Oct 14 2009
Monthly Advertising Deals are My New Best Friend
I am starting to really love monthly advertising deals. Sure, it’s temping to make a grab for the cash on 6-monthly or yearly deals, but I am starting to see the benefits of having a few monthly deals going at the same time behind the scenes.
I’ve had a couple of advertisers paying me a measly $10 each a month since August 2007 on a Paypal subscription payment. I haven’t had any contact with the advertisers since they set them up over two years ago and, unless I decide to increase the price or they decide to cancel, I have no reason to. The $20 has been coming in each month like clockwork and I don’t even remember which sites their ads are on.
Setting up automated payments with Paypal makes life easy because, once it’s arranged, you can forget all about it and just keep collecting the money each month without you having to do a thing. There’s no need to chase payments and the income truly is automated which is exactly why I love it so much. Plus I usually give discounts for 6-monthly or yearly purchases so people paying monthly end up paying more over the course of the year, it’s just that I have to wait for it.
So for ages I only had $20 worth of these things coming in a month and suddenly things have gone crazy and now I have over $370 worth of monthly subscription payments coming in across seven separate deals plus another $140 every two months in an eight deal. This is great news because one of the things that has always made me nervous about advertising revenue has been that it’s pretty unpredictable. You never really know if or when you will be contacted by someone interested in buying advertising I was always uneasy about relying on this income source. Being able to sort of count on the monthly payments (of course they can still be canceled at any time) takes a bit of the unpredictability away and it’s nice to have a minimum amount of advertising earnings to build on each month.
I would be very happy if each of my main revenue streams (Adsense, affiliates and advertising) are reliably earning me $500 each per month. At the moment I’m at about $350 for each of those so I have a bit of work ahead of me. A steady $1500 per month with those unpredictable advertising deals on top would make me a very happy camper. It would ne nice to see the earnings diversified evenly across the three revenue streams and, more importantly, bumping up my minimum earnings level to $1500 would take the edge of my fast-depleting savings account.
With these monthly payments coming in I’m starting to feel a lot more confident that I will get to the $2000 a month mark sooner rather than later. It’s been a long time coming, so I hope so!
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Hey Kirsty,
Great idea for the monthly subscription. I have a question for you if you dont mind, do you go looking for the advertising links or do they normal send you an email asking to advertise on your sites? I also guess the better you PR the more you can charge?
I guess if you can have 3 different income streams for each site then thats the way to go!
Keep up the good work,
Steve
“advertising” as well call what we both know you are talking about is a great thing. It’s a real cash cow. You just got to be careful about it. Too much and the G comes and smacks you hard!
I would already say you have too much “Advertising” on this website already, especially since it is sidebar and on every page. I count 19 which is really pushing it. I could whacked for far less.
I think this is a great example of just how much our sites are worth when you put all this in perspective. Our sites for me are like modern day Newspapers / Magazines and big brother G categorically states it is ok to sell advertising space as long as it is clearly marked.
When I first started to dabble with making money on the web I sold quite a lot of space but got to a point where i no longer needed the revenue and because i did not have people on the auto feature Kirsty talks about I’m now forfeiting a tidy sum each month, this whole auto feature appeals to me & makes a lot of sense.
@steve I used to cruise the boards over at http://forum.digitalpoint.com looking for ad sales but I haven’t done that for awhile. I usually get a few emails a month looking for ad space and most people who get in touch convert into a sale. I don’t have three different income streams for each site I have, rather three across all of my sites. So some do well with Adsense, some sell affiliate products and most have some sort of ad on them so it all adds up.
@matt Many of those links in the sidebar are link exchanges and some are sites of my own. I have a few expiring soon that got great deals back in the day so I might nix those when renewal times comes.
@goldfishguy Neale I have always thought of it the same way… websites are like newspapers. It always pissed me off to no end that Google would try to control how I chose to monetise my own site but I guess the reality is that it’s sort of a game of cat and mouse. You want to earn from your hard work but you don’t want to annoy the search engine that will determine whether or not your hard work will be seen by people. It’s a tough call.
[…] Advertising - $1220 - This is where things really picked up for me. I had a big yearly ad sale for almost $600 which was a huge boost. The thing I’m most excited about though is that I now have $370 worth of monthly Paypal subscription payments coming in which takes a bit of the guesswork out of how much I will earn in advertising each month and takes some of the pressure off. I’m just hoping nobody cancels anytime soon so I can bump this up to $500 per month. […]
Great job on the monetization of your website. I’ve been running a travel website for over 13 years and I pretty much make nothing on it. Google Ads make only a few dollars each month. I run a booking widget which doesn’t make much either. You might have a job helping make money for other sites and or taking a good cut of what you make for them. Just a thought.
My site has tons of content from both my own trips as well as from other travelers. I’ve spent thousands of hours on the site over the years. I’ve saved your notes on monetizing your site and will review. I don’t even know how to go about getting advertisers. In the past a few advertisers have found me.
Dave