- 31 Days of Submissive Journaling – Day 1: Introduction
- 31 Days of Submissive Journaling – Day 2: What Would You Like to Learn?
- 31 Days of Submissive Journaling: Day 16 – Should You Try to Make Money with Your Blog?
- 31 Days of Submissive Journaling – Day 3: What is a Submissive Journal?
- 31 Days of Submissive Journaling – Day 4: What Can a Journal Do for My Submissive Development?
Blogs come in all sorts of styles and designs these days. Some are personal journals and others like Submissive Guide is a business and resource. So, it might go without saying that having an online presence is an opportunity to make money with ads. But it’s far from easy and take it from someone with experience, it’s not quick money.
A blog may feel like easy money, but making the decision to put ads on your blog may have a negative effect and might not even be allowed by your blog host. Knowing the facts and making a decision before you begin is an important step in creating your blog.
Should You Place Ads?
When deciding if you should place ads on your site, there are a few things to consider. First, how much audience do you have? For any sort of ad to work you really need to have a goal to attract a large audience. If you plan on producing content that Google may drive traffic to you or you are going to actively share it on social media, then making a little side money might at least pay for the domain name and hosting.
What is the purpose of your blog?
If you just want a personal place to talk about your D/s relationship and your life as a submissive, it might not be a smart choice to consider advertising. Personal blogs don’t do so well with affiliate advertising because they don’t often attract a large audience. But, if you want to review sex toys you might have an avenue to make a little bit of affiliate money from the companies that you do reviews for.
Note: Many of the sex toy sites that I’ve worked with require a site that’s been around awhile and has an audience before they will send you free items in exchange for a review, so you may have to start by buying your own toys and reviewing them. Show you are professional in your reviews and you could attract other retailers.
If you are building a blog as a site for your business or as an information exchange you have a wider range of options, but not until you’ve been able to build your pillar content a loyal audience. Also, if this site will be for your business, you have to consider if you want to dilute your brand by having other companies ads on your site.
What do you want to convey to readers?
Some people consider personal sites with ads as money grubby. Others don’t care. It does depend on the type of advertising you are doing. If it’s a simple banner ad in the sidebar it will attract less attention than a pop up over your site, forcing your readers to click through it to read your content. Build the site you feel will work for you but don’t be afraid of making changes if things aren’t turning out the way you want. Again, as I’ve said above, a personal blog isn’t usually the best place for advertising since the audience you attract is there to read about your, not learn about a new wonder drug or slip on loafers.
Is it Allowed?
The last point I’d like to make about deciding if you want to have ads on your site is to look into the TOS of the blog site you are using. Some blog hosts do not allow advertising other than what they place on your site and you usually have no control over what those ads are. Other hosts allow specific advertising, but not others. If you want full control over your site’s advertising, you’ll have to pay for your own hosting and domain; a cost that you will have to pay out of your own pocket if you can’t make any income from the advertising.
What Advertising Is Available?
For the most part, you have affiliate marketing available to you. Your favorite sites that you shop at can have affiliate programs where you get a percentage of any purchases that people make through links on your site. For what is likely to be an adult site, if you are planning to write about D/s, BDSM or submission, you will need to read the terms of the agreement to know if you can advertise their products on your site.
If you are lucky to get direct ad sales (it took Submissive Guide 4 years to get its first ad sale) then you can open up to a larger market, but you will have to decide on terms of the agreement yourself and how much to charge for advertising. It’s a longer business plan than affiliate marking requires.
Your last option is selling a product of your own. This could be from an Etsy shop or an ebook of some sort. It takes work and dedication, but you’d be selling your own things, getting all of the income instead of only a percentage and you wouldn’t be diluting your site with advertising of other people’s ideas and products.
So, Is it wise to advertise?
It is your decision if you want to try to make money on your site, but if you do, add them tastefully. I’m sure we’ve all been to a site with annoying advertising ploys and we don’t want to host a site like that. For my personal blog, I’ve pretty much removed all advertising except a couple ebooks from here that I’m proud of. It’s for expressing myself and sharing my story – it’s not for anything else. Evaluate what you want from your blog and what kind of audience you want to attract. That should help you decide if advertising is the way you wish to go.