Everything About Blog Ads
Ads for blogs are nothing new. Today, blog ads can help you earn about $50 to $750 every month if your blog gets about 100,000 visits. Keep reading this guide to learn several techniques for how to get ads on your blog. You'll learn how ads for blogs work whether you decide to handle your own billing for advertising or not.
How to Get Ads on Your Blog: Doing it Yourself
If you're experienced with ads for blogs, you may want to handle your blog ads all by yourself. Certainly, this route has some advantages. If you don't know how to get ads on your blog and use a blog network instead, you'll have to pay a cut off the top to the network that is handling the billing. When you do the work yourself, you get all the money—but you also have to deal with all of the problems.
Usually, before placing blog ads, companies will want to see some hard numbers from your website about the amount of traffic you usually get. Ads for blogs usually cost more when the demographics reading your blog are more impressive. If your blog has already established an audience of prominent lawyers and judges, you won't have to worry as much about how to get ads on your blog as a new blog for a solo personal injury lawyer.
How to Get Ads on Your Blog: Using Ad Networks
The work of finding blog ads isn't always worth it. You should ask yourself before looking for ads for blogs: how much can you really expect to make? While most blogs from small firm lawyers are attracting new business, can you really say that your articles see enough page views to make it worth learning how to get ads on your blog yourself?
If the prospect of saving a little money doesn't sound like it would be worth it, and you'd just like your blog ads to bring in some spare cash, you can sign up with a blog network. Odds are, unless your blog really hits it big, ad networks aren't going to be a gigantic revenue stream. However, you can make a modest amount of money consistently while doing very little yourself.
Ad networks can teach you how to get ads on your blog quickly, and will take care of all billing and analytics so that you don't have to worry about anything. You can get ads for blogs running in a matter of days when using a blog network, and don't need to worry about blog ads taking over valuable time that you need to use growing your business in other ways.
How to Get Ads on Your Blog: Sponsored Blog Posts
Increasingly, sponsoring a blog post directly is considered a great way for companies to advertise products and services. Some sponsored posts are ads for blogs—perhaps with a guest writer. Other times, a company may offer you a free product or service in exchange for your discussion in your blog ads.
When writers don't make it obvious that sponsored blog posts are blog ads, readers can feel betrayed. This is why it's important to note when a post is sponsored, so that people know that they're reading ads for blogs. If the content is interesting enough, people won't skip over a sponsored post. Just make it interesting and make sure that it looks more like your typical content than it does like typical blog ads, and you'll be well on your way to advertising success.
How to Get Ads on Your Blog Without Scaring People Away
When you start selling ads for blogs, you may try leveraging your personal and social media contacts only to find out that you're losing friends without getting more blog ads sold. This is definitely one of the reasons that many law firms choose to outsource their blog advertising needs, but you can still learn how to get ads on your blog without an ad network and without alienating people that are close to you.
Don't use a hard sell approach for selling your blog ads. Instead, make the rates for your ads available publicly on your blog and send a link to people who indicate an interest. Ideally, you'll learn how to get ads on your blog by just getting people to click on your entries. It's much better to get people interested in your ads for blogs by making quality content than by trying to engage in direct sales, especially if you've never done this type of marketing before.
How Much Will Blog Ads Make Me?
Unfortunately, the truth is that ads for blogs no longer make as much money as they used to. If you learned how to get ads on your blog several years ago when law blogs were relatively new, you may have gotten a better rate on return.
Today, you should only expect ads for blogs to generate a large amount of money for your law firm if you're able to attract a huge audience. There's no reason not to shoot for the stars, but you should realize before you get into the blog ads business that most legal blogs aren't going to be great advertising moneymakers.
Your best chance for monetary success is to try to develop a great community for discussion. You may want to consider a group blogging effort with several lawyers from your firm, because these kinds of group blogs lend themselves very easily to informed dialogue and discussion. When you get more readers participating, commenting, and staying longer on each page, you'll be able to charge more for every blog ad impression.
Analyzing Results of Blog Ads
In order to get high-paying ads for blogs, you'll want to show that you can generate not just clicks, but high quality, high-conversion traffic. Having good web analytics can help you to show advertisers that advertising with your blog is worthwhile.
You should take as much time, in general, analyzing a new campaign with web analytics as you did planning the campaign. It's possible to learn a great deal from your existing web traffic—don't ignore it! Too many firms waste data that could be shedding light on the best new ways to market your firm on the web and beyond.