Confessions of a Six Figure Professional Blogger

When Is The Right Time To Monetize Your Blog?

February 2, 2009 | Feature, Making Money

A question that many beginning bloggers will ask themselves is: When should I monetize? Will I cheapen myself to try to make any money now? Should I wait until I’m larger and have a big audience?

The answer to this question seems to differ among bloggers. Some say you should just concentrate on content, wait until you build a respectable audience, then go for the pay day. The others say go for it immediately.

My answer is this: Go for it immediately.

There is no reason to wait until you have a larger audience before trying to make any money. There are several reasons for this:

  1. There is no clear cut-off. Some say to wait until you have around 1,000 readers to monetize. However, depending on the niche, you can easily make money with less traffic than that. So, why beat around the bush?
  2. Train your readers. If you go for a long time with absolutely no advertising on your blog, then your readers are more likely to get pissed off when you finally introduce ads. Loyal readers are resistant to change. So, provide a lot of value to your readers and remain unapologetic about the fact that you want to make some money for your efforts. Your readers will accept that if they know it going in. Especially if you train them on the fact you only recommend what you truly believe in.
  3. Learn Your Market. Every blog is best monetized a little differently. The earlier you start, the more time you have to learn your market, learn what your readers respond to, etc.
  4. Train Yourself. Many bloggers seem to suffer from some kind of guilt trip when they try to make money or sell something on their blog. There is no reason for this as long as you are consistent in providing value to your readers. But, part of this is training yourself to think that way.

So, monetize early if that is part of your goal as a blogger. However, a word of warning…

Don’t Get Greedy

While I say you should monetize early, let’s have ourselves a reality check:

You’re not going to make that much money early on.

Don’t get frustrated by this. A low traffic blog isn’t going to make that much money. Using ads, you might make a few cents per day. If you do affiliate marketing, you’re not going to convert many readers to sales if you don’t have that many readers to begin with.

Looking at this situation, a blogger many oversaturate their blog with monetization sources in an attempt to squeeze blood from a turnip. They’ll litter their site with banners, with affiliate links, and really throw the value-to-ads ratio out of balance. This is a HUGE turnoff to your readers and is going to result in failure.

Keep your eye on the ball. You want a nice clean layout for your blog. You want to focus primarily on quality content. And, yes, you want to monetize it within reason and while respecting the reader experience. You won’t make much money early on, but the readers you do have will be trained to expect a certain level or sales from you. Your income will scale with your site traffic and as you gain more respect in your marketplace.

Your Thoughts?

So, what about you? Are you nervous about monetizing your blog? Are you waiting for the right time? Or are you jumping right in?

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  • How do you feel about adsense? I've heard that some bloggers are placing it on there posts!! It'd be great to get your thoughts in this direction. Even a brief post on this subject would be helpful!! Thanks... :-)
  • I couldn't agree more about not getting "Too Greedy". Sure we all need and like to make a bit from our blogs, but if you burn the very people that come to your blog in the first place then it'll be a very short lived money making experience. Having said that, we are all exposed to A LOT of commercialism and therefore we do accept some advertising so long as the content being offered is useful and valuable for the time we spend on the blog.

    Cheers
    Alex
  • Very good advice i have ads on my blog and I'm not looking back now! Its common sense if you feel bad about putting ads on your site, it is probably because you don't feel like your time is worth anything. And that is a lie! If you are delivering good content why not make a few cents a day! If you aren't delivering quality content than yes you should feel like a sick sick puppy ha ha jk!
  • Actually before I jumped in I got some advertising req. from marketers who think that it's a good opportunity to buy text ads on my blog for their advertisers as I got a 4 page rank.

    Your post make me feel comfort with what I am doing! Thank you for the nice advice!
  • I'm glad to hear someone say this. Monetizing is essential if you're blogging for your business. Bag the guilt trip. If you don't get over that, you can continue working for free if you WANT to, but if you don't monetize, don't expect income to come magically.

    And monetizing does NOT always mean ads. It can mean a lot of things. My readership is very small right now, but I have one system that makes quite a bit of money with only about 1k visitors a month. I started with a banner on top from the beginning, because I wanted to be upfront that this was not something I was doing for free. If someone has a problem with me running a business, then they're obviously not the kind of reader I'm looking for.
  • My blog has been around for about a year now. The first few months I didn't make more than a few dollars. After I started getting indexed by google and my pages started showing up in searches, the traffic started coming.

    After the traffic came, the money started coming in as well. I'm one year in now, and my blog is close to paying my mortgage every month. I know I can do even more! Everyone else out there can do it, it only takes hard work, lots of good content, and some creativity in how you bring money in.
  • There must be some "blueprint" somewhere that says that in order to have a successful blog you need to publish an article a day without any intention of making any money for at least 6 months.

    You're right, I probably make about $2.00/week with Adsense, and my blog has been around for 3.5 months.
  • P. Van de Bussche
    I literally just started a blog on a free hosting site. I have zero traffic so far but I did put an Amazon affiliate link on it. I also put a picture and a couple videos on it as well. I don’t expect to make a penny from my blog yet. What I did get, is now I know how to put these elements into my blog. I consider this my practice or learning blog, just to get myself prepared for when I go all out with my own domain name and paid hosting. Oh, and now I know how to leave a comment.
  • What type of monetization options would be most beneficial for a young blog? I understand that there won't be much money early on so what's the biggest bang for the buck?

    T
  • Do you think it smart to just put up ads for my own company within the blog on my corporate site? Get readers used to seeing things in that space first, then monetize it another way?
  • What is your take on adsense? Are readers blind to these ads at this point? That was where I started, and then I have gone back to building design and content, waiting until later for further monetization.
  • If a blog is ne and the blogger wants to monetize the blog, the blogger should do a good job of blending the ads to fit the content and theme of the blog.
  • Im not sure if I've got too much monetization on my blog or not Ive got amazon shop, ive got a couple of banners at the very bottom and ive got a couple on the sidebar,

    I would be grateful if you could get back to me and assess if i am over doing the advertising?

    www.plenty2say.com...
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