Monetize Through Advertising

From the start, I intended to make money with My Wealth Builder. Google Adsense offers a simple and efficient way to use advertising. Once one registers for and is approved for Google Adsense, contextual advertising will be directed to your blog site. Contextual advertsing is advertising that is customized to your site based on content.

Here are some brief guidelines to consider with Google Adsense:

Do not click on your own ads. Or have anyone you know click on your ads. This violates one's agreement with Google and amounts to click fraud. To note, I believe that Google can track which IP addresses click on an ad and it is easy for them to identify pattern which are not "normal." If one does this, Google will ban your blog from Adsense. And Adsense is currently the best contextual advertising medium. In fact, if someone you know is aware of your blog, tell them " Do not click on the ads."

Use the largest ad blocks and place them at the end of a post. Several blogs on optimizing Adsense results recommend using the 336 X 280 rectangle with blended colors for the best results. I have had good result with this layout. I also like to use the 160 X 600 skyscraper with complementary colors in the sidebar.

Eliminate spam ads. There are many spam sites that have unrelated ads to your site. The ads take up room for the ones that may be more related to your site. A service called AdBlacklist.com can help you screen out these unrelated sites using the Adsense ad filter.

Increase the traffic from search. Regular readers usually do not click on ads, unless the purpose of our site is to evaluate or sell products. People who are the most interested in ads are those that are searching for information or products which they may be interested in purchasing.

If You Blog It, Will Readers Come?

A common belief, I think, is that once a blog is up and running, lots of readers will flock to it. After all, why shouldn't they - a good topic, great content, and Google searcheable. Truth of the matter is that readership will grow slowly, and you can help it grow faster. I was getting about 2-3 readers a day on my own and needed to increase awareness.

My personal preference is to grow it organically, i.e. get readers who are interested in your blog content. Here is how I approached building readership:

Joined a blog aggregator. My first step was to join pfblogs.org an aggregrator for Personal Finance blogs. This enabled me to get 5 to 10 additional readers a day that weren't previously aware of my blog. Interestingly, my readership from pfblogs.org hasn't changed much. I was getting about 25 readers per week in September, 2006. In January, 2007 I am also getting about 25 readers per week, even though my total readership has increased 10 times.

Submited content to several Carnivals. Next I started submitting article so Carnivals. For those of you unfamiliar with the idea, Carnivals are aggregations of post submissions from bloggers on a certain topic.. These submissions are vetted by the Carnival host and the selected posts are included in the Carnival posting.

This increased my readership signifcantly. Through Carnivals, my daily readership went from 10 per day to 30 per day. There are 962 Carnivals (as of 1/21/07) from which to select at the Blog Carnival site.

Visited other blogs on my topic. Check out other blogs in your community. Comment on their topics and add perspective, confirmation or new data to their post. Most blog authors will respond and some will visit your site. Over time, My Wealth Builder has become part of a community of Personal Finance bloggers which frequently read each other's articles.

Posted content frequently. Besides regular readers, a blog gets readers who are searching for a specific topic. I believe that a blog gets positive search results if the blog has a high number of posts (over 100) and a high frequency of publishing. Publishing once per day is probably the minimum needed and more than once a day is likely better. For reference, in September, 2006, I was publishing about 4-5 times per week, with 30 total posts,and had 16 referrals from Google search. In December, 2006, I was publishing once per day, with 100 total posts, and had 603 referrals from Google search.

With higher posting frequency and more posts, it seems Google's search will give priority to one's site. For example, if you Google "Mortage Mistake," My Wealth Builder is the second site returned in the results (on a 1/21/07 search).

Some bloggers use Blog Exchange communities. I have not used these and do not plan to use these communities. In these systems, bloggers get "credits" for clicking on other's blogs which will lead to one' s blog promoted for clicks. While this gets traffic, I believe it is low quality traffic which may take a lot of effort to manage and may not be sustainable (for me).

New Blogger - A Good Hosted Service

If you want to get started quickly, I recommend using New Blogger. It's free, easy to use and hosted by Google.

Being new to blogging and not being very techie, I didn't want to spend time learning how to program. Luckily, I quickly found Blogger, now New Blogger, which had predesigned templates to use. After signing up for Blogger, I was able to quickly choose a design and start blogging on My Wealth Builder.

Since then I have learned, Blogger is called a hosted service. A hosted service or developer service provides the server, software and blog templates, requiring no software installation by the blogger. Wikipedia has a nice article with a list of developer services.

I did not do an evaluation of the different hosting services before choosing Blogger. I experimented first with Blogger and found it sufficient for my needs of no investment, simplicity and quick start. The additional benefits of Blogger are that it is associated with Google (which may make one's blog more easily searched), and there are a wide range of templates to use. The downside is that one has to learn some programming to customize the templates to get, for example, a three column blog format.

I think the other hosted services are also very good. I just haven't tried them and can't comment on them from personal experience.

My Reasons For Blogging

There are many good reasons to blog: to share information, to build a social network; to keep a journal on one's experiences, and to make money.

I started blogging because I wanted to learn about personal publishing and experiment with making money through it. I chose personal finance as the topic area because of my interest and experience in the field. (For reference, I am not, nor have I ever been, a professional in the area of personal finance.)

Blogging was one good way to learn if my personal finance knowledge and experiences were of value. Value to others would initially be measured by readership. Value to me would be first measured by readership and then by monetization. Readership would let me know if I had relevant useful content. Monetization would let me know I had valuable content.

Building readership would be done through:

1. Creating content with excellent quality and relevance.


2. Creating awareness by enabling people to easily find my blog.

Monetization would be done through advertising:

1. Google Adsense contextual advertising would my initial monetization approach. Contextual advertising uses algorithms that evaluate one's site and places relevant advertising on the site. Google is the major contextual advertiser and generates over $9 billion through advertising revenue.


2. Direct sponsorships would be solicited once the blog became established

I soon learned building readership and monetizing my blog would take more time than I had expected:-)

Welcome to My Blog Builder - Introduction

I blog under the name of Super Saver. My other blog is My Wealth Builder , a personal finance blog about my journey and experiences towards building our family’s wealth for a comfortable retirement.

As background, My Wealth Builder was created on August 13, 2006. I decided to start a blog, searched the internet for blogging software, read a few sites about blogging and jumped right into it. I was impressed with the templates provided by blogging support companies. I could create and host a professional looking site for free. I also believed, incorrectly, that I could immediately make reasonable amounts money through advertising. (More on advertising in future posts.)

I am writing My Blog Builder to document my personal journey of creating My Wealth Builder as an experiment to develop a business in personal publishing. It would have been great to start this blog concurrently with My Wealth Builder and write contemporaneously about my experiences. That will happen as I catch up, but the first four months will be based on memory, tracking software, and miscellaneous records.

In addition, My Blog Builder will be created under the New Blogger software. My Wealth Builder was created under Blogger and will be required to migrate to New Blogger in the near future. This will provide me some experience using New Blogger before making the transition.

At this point, I plan to post once a week on Mondays.