Ashley Baxter

I'm a 23 year old Director from the West Coast of Scotland. I run a small business, play a lot of video games, eat scones with jam, and wonder why I'm not obese.

Advertising On My Blog

Advertising On My Blog

I’ve never considered advertising via Rockers Delight, my gaming blog. Why? Because it’s something I’ve never taken seriously. It was, and still is, purely for enjoyment; something I started through my passion for gaming, and something I contribute to with minimal effort.

In other words, I’ve never put much effort into maintaining or driving traffic towards it. With that said, I decided to sit back and take a good look at my stats. If there were enough eyes casting over my blog, wouldn’t it be logical to take advantage of that? Especially as I’ve ranted on recent occasions about my lack of expendable moolah. If it meant I could make enough to cover the cost of one new game a month, which I could then review, then everyone (both myself and readers) would be a winner.

However, advertising isn’t easy, and so I plan on experimenting with it a bit as I find what works for Rockers Delight and what doesn’t. First of all I’ve went down the BuySellAds route, offering two 125×125 ads on the sidebar of my blog for $15 (£9). There’s no reason I’m charging $15 other than I figured it was a reasonable starting point. I can reevaluate this a couple of months down the line, but I figured 15 bucks for an average of 5,000 visitors a month wasn’t out of line (if you’re some BSA guru and disagree, please let me know).

If, after a few months, this fails to return any results, I’ll consider other avenues and blog about their progress here. There’s Google Adsense (which I’m not overly keen on), Text Link Ads, affiliate links to, say, Amazon, or I can privately source advertisers. It’s all a learning curve.

On that note, I would love some input from those who have similar sized sites and have chosen to advertise. What did or didn’t work for you? And, obligatory shameless plug ahead, if you want to take out one of the ads for 30 days, you can do so here.

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This entry was posted on Sunday, September 27th, 2009 at 8:11 pm and is filed under Personal.
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4 Responses to “Advertising On My Blog”

  1. Gavin Elliott Says:

    September 27th, 2009 at 9:28 pm

    Hey Ash,

    Strangely enough my blog is now circulating around the 5k-10k area as well, more so because I started to keep an eye on the type of content I was producing.

    I’ve always had various links through to the likes of WooThemes etc, and over the past few months the amount of click throughs to WooThemes have been increasing somewhat. I now average $150 (ish) per month in affiliate sales.

    I attempted to get signed up to buysellads, however they turned it down because I wasn’t getting 100k hits per month.

    Advertising is always a strange one, and affiliate wise I would only advertise something I would use myself.

    Let me know how you get on. :)

    Gavin

  2. admin Says:

    September 27th, 2009 at 9:34 pm

    Yo Gavin! Thanks for the comment.

    That’s odd BSA turned your site down given mine brings in less traffic. There must be other criteria? I’m not so sure, but I’m thinking a gaming site might have a hard time getting advertisers through BSA.

    Y’see, I’d be pretty happy with $150 in revenue as that would more than cover the cost of a new game or two. I’m going to have a big think about Rockers Delight. I’ve always been very wishy washy with it, and having brought in that amount of traffic with minimal plugging or effort, I’m beginning to think “What could I accomplish if I took it more seriously?”. I don’t know, but it’s worth thinking about.

    Kudos on the site, btw. Keep it up :)

  3. Gavin Elliott Says:

    September 28th, 2009 at 1:20 pm

    Hey Ash,

    When I was running the gaming side of nvmax.com back in the day we were pulling about 100k uniques a month, which back in 2001 was a hell of a lot. It was an awesome time.

    That same question was what I asked myself a few months ago and changed the direction and quality of the content which I was presenting and it obviously worked with the traffic taking a significant upwards curve.

    I’ll send you an email soon about the gaming stuff, you might find it of interest.

    Cheers
    Gavin

  4. Sam Brown Says:

    September 28th, 2009 at 1:59 pm

    BSA is an interesting choice, I like their model but the target market seems to be designer & developer based sites – I’m not sure how much luck you will have with that market.

    I ran a fan site for the best part of 9 years that saw about 3 million hits a month – I employed several models there but mainly used CPM (cost per thousand) banner ads like BSA – this brought in the most money but was solely due to the traffic. Little traffic and few advertisers will be interested.

    I think your best bet in my opinion would be something like the Amazon Associates Program – you pick the products that you think *your audience* will be interested in. I’m not sure if companies/sites like Game have referral programs?

    Your audience needs to be interested in what you are advertising, and you need to be in control of what gets displayed to them.

I'm interested to know what you think. Leave a comment