Make Money Attracting Advertisers

My last post Make Money by Popularity, looked at some of the ways to get traffic to your blog. Well, since then, I've been looking around a lot of blogs that tell you how to make money online just lately and one thing seems to stand out more than anything else - the variety and sheer number of advertising banners.

I'm a little skeptical about all this as while it all appears to give the promise to make money in direct proportion to the number of banners, I have a sneaky feeling that all is not as it seems.

Could this be a case of "all that glitters is not gold?"

In fact after reading some very hard hitting blog posts on this very subject (I'm not naming names) while most bloggers would have you believe they are doing very nicely from their advertising, the reality is that most of them are scraping by or even earning absolutely nothing from all that hard work.

Ok, maybe it's not that hard to throw up some banner code, but still it must be disheartening to anyone new to this business (like me for example) to at first see the promise of making fortunes online dwindle down to a more realistic making of pennies instead.

So back to the topic of this post - attracting advertisers to make money. How does a new and unranked blog go about attracting advertisers?

Well, after you've finished laughing your heads off, the simple answer is "forget it!" No one wants to spend money to display an ad somewhere that gets very little traffic and has no search engine rank or blog age antiquity for credibility.

So what if I were to put up a load of affiliate banners flashing away in my sidebar? Would that make money?

Again, probably not until I can attract some decent traffic to this blog and that won't happen until I've written plenty of content, accrued some age, back links, popularity... and that's probably about it! In fact it all boils down to one word at the end of the day...

Popularity

If you go to John Chow's site, there you'll see popularity in waves! He's been around a long time, his name is well known and his site is a magnet for bloggers who want to make money. In a word, he's very popular. When it comes down to figuring out how to make money blogging, he's done a pretty good job of it. That of course doesn't mean its going to be easy for anyone else to replicate that. I imagine it would take years to get to the place Chow is now, so for bloggers, there must be a better way to make money online.

On the other hand, if you come to my little blog, what is there to make anyone think it's popular? Nothing!

That's because the hard and painful truth is that it's not popular - yet. Just like millions of other blogs out there, with their authors busily scribbling away day in and day out - no one goes to visit their blogs to read what they're writing.

Why?

Because they're not popular. Worse, they either don't know how to start bringing in some readers to make money, or they're just not bothered.

Well some of us won't be putting up with that! This girl in particular wants to make money and has no intention of remaining anonymous with not a soul coming to read her work!

So watch out people... I'm coming to visit your blogs and you better come and visit mine back!

Make Money with Chelsea