Monetizing a Blog

I’ve had my blog for close to three years now, and recently I decided to try an experiment with monetizing my blog. When it comes down to it I don’t really need the money, which is why I never had them on my blog in the first place. Recently however I began to think if I could at least recoup the rather minimal expenses for its upkeep that would be nice.

After reading this blog post over at Adam’s blog, I tried Text Link Ads. This actually held the most promise for generating quite a bit of revenue. In fact in just a two week period I had made about $6.00 from the placement of 2 ads.

I probably would have kept them on the blog, but I ran into a technical problem with the code they provided that appeared when people submitted comments to the blog. I was unable to resolve the issue and the help I got from support basically said “no one else has this problem,” so I pulled them off the blog.

Since the beginning of December, I have been using Google Ad Sense, and the earnings have been pitiful to say the least. In a half of a month I have generated 21 cents of revenue. This period of time has coincided with the biggest increase in blog traffic since I began this blog, so I’m thinking this is not going to be a good revenue stream for me!

Now I realize that a big part of the problem in terms of revenue generation is that the subject matter of this blog hits a very small niche market. I simply do not generate the type of traffic that makes placing ads something advertisers will drool over. Plus I don’t have the time, energy, nor desire to turn this thing into something more high profile.

Still, if I could generate 20 or 30 bucks a month from ads, it would be a nice source of income to cover the costs of keeping it up and the price of a cup of coffee or two a week at my favorite coffee shop. But at this point, I’m not sure what to try next or if I should just give up on the idea.