Last month I made about $21 serving Google ads on RedAlt. Of course, Google won’t send you a check until you’ve made $100 from serving ads.
What would be nice is if I could pay for my hosting entirely by hosting. I was explaining this to Nana a while ago - someone who doesn’t know the ways of the blogging world - and she wondered why, if Asymptomatic garnered so many more hits than RedAlt, I didn’t put ads on Asymptomatic, too. I guess I just have this whole idea of “selling out” by trying to make money off of this site. It’s basically a site for my own pleasure. If people didn’t visit all the time, the ads wouldn’t make any money anyway, and I wonder how many people I will turn off by including the ads at all.
Sometimes I wonder about people with brand new blogs who put advertising on their sites. Are they really working those affiliate links? What do they get out of it? Someone needs to create some kind of advertising manual for bloggers - what are the most profitable, least sleazy methods to make a buck off of this “hobby” that absorbs a sizeable portion of your life.
So, I’m going to try this out. I’ve put a Google ad under the first article that appears on the home page. I’m not sure how long I’ll keep it there. I suppose it depends on the visitor reaction to the whole thing. Hopefully, there will be enough click-throughs to start paying for a portion of my hosting, which I’m told is crazy, and there won’t be a backlash from visitors in response to the ads.
What do you think of the idea? At this point, I’m kind of at the point of “you’ve got to do what you’ve got to do”. It would be so nice if the site could pay for itself. So very nice.
A recent spending self-audit has me wondering where I can pick up extra cash here and there, but that’s a story for a different post. Isn’t it odd how in order to use ads to pay for your hosting you need to serve more pages, but if you serve more pages then you have to pay more for hosting?
