The Daily Dinar

A few people have asked about how Muslim bloggers can make money from their blogs. I haven’t made much of an effort to monetise this site as it’s very small relative to some of the other projects I’m working on. However, since I’ve already written and spoken extensively on this and related topics for mostly non-Muslim audiences, I thought it might benefit the Muslim blogging community to describe a few of our advertising options. This is the first part of several posts I have in mind that will cover a range of topics, including search engine optimisation strategies for Muslim blogs/websites and more.

Feel free to post any questions or suggestions in the comments.

Google Adsense

Most people are familiar with Google’s Adsense program having seen the ads everywhere (including on this site). Adsense are contextual ads, meaning that, after pasting some Javascript on your site, the ads that get displayed relate (or are meant to relate) to the content of the page. You write about widgets, the ads should be about widgets.

There are a few shortcomings: firstly, the relevancy of the ads is dependent on Google’s ability to understand your page, which can be difficult on blogs where the front page has many different topics; and, secondly, the people buying ads targeted to Islamic keywords are generally not sympathetic to Islam and so you end up serving the sorts of ads you don’t really want on your site (end of time dispensationalist rapture movies, anyone?). You can put some exclusions in (as I have done with this site) but still bad advertisements do sneak in if your content is skewed too heavily towards “Islamic keywords” and themes.

However this dependency on content for ad selection also means that people invest a lot of time, effort and money into coming up with niche topics (and keywords) to incorporate into their blogging because it means Google Adsense will serve up high paying ads. The ads served for Islamic keywords pay roughly 10 cents a click, whereas, to give an example, some of the advertisements about a subject like lawyers specialising in criminal negligence can pay $5 a click or even more. If you are going down this path, then you need to find the high paying and high volume topics to write about and you probably only want to put your Adsense ads on those pages (to avoid the anti-Islamic stuff that your more general pages will attract).

One way to do that is to use the Adwords Keyword tool. Enter a few keywords, select Cost and Ad Position and then enter, say, $50 as the maximum per click. You will see a list of derivative keywords and their estimated cost per click (CPC). This is the maximum price that advertisers are paying to have their ads served up on pages containing those keywords. It’s not what you will get paid as a publisher, but it lets you test the value and likely volume of possible blog post niches. For example, type in ‘medical insurance lawsuit’ and you will see advertisers are having to bid up to $15 to appear on pages about “New Jersey insurance”, “personal injury lawsuit”, and “insurance health plans”.

If you are unimaginative, then you can use the Adwords keyword tool to also find hot topics to write about. This has the added advantage, of course, of also boosting your likely traffic because people will often be searching the various search engines for these topics and will end up arriving at your site. Click the tab marked Site-related Keywords and enter the URL of a site that has lots of news on it. For example, http://news.google.com.au or http://en.wikipedia.org are good ones. Click the checkbox marked ‘Include other pages on my site linked from this URL’ and then click the button marked ‘Get keywords’. You will see, after a short while, a list of keywords ordered by search volume and advertiser competition. You want to find words and word combinations that have a high search volume and high advertiser competition (more competition means the prices are being bid up higher). For example, a quick search with news.google.com.au as the input, reveals ‘chemical spill’ as being a relatively high volume, highly competitive keyword at the moment. The reason, it seems, is because of this news.

Affiliate marketing

There is also what is known as affiliate marketing. This is where companies, such as American Express or Amazon, enlist affiliates to promote their products to their readership by hosting advertisements. If a reader clicks on an ad, they are taken to a web page hosted by the company. If they then make a purchase, a percentage of that purchase or a flat fee is then paid to the publisher. Many of them also pay per lead, meaning they will pay you if a person gives their contact details, requests a catalogue, or signs up for a demo of the product or service.

One of the better affiliate marketing companies is Copeac. Copeac basically let you choose from a range of ads, provide you with the code to place on your site and let you monitor clicks and ‘conversion’ (the number of people who actually went through to complete a sale or enter a lead) and they pay you. I can recommend them. Commission Junction is another big network that is worth checking out.

Once you are part of an affiliate advertising network, you choose the products — known as ‘campaigns’ — that you wish to promote. Each campaign consists of a set of advertising banners, small advertisements and text links (known as ‘creatives’). You choose the ones you like and place them on your site. The text links are worth a special mention because they provide the most flexibility. As they are links, you can link to them in your normal blog post or place them within emails. For example, you might write a review of the product or service or, if you have a mailing list, include the link at the end of your email as a note from a sponsor (be careful to check the terms of service as to the words you can and cannot use).

Auction Ads

Another possibility are Auction Ads. They display eBay ads and you get a cut on each sale made within 30 days of the person having clicked on your ad. They also pay per new eBay signup. The good thing with Auction Ads is there is a long tail so someone clicks the ad on 1st of the month but buys a car or something on the 30th of the month and you make money even though they might never have returned to your website again.

The other advantage of Auction Ads is that they allow you to limit the ads displayed to specific eBay advertisers and can filter based on keyword so you could, for example, show advertisements for drinks but exclude wine.

I’ve had some success with Auction Ads but it can be slow because most people won’t follow a link to eBay and make a purchase immediately but they might a week or two later so you need to be patient before you start seeing the money come in. The good thing about these advertisements is they have a high click through rate (CTR) meaning that a lot of people will click them because of they incorporate images that often catch the eye (images of the product being auctioned).

Text Link Ads

The other popular advertising option is Text Link Ads. In this model, you basically sell ad space on your site and they find buyers, let you approve it and then pay you a flat monthly fee. For example, depending on the popularity of your site, you could sell 5 ad spaces for $50 a pop each month and make $250 (or more). It’s a good option, popular with a lot of bloggers, so it’s also worth considering alongside some of the other options described above (there is no reason why you cannot use more than one).

I like Text Link Ads because they are a lot simpler than some of the other options. You don’t need to tweak your keywords or worry so much about ad placement or conversion rates. People pay a fee and you host their single textlink advertisement. Simple.

Amazon

Amazon offer an affiliate program in which people get paid based on the books that their users buy on Amazon. There are a number of ways to integrate Amazon affiliate links into one’s site, such as linking to individual books (as we do here occasionally), incorporating Amazon’s A Store or using one of the third-party products such as Mr Rat’s script to bring the entire Amazon catalogue (or subsets of it) into your site and offer it to users. The payout on books isn’t that great so you really need to go for volume here, more so than with the other programs mentioned above, but if you have a lot of book buyers among your readers, you could do quite well from the program. If you are an avid reader, why not write some reviews on your site and link using your affiliate code? Or perhaps you can just list the books you are reading each week or month?

Paid Reviews

Last (and least) are paid reviews such as PayPerPost and the better ReviewMe websites. Under the PPP model, advertisers pay people to write about their products. It’s possible to make some money from it but I tend to think it’s a bit crass and lowers the tone of a blog. ReviewMe is slightly better in that it’s other bloggers and website owners asking (and paying) for more popular and influential blogs to review their blogs or online offerings. As you can see from this paid review by John Chow, not all reviews are positive either.