Monetization Strategies For a Flagship Blog

Terminology

Monetization is the set up of income streams on a blog.

A flagship blog is high maintenance, high traffic blog that has its own brand. It has a broader topic than a niche blog and significant percentage of its visitors are repeat visitors. They visit the site to read the content, rather than searching for an answer to a very specific question. A flagship blog receives search engine traffic as well, but because it is regularly and consistently updated it builds a loyal following usually much larger than the search engine traffic.

Types Of Advertising To Use When Monetizing A Flagship Blog

A flagship blog has both loyal readers and 1-time visitors. This means as long as the advertising matches the topic of the blog, no matter what type of advertising is used there will always be a reasonable ROI for the advertisers and bloggers.

For example using AdSense only on a flagship blog with a loyal web-savvy readership (worst case scenario for a flagship blog) will still make SOME money, but using privately sold banner ads on a small niche blog will make 0.

Flagship blog monetization scenarios
Traffic to the flagship blog is usually predominantly returning traffic and so the strengths of the blog are in its content and in its brand. It’s also important to remember that loyal readers often Subscribe via RSS or email and only see the content, so the content is extra important.

To take advantage that the traffic is focused on the content in a flagship blog, the most effective way to advertise is by monetizing the content itself.

Monetizing the content can be done by:

• Selling sponsored content. Using sponsored content brokers such as PayPerPost (see full list ad networks later) can help you find advertisers, or advertisers to find you. If your flagship blog is still young and isn’t yet receiving offers for private advertising they are especially useful. It is very important to strike a balance between making money and damaging your readership by writing off-topic sponsored posts.

• Promoting affiliate offers and including affiliate links in posts. Many different Websites have an Affiliate program, where bloggers can sign up and earn a commission on a pay-per-sale or sometimes a pay-per-lead basis. You can write an entire post designed to sell the product and also drop in affiliate links where relevant in other posts. Another technique is to create Pre-sell pages, which we will look into later.

• PPC In-Content links require bloggers to insert a code snippet into their blogs. A popular example of network that provides this is Kontera . They turn certain keywords on your blog into temporary links to advertisers Websites. You earn for each click through. I have found these systems can slow down a blogs loading time but are worth experimenting with. These also do not appear to RSS or email subscribers, but can provide a good supplemental income stream. (Adbrite is a contextual alternative)

To take advantage of the strong brand of a flagship blog, using privately sold 125 x 125 banner ads is effective, because it is beneficial for the advertiser to be associated with your strong brand. Being privately sold (sold by you), you get to keep 100% of the revenue and can cut out the middleman. Because flagship blogs have higher traffic it is worth the advertisers time to order privately like this. If your flagship blog is still young affiliate banners can fill the spots if they are not yet sold. To be privately sold an advertising page needs to be set up. Remember to be honest on your advertising page, but show of the traffic you have and include details about where your readership is from, what they are interested in and why your blog is a great place to advertise. Including testimonials from the most well known names you that advertised on your blog adds to the chance of success with privately sold advertising.

If the traffic to the flagship blog is predominantly returning, web-savvy traffic then it is a waste to use PPC advertising as the main income stream because there are only a few search engine visitors and the readers know the ads are ads and they are focused on the content. 125 x 125 banners (or any size banner) are still effective with web-savvy readers because the brand of the advertiser is still be strengthened even if there is a lower clickthrough rate. Banner blindness is an issue that lowers the CTR on banners, especially on flagship blogs where the loyal readers are over-exposed to a banner, but for the sake of branding banner ads are still commonly sold for a fixed monthly fee.

If the traffic to the flagship blog is predominantly returning, un-web-savvy traffic (they can’t tell what’s an ad and what isn’t) then extra monetization channels can be implemented. It is here that PPC ad networks come into play. PPC works best where visitors are from the search engines, or are loyal but “un-web-savvy”. If your blog matches these criteria then PPC networks like Google AdSense are a good option. Remember to blend the AdSense ads so they match your content to help get more clicks.