125px banners that are the most popular choice for bloggers.

I have recently signed up to the Ad network to get a feel for what it has to offer and to see if it is beneficial to me. Here are some key points that I have noticed:

  • The Ad network is good for anyone looking to buy/sell 125×125 banner ads. It is more focused at these ads and has a large market place.
  • All the payments, bookings and Ads are managed by Performancing, so it reduces your work load.
  • You can book your own ads. This is useful if like me you offer away some Ads on your blog, you can simply buy the space yourself for free.
  • There is a large marketplace to sell ads on your blog, this means that you are increasing the chances of selling ads on your blog.
  • Cheap advertising can be bought. You can find some bargains in the marketplace to increase your blogs exposure.
  • You can control where the ads appear and how they are formatted.
  • Once your blog is added, you can create separate regions, to show ads in different places on your blog.
  • You can filter out ads that you don’t want on your blog.
  • The ads are bought on a weekly basis. This might encourage more sales in a month. And means that you don’t always have the same ads for a whole month.
  • You set the price. You choose the weekly price for your ads, so you can control what you are earning.
  • The ads are easily integrated into wordpress.

As you can see there are some great reasons to choose Performancing Ads. The only downside that I can see is that they take a 40% cut of your earnings. However better performing advertisers get to keep 90% of their profits. You can counteract the 40% by slightly increasing your ad price, so you are earning slightly more.

The Ad Network might by a good choice if you are currently not selling many ads per month, you have a better chance of selling ads once you are in the marketplace, so you could earn more, even with the 40% cut.

Have you tried Performancing Ads? How are they working for you? What do you like about them? What do you not like?
I will be installing the ads on ProTycoon.com over the coming days, sign up to purchase an Ad on my blog!

PerformancingAds

Sunday Link Love

Aug3 in Links by admin
8 Comments

I hope you enjoy the selection of fine links above.

Just to let you all know that I may be away for a few days soon, so I am offering the opportunity for people to have guest posts featured on ProTycoon.com. If you would like to have a guest post featured then please contact me.

I would also like to know any questions you have about blogging that you would like me to answer, you can ask your questions by contacting me, If I use your question in a blog post then I will link back to you.

What has been your favourite post from the past week? – From any blog, not just mine!

ProTycoon.com Contest Winners Announced

Aug1 in Contests by admin
30 Comments

I am now proud to annouce the winners of the first ProTycoon.com contest. In total there were 467 entries into the draw which was performed on ‘Random.org’. For those of you that were not aware of the ProTycoon.com Contest here are the prizes:

Contest Winner:

  • $110 cash via Paypal
  • 125×125 Sidebar Banner for August
  • 125×125 Sidebar Banner for one month on Blog for Beginners

Contest Runner-up:

  • 125×125 Sidebar Banner for August

As you can see there are some great prizes! Here is the result of the draw:

So the contest winner is:

The Runner up is:

I would like to say thank you to everyone that entered the contest, please stay tuned for any further contests, I am hoping to have another one near the end of August.

To the winners, please contact me to claim your prizes, if they are not claimed in the next 10 days, they will be given to the next person in the list.



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