Investing in Your Blog: Tips for Advertising your Site
Congratulations are in order, for if you have finally started earning with your blog or blogs and are now wondering what comes next you are already in a small percentage of bloggers who actually have found a way to make any income greater than $10 from their blogs. What you choose to do next will depend on how ready you are to promote your blog and try to increase your traffic faster, because investing and spending money to promote your blog is a big step and one that bloggers (especially new bloggers whose blogs make very little) do not take lightly.
Once you have started earning from your blogging efforts, now you should start investing back in your blog and this should help increase your blog traffic, rankings and ratings (in theory anyway). I would take about 25% of your blog earnings and invest them in advertising your blog if you can afford to financially that is.
There are several ways you could invest in promoting your blog and here are my thoughts on each. Note: Different promotional tactics and advertising methods work for different people, so my recommendations and advice are not rock solid, I am merely sharing my own way of thinking and letting you decide if you want to pursue one of these paths.
AdWords Promotion
I don’t think AdWords is a good idea for bloggers unless you have a specific product or service that you sell. AdWords can bring extra traffic to your blog (I brought in 600 extra visitors in 1 month) but unless you have a specific product or service, those extra visits will not provide a good ROI (Return on Investment) and your money will be wasted. If you have an article where you are promoting an affiliate product, then you can build an AdWords campaign just promoting this article. I did this for my SponsoredTweets affiliate and got 15 extra subscribers under me in 2 months (this translates to commissions on each sponsored tweet they do.
Buying Backlinks
When I first started blogging two years ago, I did invest $60 in purchasing the “backlinks” that companies offer. 120,000 directory listings, or 80+ backlinks for $25 or $50. I tried this to see if I could leapfrog the hard work and dedication to building my backlinks the manual way. This in the end was a failure, for coincidence or not, my PageRank was dropped to 0 within 3 months of paying for the backlinks (Google does penalize if too many backlinks are created too quickly). This may just be coincidence of course, but it took me 6 months to get my PR2 back and I am wary about purchasing large backlinks any further. If you are going to pay for backlinks, I would rather invest in individual bloggers doing a post than using a directory service.
Find bloggers in like categories by doing blogsearch.google.com and search for keywords or topics that relate to your own blog. Find out a bloggers traffic rating by reviewing public Compete analytics or Alexa Site Info and look up the site. After you determine if a site gets a decent amount of traffic (I usually don’t advertise on sites that get less than 10k visiters per month) then reach out to the blog owner and see if you can purchase backlinks. Most owners will sell you a keyword backlink inside an old post for a fraction of the cost of having to write a new article. Do the work for them and pick an article and keyword and ask to link it to you. Ask them to quote a price and see if you can get a package deal (2 for $5, or 3 for $10) kind of thing.
Buying Comments on Other Sites
Many people have starting purchasing comment bundles, and most of these end up in a bloggers Akismet bucket and are a total waste of your money. The ones that are true human users who read posts (at least well enough to leave a meaningful comment) can potentially be beneficial but again when you leave a breadcrumb on someone elses site, you are putting your reputation on the line. I would not purchase comments on other blogs as it is not very hard to just blogsearch some blogs and figure the average person reads a 200 word article in about 2 minutes, and another 2 minutes for the comment. At this rate you could leave 12 – 15 comments per hour and these would be from you. Dollar per hour, it is more expensive to outsource somebody else to leave comments on your behalf.
Purchasing Banner Ads on Blogs
This is probably your best “trial and error” method of promoting your blog. Every blogger should have the following ad arsenals in their blog. Usually you can resize any other unusual ad types from these, but I would make sure your blog has at least these advertisement logo’s
- 1 – 468×60 banner logo
- 2 – 125×125 banner logo’s
- 1 – 350×250 banner logo
Now you go around finding other blogs you like and blogs that get good page impressions (again use Compete.com or Alexa.com to give impressions) PageRank will not help you determine if a blog has alot of visits (PageRank is good for purchasing backlinks (you get SEO juice) but is bad for purchasing temporary banner ads, because the PR juice is very temporary, so it is more important to look at traffic statistics.
Next contact the blog owner directly and see if they will give you a discount over whatever ad service they use, tell them your marketing budget and see if they are flexible. See if you can bundle maybe a backlink and a banner ad with a combo price with discount.
One great thing about bloggers is that unless they are already so super successful that major companies are advertising with them (not affiliate links that appear that way), then most bloggers are generally flexible when it comes to banner ads. Especially if you see a blog with lots of “Advertise” her banners and none of them filled with ads, this is a more likely scenario that the blogger will negotiate for some money is better than having a blank advertise here logo.
Purchasing Tweets or Social Media Broadcasts
I lump these in with the AdWords in that unless you are selling a product or service you will not see a return on investment. Just getting visits to your blog or site will not translate to money and figure that less than 1% of people who follow a link will become regular readers. If you are selling a product or service like an eBook or Social Media service, then my suggestions would be to start a CPC campain on MyLikes.com. You can pay as little as .10 per click and can get more bang for your buck this way. SponsoredTweets is also a good potential service and you can buy many tweets for $2 – $4, just make sure you choose a user who offers to retweet if they have poor performance with their sponsored tweet so you can get a better bang for your buck if the first sponsored tweet doesn’t translate to many clicks.
Purchase Product/Site Reviews
I love IZEA SocialSpark / PayPerPost and other services as a blogger, but lets face it IZEA charges a 50% commission on advertising campaigns. If you are a blogger on a small budget, you will likely save money by contacting the bloggers directly instead of running a campaign on those networks. The exception is InPostLinks where you can purchase back links for $1 per link. I think that it is probably cheaper to purchase back links from InPostLinks than from asking bloggers direct who tend to set a higher minimum than you can find with InPostLinks. I would definitely purchase a campaign on these services if I had a product to sell, but if I am just trying to increase traffic to my blog to get more visitors and readers, these won’t translate to much benefit in my opinion. After all, you can hire Chris Brogan himself to write a review about your website, and you would get a huge traffic spike likely to bring down your server itself, but unless you are having him direct the users to a product or service you can sell, this traffic will do little but translate to a few extra readers (perhaps) and some increased AdSense from the extra spike in traffic.
Summary:
In summary if you are a blogger who is trying to increase visitors and notice online for your site, I think purchasing banner ads is your best bet. If you are interested in page rank improvements and improving search engine rankings then I think purchasing backlinks with targeted keywords is best. If you are looking to sell affiliate products or a service you offer, then I think purchasing social media advertisements (tweets, facebook broadcasts) or AdWords may leave to a higher Return on Investment.
These are advertising tips from DragonBlogger.com and again I share with you my own point of view and impressions over the past two years of blogging. I have purchased $100 in AdWords, $90 in backlinks, $80 in sponsored social media broadcasts, and $80 in banner ads over the past two years. I never purchased comments though, but I have seen and read a lot about it.
Now that I have shared my opinions on blog advertising, I would love to hear from fellow bloggers. What are your favorite methods of advertising? What have you tried and what has worked or not worked for you?
-Dragon Blogger
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Hey Dragon Blogger,
Thanks for the great post. this is actually my first time visiting this site. I have actually considered purchasing a backlink package so this information is extremely helpful to me. What do you think about using this method if you have no PageRank at all? This would be a new blog. What does a normal blog profile look like in this case? Thanks again for the great information.
All the best,
PJ
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