When to seek revenue
2010.07.29
ABOVE: Why settle for change when patience will pay off in banknotes?
by Durant Imboden, Europe for Visitors
Not long ago, in the Travel Blog Exchange's "Business of Travel Blogging" group, a blogger asked: "At what point should you start to monetize?" That's a reasonable question, and my reply here is the same one that I gave on the TBEX forum:
"When you have enough traffic to generate meaningful revenue (which could be anywhere from a thousand to many thousands of page views per day, depending on your goals, the revenue sources available to you, and the nature of your topic and audience)."
Until you reach a critical mass of content and traffic, you'll be lucky if you earn more than a few dollars per 1,000 page views. And unless you're attracting thousands of readers from day one, your earnings will be minimal even if you can "monetize" your traffic.
My advice:
- In the beginning, don't worry about revenue. Focus your efforts on building editorial content. You'll be making more productive use of your time, and--as a bonus--you'll have a better chance of acquiring inbound links from bloggers, librarians, teachers with school Web pages, Wikipedia editors, etc. who sometimes have a knee-jerk negative reaction to "commercial" sites.
- When you're averaging 50,000 or 100,000 page views per month, apply for Google's AdSense network and place an ad unit or two on each page.
- As your traffic continues to grow, you can experiment with other types of advertising or affiliate programs.
To put it another way, think of your site's early days as a time of investment. By concentrating on building "sweat equity" now, you'll earn bigger dividends later on.
Next article: "More resources on the Web"
Photo: Lillisphotography.
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