Make Money Online Through Blog Advertising

I got this question from Johnny who replied to our post on connecting with bloggers, encouraging questions to be asked.

"Do you have plans for us, Filipino bloggers, specially those who want to make money online, to convince our local business firms to advertise or put their ads in our respective blogs? Just like you got here in your blog where you post local ads as your sponsor?"

Whenever businesses evaluate advertising proposals, whether Internet-based or traditional print media, it gets evaluated the usual way such as:

• Readership or audience profile
• Content relevance
• Investment versus value proposition

Behind it, other intangible values come into play such as relationship, track record, and capability to sustain.

What I learned from Chris Anderson's "The Long Tail," the more content or product selections you have, the more segments you can accommodate. This means that if you want to succeed, like in the case of blogging, having collective strength will allow you to compete fiercely with mainstream big players. Instead of journalists, traditional consumers and technology connectors are the ones supplying the content and analyzing industry developments.

After participating in affiliate and blog revenue generating programs, I decided to launch an ad revenue program for club members last end of January. Since this is still in experimental stage, the opportunity is currently limited to DigitalFilipino.com Club members.

In addition to the parameters mentioned earlier, advertisers I was able to tap got convinced on the following reasons:

• Ads to appear in a good number of blogs and sites plus those of club members part of the ad network. More eyeballs, diverse blogs, fraction of mainstream media cost, all the better.
• Apart from exposure, add-on benefits includes better search engine positioning. As most of my advertisers were able to get clients through being found in search engine results, it made more sense to support endeavors like this. It is also suitable to entities who are just testing the waters on Internet advertising.
  

There are some lessons learned in this area that I shared lately and look forward in growing together with those who joined.