ReThinking My Blog Monetization Strategy

Hi and Thanks for taking a few minutes to drop by. I appreciate it....does that sound a little too um...'slurpy' or something? I really am glad you dropped, by, and I really appreciate you reading my blog but...well...what they heck, I said it now....

Well I have been watching the results of my entry into the WidgetBucks Program and to tell the truth I have been a little less than impressed. So far after a month or so, I have made pennies...not the return I had hoped for. Of course when do we bloggers actually get the returns we hope for? However, this is less than acceptable so far.

So what to do? Well, I am watching it closely, and I have to admit, I haven't really spent the time I should to try and tweak things a bit, maybe some different widgets, maybe revisit the keywords I am using etc. However, I am not really all that keen on doing all the work in terms of advertisments on my websites. I have enough to do to keep the blogs written and up to date without spending all my time worrying about the advertisements. I'm thinking hard about that kind of thing these days. I mean, how long can a person keep doing something over and over without making some money?

But like most blog monetization programs, it isn't enough to add the widget, and then forget about it. All of these things take time and they take some tweaking to find the best combination for your blog or website. I do the same with Adsense and the other programs I use, but that takes so much time it cuts down on the time I have to write. I suppose if I was big enough I could hire someone to handle that aspect of the business, and I could concentrate on the writing. A bloggers dream....

So WidgetBucks hasn't performed as I had hoped, but neither are some of my other programs. It takes a lot of posts and a lot of hits to those posts to make much return, and I shoulder some of the blame myself for not finding enough visitors yet. However, I have had a few and when you see that a number of hits is only returning pennies...well...it is cause for concern. Are those hits to a non-performing ad, or low paying ad, taking away better paying results from programs like Adsense or Amazon? That is the 64 dollar question isn't it? How many ad programs does a blog need to make money, and how many is too many? It's quite possible that I have over done it on some of my sites, showing too many ads to make anything pay well.

On the other hand, I do have a few things on the go that are making a bit of a return, one of them is Amazon, where sales have picked up fairly well in the last few months, making me wonder if that might be the way to go. My Amazon sales got off to a slow start in the beginning, but have be steadily increasing over time. That's partially because I have more posts and more products and partially because I have a bit of an Amazon system that I use, which is getting the products out there and people are buying some stuff. It's not life changing money, but it is money. Besides that, it is kind of fun to try and sell actual products instead of just advertising space. Kind of the intangible versus the tangible.

There is a bit more effort to promoting Amazon in a way that gets sales, but on the other hand, one sale is often worth many times more than a few pennies....

Perhaps it's time for a rethink.....should I be using more space on my blogs for Amazon and less for some of the other programs that don't seem to be performing, or do I wait a while and see if the newer programs catch on?

I think I will sleep on it.....