In-Text Ad Solutions To Increase Blog Revenue
Lots of webmasters know the ins and outs of Google AdSense and use it as their primary revenue source from their blogs. Fewer are good affiliate marketers, but bloggers with good, targeted mailing lists can make pretty good money from affiliate marketing. However, even these bloggers rarely make as much money as they can from their blogs. Using in-text ad solutions like VigLink can greatly increase your blog’s revenue. However, solutions like these rely on high-quality content to earn you revenue, so in order to get the most out of VigLink and other content monetization solutions, you need to have a strategy for developing content — and lots of it. That’s where forums come in.
Content is King
Recently, I re-read an old article by Bill Gates called Content is King. In the article, written in 1996, Gates makes some interesting predictions, and asserts that ultimately, money will be made online by selling content. However, he points out that subscription fees have to be high because online transactions are expensive, so the subscription model is not good for many online publications. Furthermore, subscriptions reduce readership substantially, reducing the value of advertising.
Gates’ solution was to charge Internet users small microtransactions for content, maybe a nickel per page. Sixteen years later, this solution seems laughable for a number of reasons, among them that people don’t want to give unknown sites their credit card numbers. Plus, the cost of online transactions through trusted third-parties such as PayPal is still pretty high.
Content is How you Make Money
However, he was right in that you can use content to make money online. With the advent of blogs, this has meant that bloggers accept a plethora of guest posts every day in the hopes that people stumble upon them through search engines. The readers view articles and click on AdSense ads, earning money for the blog owner. Content is king because bloggers need to constantly produce new content or else people won’t find them on search engines.
As any blogger can attest to, there are only so many posts we can churn out in a single day. And guest posts, while useful, can be hit or miss in terms of quality (some may have grammar issues, others may be off-topic or simply trying to sell a product). As a result, a lot of bloggers, even those who have great readership, simply can’t keep up with the amount of content required to continually run a profitable blog.
Forums Provide you with Free Content
Placing a forum on your blog provides a place where readers can create high-quality content for you — in the form of forum threads. For those not familiar with the general structure of a forum, here’s how it works:
- A forum administrator or user starts a conversation “thread” — it could be asking a question, or sharing their thoughts on a topic, product or service.
- Other community members read and respond to them.
- Members can also subscribe to threads and be notified when a new comment is posted (bringing readers back to your site to generate more content).
Over time, a topic evolves as more and more people add what they have to say to it. The new posts, as well as the act of discussion, become high-quality content that serves to augment the original post. These discussions can even bring new people into your community, as people show their friends interesting forum posts.
More Opportunities for Advertising
People scroll through blog posts fairly quickly, but the best place to advertise on a blog post is still at the very top of the page. As a result, even the best banner ads on blogs have a low click-through rate. This is why large publications charge advertisers per thousand views: They make more money charging PPM than they would if they only got paid when their ads actually worked!
VigLink + Forums = Profit
However, forums can beat this method when they opt to deliver in-content links from VigLink within their threads. Because developed threads are much longer than blog posts, there is simply more content to monetize — and more space for all types of advertising (even banner ads). VigLink in-content links appear in the content itself, not to the side or on top of the content like a banner ad. A forum is a great opportunity to increase the volume of content on your site and your site’s revenue.
Learn more at ForumCon
ForumCon is the world’s only conference for forum owners and people interested in setting up a forum. VigLink, the market leader in content monetization hosts the event annually in San Francisco. This year it’s on June 12th at Hotel Kabuki. ForumCon is a great place to learn more about how to use a forum to better engage with your blog’s readership and leverage your community to create more content for themselves. As the only conference for forum owners, it’s a great place to learn how to make money off your blog’s forum and to network with successful forum owners and advertisers.
Tickets are selling out, so get yours today! Hope to see you there!
Disclosure: My company, Influence People, does blogger outreach work with VigLink
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Forum is where I’m lacking, I guess. May be, because of less time for being online, have studies as well. But I’ll step in to this soon.
Thank you for linking Mr Gate’s article.
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Abhi Balani recently posted..Good Blogger And A Good Blog: What Are The Signs?
I have the same problem. I am still not making use of the forums in the best way. And it is hurting me big time
But it’s too easy but getting members thats too hard but not impossible.
I’ve never heard of VigLink before. I’ve used both Kontera and InfoLinks. I’m also surprised how I’ve never seen a service like ForumCon before. With all the forums people are doing you think there would had been more businesses lie this created. The only good place I know for forum owner on the internet is theadminzone.com
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bbrian017 recently posted..Blog Engage Customer Contests (Free Blog Engage Accounts)
Forum administration/Community management is a small niche so there aren’t many sites catering toward them. Plus, doing a Google search for “forum community manager” and similar queries will often return results on random forums about their community managers, as opposed to returning forums about community management
This sounds a lot like the tweet clicks thing. How it it for pay out. Sometimes you put effort in for little to no payout. If you go through the effort will Viglink come through?
Forums will help in getting the bloggers good content from the readers. This will also help in giving the opinions from the readers on a certain topic. Bloggers can use this for posting on similar topics on the blogs. By doing this, interest of the readers will be increased. I have never tried this anytime for my blog but I think I will start from this year. This will also help me in getting to know my reader’s more closely. By using this, bloggers can initiate more conversions from the readers. Thanks for sharing your useful tips!
Informative post..
Through forum we can interact with many readers..we can post our own views in it and we can also post any doubt in it..so many users will respond to the query…
i haven’t heard about vinglink,thanks for sharing some information about it..
Absolutely great article! A lot of new information, as in all of your other posts. I actually like your method of blogging. Thank You for information about VigLink, I’ll test it.
Forum Marketing can be great aid to the blogging services, I have just made this transition and starting to utilize it more…
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Sanjeev recently posted..Business Blogging: 5 Risks Which Needs Mitigation on Your Blog
Content is king, I really agreed.
ForumCon is a new place for me, I have never heard of it. VigLink is new place to make money with content. Most people’s arguing about the problem of content, I think you can read the one below.
http://t.co/Ktr5N8pC
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Ferb recently posted..Do’s and Don’ts when Travel while Blogging
Thanks for the link, Ferb. The point about social media making content “not king” is a really interesting perspective.
Yes i agree with you and same with me
Thanks for the article. I haven’t yet explored the forum marketing concept. Forums are a great way to interact with and reach a wider community.
Thanks for the useful information, I haven’t heard about the importance of forum postings in the SEO processes, until I read your blog. Now I’m gonna do some stuff with forums, I’m looking forward for my new statistics:)
Honestly writing , i never knew about this part of SEO involving and using the forums . Till date i used to be more focused on posting rather updated and then going away but after this blog post i have thought and really came to a conclusion of reviewing my methods and using the forum way as you told to build much better statistics corner and improve things !
Forum Con well just trying it now , never heard but that’s what i always except from great sites !
I personally think it is more difficult to manage a forum, but the advertising potential is incredible. I use to advertise on forums a few years ago when I was selling electronic equipment online, and when I found a niche blog that fell in line with my products, it was a gold mine for both me and the forum owner. I paid of $2000.00 / month and it was worth every penny!
The other benefit was that my customers could go to the blog to get support on how to use their items, and the other members provided this free of my help.
Many members were daily visitors to the forum, as it was a community hangout. This also helped improve “brand recognition” for when they were ready to buy again.
-Joe
Wow. Making money off a forum when your advertising budget is over $2000/month is pretty impressive. Do you mind sharing with me what forum you run? How much more do you think you’d make per month if you added VigLink?
The forum I advertised on is no longer available because they got into some type of legal trouble and decided to close up. They were a hobby site that discussed all types of unique electronic products so it was very niche. They were more than happy to support my brand of products that I was importing which varied from navigation equipment to networking products.
I sold that part of my business two years ago as my wife and I were extremely burnt out. I started my consulting business to take its place and I couldn’t be happier.
Thanks for the article. ForumCon sounds interesting, and long overdue. I have to admit I closed my only forum due to time issues, however I may start from scratch again this year. Also, thanks for the VigiLink info, as that’s another website that’s new to me.
Hi, Brian,
Wow, ForumCon in San Francisco? Wish I could be there. Unfortunately, I am not a US citizen, although I travel once in a while to the States (lets say once in three years). Maybe next time I could go over there and exchange some ideas. You can never go wrong with hearing experiences of other individuals. It’s all school!
I’ve seen the in text links on various sites. I wonder how well they really work. The first couple of times I came across them I did click on them because I did not know what they were. However, now I avoid them like the plague. Is the goal to make the money of the new people or do some people like it?
i’m also not tried forum marketing .. i’m using dofollow blog commenting only .. i will use forums also soon
You’ll need a decent-sized blog of your own before you start a forum. To get the readership required to start a forum, you’ll need to make a LOT of dofollow blog comments to boost up your ranking on search results. For that, in-article dofollow links are usually better and you get more SEO for the amount of time you spend on them than you do by making dofollow blog comment links.
Actually i have tried some in text links like
Infolinks and Kontera but i think VigLink sounds interesting worth trying,isn’t it?
Kuldeep Khatri recently posted..How To Make A WordPress Or Blogger Blog Do-Follow?
This is a good strategy for increasing the rate of content generation for our blogs… We can turn our blogs into more like a ‘portal’ with a forum. There are a couple of good wordpress pugins (free) that will allow you to quickly and easy attach a forum to your blog.
Yes forums play important role.
nice article it’s helpful.
A forum is great but also a bit hard to manage.I mean…there must be some moderators to keep it without some dirty words or you will see one day that your forum will be full with this kind of post.
yes that’s the big problem for forum admins and moderators.
This was really an interesting article to read. In-text advertising is a form of contextual advertising where specific keywords within the text of a web-page are matched with advertising and/or related information units. I think it’s really nice. Keep sharing such more.
I’ve used both Kontera and InfoLinks. I’m also surprised how I’ve never seen a service like ForumCon before. With all the forums people are doing you think there would had been more businesses lie this created. The only good place I know for forum owner on the internet is theadminzone.com
shafeeq recently posted..How to make money from online