Auction Ads Revisited

Summer is gradually giving way to autumn around here, and just like the seasons change, so must our blog monetization strategies if we intend to make money from blogging. This is not a static money making business.

So after giving them a second try I have decided today to remove AuctionAds from my blogs. Those of you who read this blog regularly will recall that I had them up before, took them off and then had a change of heart and put them back on my blog.

Auction Ads are another method of making money from your blog, similar to most website monetization products, AuctionAds display product links on your site and then pay you for conversions and hits etc. The ads are for products listed for sale on Ebay. I thought they might be a good way to go, but unfortunately they just don't convert on any of my sites.

After months of having them up, I haven't made $0.50 I haven't even made half of that, so I am going to remove them. There are a couple of reasons why I am going to take them off. If they aren't making money they are taking up what could be valuable advertising space on my blogs. I do make money from other ad providers and affiliate programs, so why should I give up that valuable space to what amounts to free advertising.

The second reason is having too much 'stuff' on your blog can result in it becoming very busy and detract from the design, as well as taking visitors away from the things that might be making money for you.

Oddly enough I hate to do it. The AuctionAds code is easy to use and for the most part does a reasonable job of providing products that compliment my blog topic. But as with any 'call to action' type of advertising, they are harder to make money on. Lets face it, advertising programs that pay per click are one thing, but if the reader has to do something before you make any money, and that something is buy something, you are at the mercy of how good a job the seller does.

Secondly, it takes a lot of visitors to your site to get a percentage to buy anything. Most blog readers aren't necessarily planning to buy something, so to some degree they have to be convinced to an impulse purchase, which again is difficult. Of course there are lots of conversion strategies used by online marketers that improve the chances of a sale, but they are more familiar to people in that business. Besides, with AuctionAds, I am only pointing people to the products, I have little or no control in what strategies are implemented to convert the reader to a purchaser. For that I am dependent on the person posting the product for sale on Ebay.

So long story short, AuctionAds are coming off this site and the others that I write. As we have said so many times, blog monetization requires you to experiment, track your results and make changes when you think they are required. That's what I am doing today. Now before you go hitting the delete key, removing your AuctionAds you need to consider your own situation. Maybe they are making money for you in which case, leave them alone, or think of ways to optimize them. We all know by now that products and monetization techniques work differently from blog to blog, website to website.

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