7 Levels Of Revenue For Your Blog
Chad Randall has written a post called the 7 Levels of Revenue For Your Blog, which ranks the various ways bloggers can make money, with level 1 being the lowest and Level 7 the highest.
Chad has placed Adsense at Level 1, which isn’t surprising given his views about Adsense - Chad was the author of the controversial post on Problogger encouraging bloggers to remove Adsense in order to attract advertisers. Chad places Fixed Monthly Sponsors in the top position at Level 7.
Here’s the full list - Do you agree with Chad’s rankings?
- Level 1: Adsense
- Level 2: Affiliate Programs
- Level 3: Ad Networks
- Level 4: Automated Text Link Ads
- Level 5: Fixed Link Text Link Ads
- Level 6: Graphical Banner Ads
- Level 7: Fixed Monthly Sponsors
I think Chad is mistaken to put Adsense at number 1. Not only is Adsense the main money earner for most bloggers, it’s also the most accessible service. Although Graphical Banner Ads and Fixed Monthly Sponsors definitely do offer the best return, these tend to be only accessible to the big blogs. To be honest, I think when a ‘blog’ gets to the size of Gizmodo or Engadget, I think they stop becoming a blog.
Personally, my biggest earner remains Adsense and I think it will continue to be, unless I get lucky and sell more direct campaigns like I did in March where I sold over £3k in direct ads. However, constantly generating Direct Ad sales is tough unless you have the time to concentrate on approaching Direct Advertisers.
One area I’m still trying to work out to crack is Level 2: Affiliate Programs as no matter what I do, I never seem to generate any income. I’m also still experimenting with alternate ad schemes to supplement my Adsense income.
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Comment by Selbourne on 15 August 2007:
Well adsense comes out to be the best bet as they continuously innovate. You have seen text ads and then came the image ads. Now they have the video ads.
Comment by Make A Guitar on 8 May 2007:
Text link ads certainly have excellent potential once you’re up and going. Adsense is nice but still varies all over the place. With text link ads, you have a fixed bit of income and, as Psychic points out, they take precious little space.
Comment by Psychic on 6 May 2007:
I believe the best one is the fixed link text ads. Once your site has good traffic and PR then placing these types of links on your site does not take up too much room
TerryG Psychic ability
Comment by Investing Blog on 6 May 2007:
Good point. Well it looks like you’ve encouraged me to start a case study. It’ll be one the effectiveness of RSS subscribers vs. newsletter subscribers. Can’t wait to blog about this one!