Blog for Traffic, Then Money

The other day I got a question in from one of my mailing lists:

Good morning! Does anyone have any information about advertising rates for blogs? A freelancer friend of mine is starting a home and style blog, and she’s hoping to sell some ad space on it. She’s just wondering what rates start at these days.

To which I responded….

Here’s some general tips:

1. Don’t blog just to make money. Blog because you’re passionate about your subject.
2. Don’t think about about running ads on your blog until you’ve established your blog.

#2 above is for 3 reasons:

1. 9 out of 10 blogs either suck or fizzle out, or both.
2. Anybody seriously interested in advertising on your blog is going to ask for traffic statistics, and they’re going to look at your Google Page Rank. New blogs have neither of these. In short, you need to prove you are (and have been) in for the long haul.
3. In order to attract new visitors, you want to wow them with your content, not distract them with ads. Win over your traffic base first, and then slowly introduce ads to the site.

So, the short version is: learn about building traffic, then learn about advertising - you can’t succeed in the 2^nd without the 1st.

Cheers,
Matt