Monetising a blog from Day 1 - yes or no?

Written by Nick in Saturday, March 29th 2008 under Blogging, Making money online   

I have been pondering this question for a few days now, ever since I earned my first few pounds through Adsense. Clearly I have been fairly gung-ho with the advertising on this site from quite early on, but is this a bad thing? The general school of thought amongst the blogging community seems to be that there is no point in trying to monetise your blog until you have ’sufficient’ content and a readership base to justify it. This is fairly reasonable I suppose: you’ll never succeed with Pay-Per-Click if you’ve got nobody to click your ads. There are also compelling reasons for not putting up any content-related advertising until there is enough content for Google/Yahoo/whoever to work out what your site’s about.

So why have I decided to keep up so many adverts and affiliate deals on a blog that is only just finding its feet? Here are my top 8 reasons for attempting to monetise a bog from day 1…

  1. Readers are readers, whether you have 1, 10 or 1 million. If we treat blog monetisation as a numbers game, then we should also consider the fact that your first visitor is just as likely to click an advert as the 1 millionth (all other things remaining equal), so why miss out on making something from your early visitors?
  2. Quality not quantity. If you are blogging in a particularly small niche, you may in fat never get more than a handful of visitors per day, but what you will miss out on in terms of numbers, you make up on with the fact that your adverts are likely to generate more revenue per click. Your targeted readership will also be valuable in terms of selling products specific to your niche through affiliates, so why wait for readers who will probably never come?
  3. Getting used to all the systems takes time, and learning to optimise ad positioning etc can take years. Why not start early so that when you eventually do have the large readership you are looking for, you are already up to speed with what works/looks best on your site?
  4. It’s important to make mistakes, and you don’t want to make them when you’ve got a readership to entertain. There is every chance that as a blogging virgin you will have some problem along the line with placing advertising within a template, displaying out of context ads or simply getting over zealous with your advert frequency. Making these mistakes is how we become better bloggers, so make them early and get them out of the way.
  5. The look of your site may be enhanced by having graphical banners in specific locations, and can give your site a professional feel that it would otherwise not have had if you left vast dead areas devoid of any content. The look of your blog can be critical in making it stand out in a saturated market, and having ads up early can make you look like one of the big boys.
  6. The motivation of seeing your earnings steadily increase can be an important factor in the early days of starting a blog. If you have few readers, then actually this is the time when you will probably be doing the most soul searching and questioning whether you should continue with the blog. Seeing as lack of motivation is the number one reason that a blog fails, having that added incentive can make the difference and give you the stamina to press on.
  7. Monetisation can make you see your blog differently, which can help improve the quality of your posting. The more I learn about contextual advertising, the more I become aware of how to formulate and construct my posts so as to be most effective when it comes to displaying relevant advertising. Without the the thought of those Google-bots scampering through my content, my blog would end up a lot less focused than it is, which would make both writing and reading it much more difficult.
  8. Making money is fun! Those few pounds I made the other day in my sleep was so valuable to me as I had made it using a system that I had set up - after all you can possibly learn about monetising a blog, the feeling when it pays off is magical, even if it’s such a paltry amount of money.

Have you got a blog that you are thinking of monetising, or are you a serial blogger with some thoughts to share? Leave a comment below!

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