Author: Nancy McCord

Nancy McCord is the President and resident blogger for McCord Web Services LLC. She has been providing global web services since 2001. She is a web designer, search engine marketing professional, and search engine and blog expert. She lives in Maryland just south of the Washington DC metro area.
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Monetizing Your Blog – the Reality of Making Money

Before you monetize your blog, or your website for that matter, it is important to consider your traffic and intentions before you insert code or change your site’s layout to accommodate ads.

Case in point, www.StreetSoldiers.com – AdSense advertising was added to the site three years ago. The addition of the ads affected the overall clean look of the site and had not been planned for by the original designer. Although the ads were styled to match the site, they looked like they were an after thought. After three years of click traffic the client got a check for $100 for Google. You look at the site. Was it worth it?

The key to monetizing your blog and website is one, traffic, and two, that the items you are promoting are a match to the services you offer. In my case, I make a nice side income on clicks in on Google AdWords referrals, but I make pennies on other ads. (I have tested monetizing my own blogs a number of times and in different formats.) I sell, service, manage, and write about Google AdWords and so the promotion of AdWords effectively works for my site. However, when I say nice side income I mean specifically that in three months Google has paid me $180. You may consider that high or low, but that is the reality of what I generated.

If you are getting under 200 unique visitors in a month, you will never make “real” money with AdSense. What you as a site owner have to decide is, is the dilution of your message and disruption of your page layout appropriate with the return on investment. Monetizing may work for your site or it simply may be an annoyance for site visitors.

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AdWords, It is Not Add-On Selling, It is About Success

We’ve made a pretty sweeping change in our Google AdWords account set up service. We now bundle our research and set up with the first four weeks of account management. This is not about building a sale as nearly all of our clients had bought the first four weeks of management, but it is about helping your program to be successful.

Find out why this is crucial to your success with Google AdWords in our post at Web-World Watch and what happens typically to an account in the first week. We see the same pattern over and over and know from experience what to do to bring you through the “crash”.

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Why the First Four Weeks is Crucial to AdWords Success

Good keyword research and winning ad text is now not enough when it comes to success with Google AdWords. It is now crucially important to not only have great set up, but careful management of your account in the crucial first four weeks.

This is not an issue of add-on selling or building a sale from my viewpoint, but an assurance of success. Why? Typically when an account first starts rolling Google will strongly serve the ads and sometimes at lower than typical figures. In the first two to three days all seems peachy. Then Google figures out where the new advertiser fits in its mix both by CTR, daily budget, and max. CPC. Typically we will see an account suddenly drop in ad position to 7 or 10 or even lower on the page. If you are not watching the account and making incremental adjustments in the cost per click based on market competition, your program is doomed to start to see the impressions drop and ad position continue to stay low and the program stagnate.

After weeks at this level some self-managers will figure that AdWords is not a suitable program for them. What they do not realize is that the first two weeks in an account are typically rocky. With fine-tuning by a proficient account manager around week three things seem to gel and the program really gets rolling.

What we do as account managers, in the first four weeks is crucial to your success. Sometimes adjustments are made in geotargeting, cost per click, ad text, keywords, negative keywords, and match types. In fact we feel so strongly about helping you start off successfully that now we bundle our set up and first four weeks of management together. We don’t do just set up as we know that these programs are doomed in the first week without active experienced account management to bring them to a satisfactory level of experience.