Adding Sense to Your Money Making Strategy

Posted on November 16, 2007 - Filed Under Monetizing

There has been a recent rumble among online publishers around changes that Google is making to Adsense. This development has been reported on numerous sites, and Problogger and John Chow give in-depth coverage of how Google Adsense is now making ads less clickable. I did not want to bore readers with repeat news, but instead decided to write a post about the challenges that money making blogs will face, especially if you are not located in the States or Canada.

Dissatisfied Advertisers

I would say the woes that are facing online publishers can be indirectly attributed to the complaints and demands of advertisers, and the money making channels who want to keep their customers satisfied. Google Adsense has been facing pressure from advertisers that they are paying way too much for clicks when they could very well be making a single sale only after paying for 200 clicks on a publisher’s blog. They (rightly or wrongly) attributed this fact to accidental clicks by visitors due to the “clickable area” surrounding an ad, and this has sparked a debate between publishers and advertisers, as well as blogs that rely heavily on Adsense and others who get most of their income from other sources. While A-list bloggers do not use Adsense in their main blogs, it generates a healthy income for them on other blogs that they manage.

To add to this unhappy situation, ad networks like WidgetBuck have stopped monetizing non-North American blogs and Chitika has also resorted to invalidating clicks from countries like China and India as part of their audit process to avoid “fraudulent clicks”. That means that asian blogs will see a significant drop in their revenue, including Problogger. Apparently this move was to please customers who are US companies that did not want to handle shipping charges to countries outside of North America.

Alternative Solutions for Monetization

While these moves by money making channels leave a bad taste in the mouth, they are not necessarily the end of the monetizing rainbow for Asian bloggers. Until there are enough money making platforms in Asia itself, one of the solution is to revert to geo-targeting your ads. This may not be a viable solution for asian blogs targetted at the North American audience, or for large blogs like Problogger. In this case, it might be a good idea to concentrate on Adsense (despite their recent change of reducing clickable area to the URL of advertisers) until you have built up enough profit from selling private ads or affiliate marketing to overtake Adsense earnings. Do note that reports by Adsense are not entirely reliable, and I have personally noticed quite a huge discrepancy on the number of ad clicks reported by Adsense, and the MyBlogLog tracker I installed on my blog.

Shifts in the Monetization Business Environment

While blogs used to depend solely on generating revenue via Google Adsense, businesses are starting to catch on to advertising online, providing opportunities for publishers to diversify their earnings. And as other mediums and channels for monetization pop up on the horizon, publishers now have more alternatives to choose from, depending on how heavily their traffic reacts to these various channels. And with any business environment, simple policy changes by a giant like Google can create tremors in the meta blog industry, unless you are John Chow who has diversified all your eggs into different baskets, with a healthy offline business earning as well.

My take on this is that the business of making money online has become a lot more complicated as monetization channels start implementing new policies to adjust their profit algorithm to please customers. I would say it is now not enough to just run a blog to make money online. You need to sell a product or service. Be it an eBook that costs $20 or selling products at $100 a piece, if you are planning to monetize your blog so that you can retire from your full time job, I would seriously suggest that you relook at your monetization strategy. Think about what paid product or service you can offer so that your blog earnings will not be swayed and tossed about by shifts in the monetization environment we are starting to see caused by advertisers who are starting to ask for more return on investment on their advertising dollars. Brian Clark’s Teaching Sells is a great way to start.

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