How to Make Money as a Book Blogger Part 6: Advertising

It’s been a while since the last post in this series, so here are the threads to the earlier entries in case you’re coming in new or want a refresher:

• How to Make Money as a Book Blogger Part 1: Introduction
• How to Make Money as a Book Blogger Part 2: Blog Setup
• How to Make Money as a Book Blogger Part 3: Content and Keywords
• How to Make Money as a Book Blogger Part 4: Building Traffic
• How to Make Money as a Book Blogger Part 5: Affiliate Links

Now that we’ve got some traffic flowing to our blog, and we’re making a few dollars with affiliate marketing, we may want to look into another way to make money: selling advertising.

Types of Advertising

We’ll look at third-party pay-per-click ads, third-party pay-per-impression ads, and a variety of ways to sell ads directly to a client (most likely authors).

Third-Party Pay-Per-Click Advertising

With third-party ads, someone else handles the interactions with the client, and you simply get a snippet of code to embed somewhere on your blog. Naturally the middleman takes a cut of the earnings, but there’s a lot to be said for the set-it-and-forget-it nature of these ads. No need to worry about billing or customer service.

As the name suggests, with pay-per-click ads you only make money if a visitor clicks on the ad. This makes things a little easier than with affiliate programs, where you only get paid if there’s a sale, but you might only get a couple of pennies for a click (in industries with high-end products, where profit margins are greater, per-click-earnings tend to be greater, but books alas are not that industry).

As you can imagine, you need to sign lengthy terms of services in which you promise not to click your own ads or encourage others to click them for you (that’s a one-way ticket out of the program).

Pay-per-click ads can be text-based or image-based or a combination of both. Examples include Google Adsense and Chitika. Sign-ups are easy, and they’re not usually that picky on what sites they accept.

One excellent aspect of this type of advertising is that the third-party services send bots to crawl your site, and they attempt to match the ads closely with the content on the page. People are far more likely to click ads that are relevant.

Note: pay-per-click ads work best (earn you more) when you’re willing to display them prominently near the main content of your page (i.e. in the blog post itself or right next to it, not over in a side bar or anywhere people would have to scroll down to see). If you’re not willing to “ugly up” your book blog with ads stuck right in the middle, this method may not be worth pursuing.

Third-Party Pay-Per-Impression Advertising

The web was built on banner advertising, and this is usually what you’ll find in this arena. Again, you’ll sign up with a third party, and you’ll receive a snippet of code to embed into your blog.

Payment is based on the number of times the banner is seen, and clicks aren’t a part of the equation. Don’t expect to get paid a lot though, as it’s usually something like a buck or two per thousand impressions. Those with high-traffic sites are rewarded with this type of advertising.

Placement is usually at your discretion, but you’ll earn more if you display the ads prominently (yes, that’s a theme with advertising), such as at the top of your blog.

An example is Project Wonderful.

Selling Ads Directly to a Client (AKA authors)

This involves the most work, but it also offers the highest potential for earnings since you’re cutting out the middle man. You also have the most flexibility, since you decide whether you want to display text links, banner links, include blurbs in a newsletter, or perhaps try sponsored posts where your blog post itself promotes an author’s book.

With these ads, you usually charge by the month or day (you need to have a really popular book blog to make a daily ad worthwhile for authors!). To simplify things for yourself, you might try offering discounts to people who sign up for multiple months at a time. This means less time spent on rotating ads and worrying about billing and such.

About that billing, it’s up to you to handle it when you’re selling ads directly (Paypal is popular and inexpensive for set-up). You’ll have to deal with customer service too. Oh, and it’s also up to you to find clients! (Once your site becomes popular, some of them will find you, and all you’ll need is a page with advertising details and information on how to sign up.)

You can make things easier on yourself by automating the sign-up area (i.e. create a form where users simply select the type of advertising they want and click a “buy” button that takes them to Paypal). If you’re not techy, you can hire someone to do this for you.

Red Adept is an example of a book blogger who has an automatic sign-up for advertising, so check out her page for ideas.

There you have it: three ways to make money selling advertising on your book blog. I advise waiting to implement advertising until you have a decent amount of daily visitors, otherwise you’ll have ads cluttering up your site and you’ll be making next to nothing.

Good luck!