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Blog Advertising – Yea or Nay?

Posted 22 Apr 2010 - 2 Gratefully received comments

If you keep a blog going long enough this question will inevitably rear it’s head: At what point do you begin trying to make money out of it?

Perhaps this question was the reason you started your blog in the first place, but I can only write from my experiences, and it certainly wasn’t something I ever planned when building this blog last year.

I’ve been clear in the past about my reasons for starting this blog (5 Questions to ask yourself before starting a blog), to be honest I never saw it as anything but an extension of my freelance business. Now after nearly a year of blogging which has comprised of 26 editorial articles, 25 comic strips, 7 project showcases, 6 book reviews, 2 competitions, 6 freebie resources, a couple of tutorials and a few guest articles dotted around other blogs; I’ve begun to realise that my blog has grown a lot bigger than I ever planned.

Now I find myself faced with a question that will change the little corner of the internet I’ve carved out for myself.
I blog because I love it, and I hope that I’ve helped or inspired a few people in the last 10 months, but it does take a lot of time to keep things going, time being a commodity that I increasingly find myself short of. So I have been thinking of ways that my blog might begin to pay it’s own way.
I’m not looking to become a professional blogger, I’m not trying to cash in on anything I’m merely considering how I might get a small revenue from my blog that will pay for it’s running costs, fund a few more competitions and possibly buy me a little more time to devote to it’s content.

Inevitably the obvious course of action is to consider advertising. It’s something I’ve put off looking into because I assumed that my site didn’t have a high enough level of traffic to be able to attract any advertisers, this is an assumption that hasn’t been disproved yet. However, there have been some encouraging developments that have made me consider advertising as a possibility.
On a whim I submitted my site to BuySellAds for consideration, and to my great surprise I was informed that it had been accepted. I believe this is an opportunity that I would be stupid to overlook.

Over the next month or so I’m hoping to make a few changes to my site in an effort to accommodate a few small ad blocks in a way that is as complimentary to the overall design as possible. This includes adding a footer to the bottom of the blog pages and shuffling the heirachy of the sites pages, with the blog page becoming the landing page for the entire site. I’ll also be looking to add a few other little bits and pieces to make my articles more interactive and available to social networking links.

All in all it’s quite exciting at the moment and a bit confusing, in fact discussing the changes to my site inspired my last comic strip. Luckily my coder in real life is a lot more comprehensible!

I’d love to hear what your opinion is of blogs that include advertising? Do you dislike it, does it put you off reading the content? Feel free to add links to good examples of integrated advertising, and let me know your thoughts on the changes I’ll be making to my blog.

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