How to Monetize Your Blog! - Idea #1

I figured rather than writing a long boring treatise on “How to Monetize Your Blog” I would come up with a series of posts on how to make money from these things. Some of these ideas are new and have not been tested, some have been moderately successful and some have worked well for me.

Today's Idea: (Under the Classification – New and Untested)

I've spent a great deal of time trying to design my blogs to be visually appealing and easy to read, hoping to increase return visits but I’m not doing this more my health – well actually, I do blog to maintain my mental health – I also want to make some money from this effort so I spend additional time placing Google AdSense ads and my Affiliate links in high visibility areas hoping to increase click-thru rates. There is a delicate balance between writing an informative and interesting blog and creating an online ad.

I recently realized there was a hole in my advertising approach. Many of my readers subscribe to my RSS feed and read my posts from their reader application rather than visiting the blog directly. Because of this I wasn’t exposing them to my advertising and affiliate links. I was getting readers to my posts but there was no means to monetize the traffic. I subscribe to roughly 20 blogs and rarely revisit the blog after I have subscribed; my guess is many readers do the same thing. So, I came up with a fairly unobtrusive idea to get my advertisers in front of these RSS subscribers.

I’ve begun to add text links to my affiliates at the bottom of each post. These links show-up in each RSS posts and provide exposure for my affiliates. I try and make the link germane to the topic discussed hopefully increasing the likelihood that a reader will click-thru. Sometimes, I just send them to a specific book or other resource that might be of value.

Okay, now for the test: If you use an RSS reader (like Google Reader) to review recent posts from your favorite blogs make sure and subscribe to The Digital Napkin’s RSS feed to see how this works.

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