In the past i have been negative on advertising on any of my sites. I then twisted that and opened the “Member of the Month” section where the top commenter gets his banner on my sidebar free of charge for a month. This was not all that bad since it is actually a way to say thanks to a frequent visitor and commenter. My point of view is that i blog for fun and not for money. This hasn’t changed actually. What has changed is that i moved onto a better server, meaning bigger costs for me. I am not saying that i can’t finance the expenses myself but it would take a bug burden of my shoulders if the server was all paid for. So, i came up with a minimum of an advertisement campaign.
There is a thin line i am trying not to cross. On one side is a blog clean enough to be easily readable and not annoying to my visitors and on the other side is putting ads on a spot that is a good place for advertisers well worth their money. So, here is what i decided to do. I am going to try make the costs from having two advertisements on the top right corner, making enough money just for my server. I will not put them on any other place so it won’t get messy.
I am really curious and anxious to see if this is going to work out, to actually see if someone thinks five bucks is cheap enough to buy a spot here. If it doesn’t, and the spots remain empty for a period of time, i will remove them and cancel the whole thing. In that case i’ll just have to keep going as i am right now.
So, bare with me people. I am experimenting with this. What do you think? Is it worth it? Is it too expensive? Should i got to $2.5 maybe? I guess time will show…
I have no clue on how much traffic you get every month, but 5 bucks is damn good a price for an advertiser. I completely agree with your reasoning for monetization of your blog, if the ads are relevant and non-cluttering there should be no issues at all.
But what about Performance ads? They manage your ads and keep a share of it eh?
Could you maybe provide programming services or custom plugin development to earn the money to pay for the server rather than through advertising? You’re very talented and if you made a services page and we got the word out you should be able to obtain some freelance work.
I just did a mini experiment with ads, hated it and removed them. I might write about it tomorrow.
I am sorry if this is the wrong place to ask this question: Which host/hosting plan you are using? What’s the monthly cost?
@Raju just check out this post http://www.stratos.me/2008/10/vpslinkcom-your-best-option-out-there-on-vps/ the monthly cost is ~$25
@Kim i thought about this but to be honest i didn’t think it would succeed 🙂 that’s why i went with ads. really it’s not my best since i don’t like it but i would like to cover my costs somehow…
btw i have a “Hire me” page as a draft for over 2 months now but i never thought it could actually get me something…
You might not succeed but there’s nothing wrong with trying. Putting up a hire me page is a great idea but you have to make sure that people are actually seeing it. I only started doing it after someone else encouraged me to. But I haven’t been able to sit back and wait for people to come visit. I’ve done free work in trade for publicity, I’ve made myself known on Twitter, I search Twitter for mentions of the keywords that will bring me work and contact them. I do think if you put a little bit into promotion that you would be successful because you have the talent.
And $25 can be earned in 20-30 mins.
@stratos,
Thanks for the suggestion mate. They have some really good packages out there, will surely look at this option once my site consistently outgrow shared hosting 🙂
@kim,
you are making lotsa sense, Stratos surely has that talent to do some freelance programming. Come on buddy, it’s just the first step which seems difficult. A bit of marketing is all you need, you anyway has the programming skills.
thanks for the nice words on both of you… you know my problem is that on the marketing area i suck. i might be able to do something but i am not able to sell it.
anyway i suppose that you are both right… if i try it might not hurt. i’ll probably set up the page and see what happens…now with all the exposure of the plugins i might get lucky 🙂
Can we have a “phpsysinfo” to see wich plan you really have?
@Semeriah: i have vpslink 3…
Just type “apt-get install phpsysinfo” I will sure donate but i want to see if you really have this plan
@Semeriah: I know what phpsysinfo is and i know what to type. The thing is i don’t need to convince you nor anybody that i have this plan (i do but this is irrelevant). I am not begging nor asking for something special. The ads will go away really soon. Thanks for the interest though.
I only pay $7 a month for hosting costs and that is more than covered by my adsense revenue. I have a couple of advertisers that pay me $5 a month per link, so I reckon $5 for a banner is well worth it.
@Sire: well i will probably remove the ad campaign and go with the “Hire me” thing. I am putting up a page at this time…
Great decision Stratos (not the removal of ads, but addition of “Hire Me” page!)
@Raju: thanks! We’ll see how it goes…