Back To Making Money
By Vic on Feb 1, 2008 in Niche Blogging
Local advertising. This is why I say local niches provide you and opportunity to capitalize on your local community for income the bad part with this type is usually you have to first prove yourself in other words get traffic. Now there is kind of shortcut to that and I wanted to give you a hint to see if it works for you.
Now i have already read a few of the local niche bloggers doign reviews of there local restaurants now in a perfect world you would be John Chow and you would be getting paid for that review and eating free. Now why would that local restaurant pay for advertising when you just gave him a free plug? One reason, competition. What will happen is sooner or later you will have tons of reviews of your local restaurants and now when people search in your local market the GEO should kick in and you should become the local authority on restaurant searches of course given you have also worked on links. Now the local restaurant owner says wait a minute yeah my name is on there but I want to showcase my restaurant more. So now the door opens again for recurring income from restaurants and the likes. Folks 125×125 are really good for this you get to sell more space for more money making the inch higher priced. Remember folks this applies to all types of retail or service businesses.
As you folks know Adsense is not a good fit for a blog that is all over the place. So using Adsense on a site wide basis with a local niche blog would be killing your CPC and welcome the world of pricing. Now how then can we still capitalize on Adsense and the CPC, yes we can but in a more sneaky way.
And the last option generic advertising. In other words travelocity, 21st insurance etc etc etc. Now folks this ads are great but geezzee you need tons of traffic to convert and it frustrates many new people to the business. I have found that it becomes productive at the 30k page views a day till then you are making shit money.
Ok instead of dragging on. Just start asking away
Popularity: 28% [?]
OK here I go.
If you are hiding the article or post how do you get clicks on the adsense ads? If no one sees the ads how are you making money?
That’s for the benefit of people doing searches, not people just clicking around the site. It’s targeted traffic in that case, so it should have a higher CTR.
Also how do you back date an article or post?
Use Post Timestamp and edit the date
Hi,
I wrote something about making offline promotion in December. That should help with local niche.
Offline Promotions With 250 Free Business Cards For Your Blog
In my example, the cards are in English but my city is mostly French speaking. It was test of the service. Like you said, sell products that you tried
They will either convert to clicks or readers or nothing.
Hey Vic,
So far I’ve sold three local ads but only for $10/mo each so far. What should we use or how should we determine pricing? I priced mine so low because traffic has been so low. Today is the end of the first month of East of Huntsville and our average 48.4 visits and 90 page views per day. Can you point us in the right direction for where to look for a reasonable rate to charge local advertisers?
Thanks man!!
-Thom
Thom,
Call around to the other advertising agencies in your area. Call the local newspapers, other websites (news, etc. ) and find out what they charge.
You can then out price them to get some business and raise your rates later.
One way to find “normal acceptable” add rates is the local newspaper. Most that I have visited have their rate cards online. You may have to look for it but it is there.
You will be surprised home much they get for ads. Obviously you will not get their top dollar. I would use a ratio of traffic to dollars. That way you know your ad rates are on par with theirs, just indexed to your traffic. As your traffic goes up you can charge more but keep it pegged to their ad rates.
you’ll have to find out their traffic as well but that is normally a bullet point on the ad rate card.
formula: ad_rate/traffic_for_time_Period
for instance: $100 / 1000v per month or .10 cents that is a bit high per site visitor.
the paper $1500 / 150000 per week = .0025 per visitor
Now obviously you’ll want to establish a minimum ad rate for your site the lowest rate you’ll accept.
The point is that once you can show similar or slightly higher rate to visitor ratios you will be able to more aggressively target local businesses.
They have done the work to determine what your local market will bare for ad rates. Just leverage their investment in this process.
Just a thought
I meant “page views” in the formulas not visitors
Thom we are working right now on a post about this whole local niche ad selling I look forward to having it ready this weekend.
I like the idea of getting lawyers and real estate adwords $$. Timeshare ads also have high CPC.
What do y’all think about adding a business directory that starts as a complimentary text-line only, then can be upgraded to a link/image/video/article for a fee. e.g.
phpMy Directory
It could also be user-maintained, and integrates with payment systems.
It’s a nice ideal but could a bidding directory be better? Local business may start a bidding war to get on the first page of the directory in their category.
I love the idea… where do you get the listings? Yellow Pages and type them in???
-Thom
Tes, YPs, or for starters one could scrape the Chamber of Commerce just for the business name and categorize them, then notify them that they can add more. The phpMydirectory script looks appealing because it can accept user input and automate the subscription billing.
here’s another idea. Talk to certain groups of people in your area (lawyer, doctor, real estate, etc.) and offer them a free write up as a post promoting a portion of their business.
Let’s say that you have a lasik doctor in your area. Offer them to write an article for your site, and they can promote their business by putting their contact info in it. Now, this is a free post for them, but you put adsense on it…targeted traffic for lasik in your area!
Just an idea!
Hey Mirol,
I’ve actually done this already. A simple business directory on which I list local business owners who don’t have a shop front to give them somewhere to advertise. At the moment it is free and my add is at the top but in the future I intend to charge for this.
Exactly. I’m thinking a one-line text listing could remain free, and charge for enhancement.
So Vic…
Am I understanding you correctly…until I’m able to generate noticeable traffic, I’m not really going to make hardly any income from monetizing my local niche site?
And what amount of daily site traffic would you estimate will catch the attention of local merchants to want to pay me for ads?
I’m so glad you’re back on track with this. Thanks…
No John you just have to be smart this is why we use adsense and hide the post. I have a site that has on a good day 50 unique hits but avg $20 a day in Adsense
I disagree with the pricing idea. From what I can tell everyone is pretty specific with a town. Newspapers are read if people pick them up. If they pay for them. And most newspapers are very broad in the area they cover. You are developing very specific customers for your advertisers. Forget adsense and newspapers as a guide, I think your customers are worth a whole lot more. I would be going after businesses with high profit items. Autos, roofing, lawyers, plumbers, Landscaping. Dust off that yellow pages book and look who is paying full page ad prices. Thats your target customer.
Heck you folks do not need me anymore LMAO. I love it how everybody chips in to help each other out. Just awesome.
I NEED YOU!
Really everyone has been helping me and I really appreciate it so much. I am so anxious to start making real money.
I just checked my adsense income and I have made $52 in over 2 years. How sad is that!
Denise,
Don’t be discouraged! it takes time, trust me. I had almost a $6 day yesterday, and today, $.07. It just takes time to build, not that I’m any expert.
You need to write keyword rich posts, use BZ and other promotion methods and get links.
For your local niche, ask the other smaller papers, and news sites to link to you and you link to them. It will help to promote your site probably more than theirs as you are the new site in town.
Denise no worries we are all here to help many great people are behind you.
The idea I was going to try was to wait a month till I get a few restaurant reviews, then make a separate page which links to all the posts. On this page I’ll sell the ads, so you get a free post but for top spots you need to buy the ad. This is pretty much what’s been said here, isn’t it? I figure that this page will by then get some pretty good traffic. My site is already # 8 out of 1290 Google results for “Red Deer restaurant”. After 1 review, how good is that? This stuff really works, for anyone that is worried about pulling it off, keep going. Vic and Court are giving us the real deal! Our review is getting hits because most of the other search results are crap.
Then, once I’ve got this format and some printed off stats, I can duplicate it for other types of businesses cause I’ll have something to demo for them. And I figured on going fairly high on prices. I used to run a coffee time style newsletter, and I made the mistake of pricing myself too low due to lack of research. Try raising the prices later on existing customers! Real hard to do.
I would advise to aim high. You can always come down in negotiations. If you price low, they might think that you aren’t worth much. And like was said earlier, research what your competitors are charging. Everyone is already buying for hat much, so if you have the traffic they won’t even blink. A laptop with wireless connection would be ideal for demos, but if you don’t have one convince them to let you borrow their office computer to show them what you can do.
Tim you are so right. It is easier to come down but man bumping people one dollar is a bitch.
These are valuable tips.
I’ve got my lawyer words and working on the articles.
I found some info on vertical market ads, like Adify, but I’m not familiar with any of them. Anyone have some suggestions on how to preselect which ad types display?
Mirol I will make a post that is kind of advance for monetization but I think you folks by now will understand it.
All I have to add is that I created a simple little website to promote a local guitar and piano tutor. I was concerned that people weren’t searching for this because nothing was coming up on my keyword research.
I was wrong. I got 90 SE hits last month. Not much but he already has more students than he can handle and has to turn people away.
April
April that is suck cool news. It is so amazing to hear how success can change a persons look on the whole system.
Vic,
I have built the site and now am posting articles and getting unique visitors. However, yesterday I did a “hot topic article” and had a huge spike in viewers and today will add more hot topic articles. I realize these viewers are not all from my geographic area, but, I assume no harm done - it’s just that for future advertising purposes from local vendors most news should be local news. On the other hand, if local people search the “hot topic” news article I wrote they will see the local named website. I guess what I mean is perhaps some National news could be mixed in with local news. That way local people may be more thrilled with the site because it offers a local and national news.
I typed this article yesterday afternoon and am
ranked on page 1 of google for the following terms: *in some cases above: youdecide, cbs, abc, etc…
Super Tuesday Results - Obama vs. Clinton
Here are results from my stats page:
obama vs clinton super tuesday
super tuesday results obama
obama vs. clinton delegate count super tuesday
obama vs clinton on super tuesday
etc…
go to “g” and type those phrases in to see for yourself that all three phrases are on page 1 of “g”. At least as of this moment. No telling what happens during the day and the weeks ahead.