subject: How To Milk Your Blog For Pocket Money [print this page] Everbody - the adults, the kids and their pets nowadays have a blog or a website. Somebody really smart once said about blogging: "Never before had so many people with so little to say said so much to so few." There are billions of websites out there and - as seen on TV - a few of them even make decent money.
You've actually experienced those money-making devices first-hand: ads on Youtube and NYTimes, banners on CNN.com and those nasty popups on your favorite jokes site. Someone paid those sites so that they annoy you with those ads! Wouldn't it be nice if you got money to annoy visitors to your site?
That would be much nicer, - you would say, - but, I am not exactly Youtube: all my blog contains is the exciting assortment of videos of my grandpa snoring, funny jokes that are many years old and pics of cute kittens. Somehow every month I get a hundred visitors. I don't know where they come from - well, I don't know where the ninety-nine fools come from, but the hundredth one comes from the other room and it's grandma. Who in his right mind would ever consider placing ads on my website?
Well, surprisingly enough, there are plenty of companies out there who would love to advertise on your blog. Naturally, they don't want to waste their time trying to cut an exclusive advertising deal with every owner of an obscure website out there. But, they would gladly see their ads displayed on tens of thousands of small websites - including yours.
To help these companies advertise on many small websites, a whole class of intermediaries came into being - the ad networks. Ad networks bring advertisers and website owners together and they do so automatically - all you have to do is place a few lines of code that the ad network will give you into your webpages. The code will display an ad whenever someone visits your page. At the end of the month, the ad network will tally up the number of times the ads appeared on your page, calculate your earnings and cut you a check.
Some ad networks are easier to get into than others; others don't accept just anybody - they prefer a certain kind of a website and they lure them by higher payouts. What kind of website? you might ask. Well, unlike what your girlfriend told you, in the world of websites and ad networks size actually does matter - the more visits your website gets, the more likely it is that a higher-paying ad network will accept it. In the industry, those high-paying ad networks are known as "first-tier" ad networks. I will mention a couple of first-tier networks at the end of the article - follow the links and see how many people should visit your site every month before you can get admitted.
So, make your friends and relatives visit your site as often as they can, spam your email contacts and share those jokes with your friends on Facebook - the more people visit your website, the more likely it is that a first-tier network accepts you and the more money you will eventually be making. Think about it - a banner on top, an text-link ad on the bottom and an video ad somewhere in the middle - and, suddenly those cuddly kittens begin paying for themselves. Your grandma would be proud.
