This is a question that all bloggers will need to face at some stage in their blogging life: Do I or do I not monetize my site and try to derive some blogging income from my blog?

The bottom line is why not? The question often raised is how.  Whether or not you run ads on your blog is always going to be a personal decision. The reality is, until you can generate a ton of traffic you are not going to generate much in the way of blogging income anyway.

One of the clever ways to generate blogging income is by not generating income at al - at least not initially. As you are not going to earn much, leave the ads out for starters. Over time, as your blog starts to get more and more traffic, start to incorporate ads - ads that are relevant to your site.

A good form of blogging income is through affiliate links. You can often find affiliate links to products that are closely related to your site. As you incorporate these ads, don’t be afraid to market them yourself either through direct blog posts or by highlighting the affiliate links.

Blogging income is a personal decision that should be made taking into account your blogs overall aim and whether or not you can incorporate ads that do not conflict with the sites overall look and feel.

I could also have written how to prevent halving your blogging income through Adsense. The income you receive for each click is based in part on your click through rate or CTR.

As you work to increase your traffic, you need to carefully watch that your CTR doesn’t start to fall. Many bloggers use traffic generating solutions which, while great for generating traffic, usually deliver poor CTR results.

Examples of poor CTR traffic include StumbleUpon, Entre Card, Blogrush and many of the other social sites. The best traffic for generating higher CTR’s is that derived from organic search results through the major search engines.

Common sense would suggest that as they have clicked a link to find you, they will also click a similar link to leave if you don’t quite match what they are looking for. If it is an Adsense link they are clicking then your CTR will rise.

With this in mind, you need to be sure your Adsense units are optimized to deliver the best results. Matching those ad units to web page is the first step, however placement can be critical. Visitors will not always travel below the fold if they feel the site is not providing what they want. Trial your Adsense units in a variety of places to see which placement produces the best results.

The bottom line when relying on Adsense for your blogging income is to ensure that any growth in traffic is not matched by a drop in your CTR. If this happens your per click return will drop dramatically. If you can increase your CTR then you may well find your per click return increasing and, with luck, your blogging income doubling.

If you rely on Google for your blogging income then you should be relatively happy with the release of the latest Google revenue statistics. They release has certainly brought to light a couple of interesting facts. I guess the major one is that The big G is not on deaths door - at least not yet.

One of the most interesting facts to come out of these statistics is the grown in ‘Text Link’ income. Text Links now account for 33% of Google’s Adwords program. The other news from these figures is the reduction of actual clicks without the reduction of income. Google’s moves to remove poor performing advertisers are paying off with publishers now receiving slightly more with less clicks.

If you like to incorporate Text Links then you may be interested in the new reporting feature that Google has introduced. This enable you to separate Text Links from other data.

[source - Google]As of today, we’ve enhanced your reports so that you can view the performance of link units separately from your other AdSense for content units. Even better, the link unit-specific reports contain more information about your link units.

It seems all is not lost with Google. For now, your blogging income is safe and you can even seriously consider adding Text Links as a viable addition.

Google prefer the term ‘next’ and ‘previous’ button, too me it looks like a scroll button. Whatever you wish to call it, will it make any difference to your Adsense income?

You can see the ‘next’ ‘previous’ buttons in the bottom left of this graphic from the Adsense Blog.

The theory behind the ‘next’ ‘previous’ buttons is that if the viewer cannot see an ad that suits them they will use the ’scroll’ buttons to look at some of the other ads to find what they are looking for. Fine concept in theory, however it can be difficult enough earning any blogging income from the exist ads.

If visitors are not clicking on the ads now, I cannot see them using these buttons to look at other ads. The buttons themselves are small and there is has not been any real publicity to go with the release. Are visitors even going to realize the options is there? Eventually they will. If you rely on Adsene for your blogging income, don’t expect a dramatic increase.

The ‘next’ ‘previous’ buttons have been appearing for several months now while in test mode. It seems the concept is in open mode now and all Adsense units will display the buttons. It does provide your reader with more options and perhaps over time they will become popular. Another tool in the Google war chest to help you build your blogging income - we hope so anyway.

The latest concept in online advertising is the video and audio ad units. Whilst still in its early stages, most bloggers can increase their blogging income by incorporating one of these ad units on their site.

I have my doubts as the long term value of audio ads in their current format. They do not have any user control and are generally played as soon as a page is loaded. This will have the effect of slowing the load speed of the page.

Video ad units on the other hand look to be a much better prospect. These load as static images and require the user to click to play. It takes a second click to visit the advertisers web site. Google are the latest to ad video ads to their ad unit inventory and come in a variety of sizes.

At present the number of advertisers using video ads is fairly low, however as the concept grows and the production costs fall and I can see many more advertisers adding the concept to their advertising programs.

Google have several articles relating to the concept that are well worth reading if you are looking to add other options to your blogging income portfolio.

Blogging income is difficult to generate these days. There is the constant problem of banner blindness to contend with. Often what are supposed to be context based ads appear to be totally unrelated. Affiliate advertising can be hit and miss and can often depend on trends.

The question is, what can you do to maximize any opportunities that come along. These tips may just help a little.

• Remove any under performing ad units, particularly Adsense. Adsense will pay all ads in your account based on the poorest performing. If you do receive a click, you want to receive the maximum benefit for it. If you have any Adsense ad units that have less than a 2% CTR, remove them.

• If you have affiliate ads running, take a moment ever now and then to write about them - promote them a little. A 125 x 125 banner sitting in your side bar will not often sell itself. A little promotion goes a long way.

• Rotate your banner ads. Take a moment every now and then to rotate your banner ads. When using affiliate banners, check and see if they have a range of banners available. Rotate through the range until you find one that is more successful than the others, or just keep rotating them. This helps to ease banner blindness.

• Change the location of the ad units. Trial different places on your site to see which area has the highest return - you may be surprised.

Be selective in your advertisers. If after trying out some of the above, the ad unit is still not earning, remove it and try something else. Not all ads suit all sites.

By following these blogging tips you may at least increase your blogging income opportunities. The key is to maximize the available space to get the best return possible.

One final tip - make sure your site is attractive and welcoming to your visitor and that there is something there for them, that is, content. If you don’t have content and you site looks over commercialized, they will not come back and no visitors equals no blogging income no matter how well placed the ads are.

One of the fastest growth industries at present is that of the blog and the potential for blogging income. The question is going to be asked sooner rather than later as to the sustainability of this income. Blogging income can be derived from a diverse range of methods. These include your standard Pay Per Click advertising campaigns; Pay Per Action which seems to be gaining some momentum; and Pay Per View which appears to fading as a form of advertising. Emerging now are Pay Per View video formats and Pay Per Play audio advertising campaigns.

Along side those are the pay per post campaigns; the buying and selling of text links (although more SEO than advertising but income producing never the less); the buying and selling of advertising banner space and the never ending supply of affiliate advertising. Adding to this is the often dubious multi level marketing advertising campaigns that are sprouting up everywhere.

These all represent potential areas for blogging income. However, how long can the market sustain these forms of advertising? I ask this question since it is often more of a benefit to the publisher than it is to the advertiser particularly when click fraud and other illegal or at least immoral activities are undertaken. Are we reaching saturation point and is the blog the right place to advertise? I know from my experience in the blogging network, most bloggers don’t click on ads. Clicking on an ad takes them away from what they are doing, and that is reading blogs then moving on to the next blog.

Pay per post and paid links are currently out of favor with Google. Most bloggers are finding it difficult to generate pay per click revenues and the new pay per play video and audio advertising campaigns are having mixed reactions particularly if they slow the loading speed of a blog.

The older well known blogs are able to gain a good return on their efforts. New bloggers are struggling and often resort to the pay per post income streams then hit the panic button when Google drops their rankings.

Will we ever see a return to the more traditional buying of advertising space as in the off line publishing industry? I doubt it.  One area that I can see opening up, particularly for blogs with high traffic and good reputations, is the pay for recommendation style of posts. These will have a no-follow attribute as they are not looking to create link juice - they are looking for the recommendation and the click through to the advertisers site. Once marketing guru’s get their heads around this form of advertising it may well take off. When you think about it, it is no different to getting a well known individual to promote your product on TV. In this case you would be using a well known blogger to promote your product through their blog. The plus for advertisers, using a  TV commercial you wont see results until the viewer next visits a shop; with a blog you are going to see immediate click throughs.

As with most things in life, the more popular (or more famous/infamous) you are the more blogging income you are going to be able to generate. If you are new to blogging, concentrate on blogging. Build a reputation; build your traffic; ultimately, build a following of readers that come back time and again and who happily recommend your blog to others. Once you have built your ‘business name’, then you can think about your blogging income. Treat your blog like a business; most new businesses take anything from six to twelve months before they becomes profitable - your blog is no different. Put in that effort and there may well be a future for blogging income for your blog.

If your blogging income comes from pay-per-post or other paid links then Andy Beard’s response on how he intends to get around Google’s penalties for paid links may interest you.

Google would like to see all paid links using the rel=nofollow tag to prevent those links being followed and so earning page rank link juice. If your blogging income is from paid links then you will know that the advertisers do not want the nofollow tag being used - it runs contrary to their intention for a paid link.

Andy Beard’s approach is not new, but may be novel in this situation. He is targeting his Robots.txt file. This file directs the search engine robots to the directories and files that can and cannot be indexed. Andy’s theory is that if he excludes the paid links files from indexing, the included links should not be followed - if they are not followed they are not earning ‘paid link juice’.

The theory is that links may appear in other editorial entries to compensate for the robots exclusion. Those links are not paid for so they should not draw any penalty. Andy also notes that whilst these pages are not going to be indexed by Google, they will still be syndicated through email and RSS feeds and through various directories. The links may draw ‘link juice’ from those placements.

This is fine and I agree with this scenario. I wonder though if Andy has gone too far in broadcasting this to  the broader public, and Google. I am sure that Google will now look at this situation, particularly if it is picked up by others, and consider extending its penalties to those that only use the robots file to limit indexing.

Using pay-per-post for blogging income and the Google page rank penalties are an interesting issue - I am sure the tug-of-war is far from over.

If you monetize a blog then you want the maximum blogging income possible. The one thing you don’t want is to waste the value of any clicks.

Let me clarify ’smart pricing’. Whilst Google does not say much about it, they will cut your income by 90% if you don’t have a site that is performing to their standards. Their standards equate to CTR of around 3% or better. If your CTR is below then Google will only pay 10% of the standard click rate. Instead of a keyword click being worth $0.50, it will only be worth $0.05. This is a huge drop - but it gets worse.

If you run more than one site then your return is based on your lowest CTR site. If you have three sites, one with a CTR of 5%, a second with a CTR of 4% and the a third with a CTR of only 1%, they will all return the value of the third site - 1%. This is known as ’smart pricing’. Is it fair, probably not. Whilst Google can tell you every thing about a user and about a blog, they cannot account for different web/blog sites.

How do you avoid ’smart pricing’? First, make sure you have good analytics on each of your ad units. Secondly, if any ad unit is performing at less than 3%, either reposition it or remove it altogether.

You can reverse ’smart pricing’. Simply remove the poorly performing ad units. Once you stats are showing a better than 3% CTR across the board your income level will return to full value. This can take from 3 to 10 days.

In brief. Your blogging income will fall across all ad units if just one of those ad units has a CTR of less than 3%. Keep good statistics on each ad unit. Remove any poor performing ad units. Another good tip provided to you by the best blog marketing journal around.

There are many blogging income streams available ranging from the traditional Google ads, Yahoo, affiliate marketing and PPC. The Rubicon Project on the one hand is no different to the traditional methods and yet it is in it’s own right a fairly new concept. It has certainly created a deal of hype.

The Rubicon Project has partnered with traditional advertisers like Google, Adbrite and Shopzilla to name just a couple. The concept is that you place advertising units on your blog or website in much the same way as you do now. You can specify banner, skyscrapper or box units of various sizes. You can also nominate which advertisers, which geographical area and even which demographics you want ads targeted towards. You can also nominate the ratio of ads from the different advertisers.

Once you have set up and placed your ad units, the Rubicon Project then goes to work to display ads according to your setup.  For the publisher, you no longer need accounts with each of the advertisers. The Rubicon Project collects all the statistic and collects your income on your behalf. You only need the one account.

The plus side. You get to publish ads from a wide variety of advertisers. Every time someone visits your site they will view a completely different ad. You only need to keep track of one ad company. Another plus are the comprehensive statistics that are available to keep track of your blog marketing efforts.

The down side. Not all ads will be targeted to your sites content. If you include Google Adsense you are still constrained by Google’s three ads per page rule. The biggest downside for me is that I have not been able to determine what percentage of revenue I receive from each advertiser.

As a blogging income stream the concept has merit. I have trialled it on one of my other sites and income from this ad stream is almost triple what I experienced before placing the ad units (similar ads units too). The Rubicon Project is still in Beta, however it may be worth a visit to see if it fits in with your blogs aims.

Blogging income can be derived from many options. If you are relying on Adsense then I suggest you keep a careful watch on any Google announcements. Over the six weeks or so Google have announced several changes to their publisher partnership arrangements.

The first change would probably not affect most small time or new bloggers. Google is discontinuing the Adsense Referral system generally for those living outside the United States. There have been a few modifications of the policy since the first announcement but the bottom line is that the number of partners eligible to receive income will be reduced. Not only that, the size of the payments have also been reduced.  The Google announcement stated:

[source] The changes to referrals promoting AdSense will now depend on where your users are located, regardless of your location as a publisher. You’ll earn $100 for every user you refer to AdSense who is located in North America, Latin America or Japan when they generate $100 in AdSense revenue within 180 days and they remove all payment holds. You’ll no longer be paid for users you refer who are located elsewhere. These changes will go into effect the last week of January.

The latest announcement from Google involves the Google  referrals programs for Google Pack and Firefox. The amount to be paid for these referrals is being halved. The statement from Google:

[source] Google Pack: Currently, you can earn up to $2 when a user downloads and runs Google Pack for the first time after being referred through your link or button. Starting the third week of February, each successful Pack referral will earn up to $1. This change will apply to all referrals for Google Pack and is independent of user location or publisher location.

Firefox: We’ll also be reducing payments for Firefox referrals from China during the third week of February. This specific referral payment change will only affect installations from users in China. Again, this is independent of your location as a publisher.

It seem that Google is going through a rationalization period and I would not be surprised to see more announcements in the future relating poor performing partners. Google has grown with a high percentage of blogs running Google ad units of some type. This is flooding the market with some partners taking a year to earn the $100 minimum payment. If Google is going through a rationalization stage then I expect these publishers to be the next target.

For bloggers to make some type of income from their blogs, the time may be right to start investigating other options. It would certainly be judicious to trial different ad types to determine which ones are most profitable. It should be remembered that some of the biggest bloggers receiving  a lot of blogging income without using and Google ad units. Perhaps you can too!

Blogging income can be earned from many streams with the most popular being Google Adsense. Over the last few days we have seen the banning of IncrediMail, one of the largest listed companies to ever receive a Google ban. I wont speculate on reasons behind the ban, however I think it is a timely warning to all bloggers who display any of the Google ad units to take care.

Google’s policies are fairly clear. The consequences of breaching them are just as clear - you will be banned and lose any income already accrued.

The two biggest problem areas are Invalid Clicks and Encouraging Clicks. To quote Google:

Clicks on Google ads must result from genuine user interest. Any method that artificially generates clicks or impressions on your Google ads is strictly prohibited*

Other areas to be wary of include the sites content, both the site and the ads behavior, the ad placement and competing ads. Failing to comply with Google’s policies:

we may disable ad serving to your site and/or disable your AdSense account. While in many cases we prefer to work with publishers to achieve policy compliance, we reserve the right to disable any account at any time.*

The bottom line is if you are looking to Google for blogging income then make sure you read their terms and conditions along with their program policies.

Blogging Income - some people want it - others steer right away from it. If you decide to look at blogging income options then there are several areas you must consider. Some of these options are:

• The type of advertising to include on your blog
• Where to place the advertisements
• What size advertisements

The type and placement of these ads are critical to the amount of blogging income that you can earn. Types of ads include:

• Adsense type units - Whilst Google are the best known there are many others including Yahoo and Bidvertiser. Google ads can be further broken into AdSense, AdSearch and Referral.
• Affiliate advertising. These generally require the placement of banners.
• Other pay-per-click (PPC) or pay-per-impression type ads
• Pay Per View video and audio
• Pay Per Post

Once you have selected the type of advertising you will use you need to think about the size and placement. The graphic on right, taken from Coolayla, shows the various areas on a blog page. You can think of your page as a piece of real estate with each area having a different blogging income capacity.

The red areas are the prime earning areas - they are also the area generally set aside for logos or banners. The orange section top center is also an area that generally makes a good return.

The most popular zone for ad placement and are the two yellow zones. The green zones have decreasing returns whilst the blue zone represents very poor blogging income potential.

The large pink area is your content zone. Advertisements can be placed here, particularly on internal pages where you can place the ads within the content, before the content and/or at the foot of the content.

How and where you place your ads is always a complex matter. You need to balance the look and feel of the blog, the readers comfort (which will affect their decision to return) and maximizing the income. Do your research. Plan your blog using a similar map and you will find your blogging income providing you with a reasonable return.

By using some smart research and planning you can optimize your blog for maximum income.

Happy New Year bloggers! The new year is here and it’s time to set some goals. Unless you’ve already done that.

According to a Harvard Business School poll, 3% of Harvard graduates write down their goals. Those 3% make twice as much money as the average of all other Harvard graduates. Why the big difference?

Goal setting is essential for business - any business. Blogging too. Goals keep you focused. When you write down your goals then you solidify them in your mind. You can go back and review them.

Goal setting is very powerful. Those who set goals and write them down usually have goals for different areas of their lives - spiritual, relationships, financial, hobbies. And I’m a big believer in goals. I’m also a big believer in blogging. Have you set your blogging goals? If not, here are a few areas of blogging that you might want to set goals for:

• Income
• Targeted traffic
• SEO performance
• Number of posts you’ll write this year
• Social bookmarking benchmarks
• Overall marketing expenditure
• Number of new customers

If you haven’t set any goals for your blog in 2008, now’s the time. Take 30 minutes to an hour and think about where you want your blog to go. What do you want it to do for your business? If you don’t set your goals you likely won’t meet them.

If monetizing with WordPress isn’t enough to convince novice bloggers that you can make money online, then this list by Darren Rowse of Problogger.net could perhaps make you think about singing up for Google AdSense.

10 Reasons Why You Should Consider Using AdSense on you blog by Darren Rowse:

1. International Traffic - Adsense have a large client and advertise base who wants traffic from other parts of the world
2. Easy Implementation - any web idiot can set up ads on his blog
3. Massive Advertiser Base – AdSense’s large advertiser base enables them to serve relevant ads to any blog
4. Obscure Topics – not many ad sponsors have ads on targeted niche but AdSense does
5. Make it Easy For Advertisers to Target Your Blog - there is a big potential of advertisers to make contact with you for further advertisement deals once they see they are getting more than what they’ve paid for from your blog
6. Set it and Forget it – you can leave the code as it is and earn if you’re too lazy to experiment
7. No Minimum Traffic Levels – small traffic can get you approved and can be a good start to a happy online earning
8. Able to be Used with Other Ad Types – you can run other type ads and PPC programs with AdSense
9. Multiple Ad Formats – you can choose to serve different type of Adsense ads : text Ads, Image Ads, Video Ads, Adlink units, referral ads (CPA), and even the Google search tool
10. Reliable Payment – very prompt and reliable once you get your first Google AdSense cheque

AdSense may not be the best choice because there are quite a few number of other Pay Per Click programs available but the fact remains that it has many financial benefits. You decide.