Time to Make Money?

The first decision you have to make is obviously whether you even want to try making money. Many bloggers swear off any sort of commercialization of blogs, and others try and do not like it.

I’m going to assume you do want to make money off your blog. The two questions then become:

• When?

and

• How?

When to monetize is a question with no correct answer. Ask around and you will get many answers, none of which help very much.

There are two dominant camps of opinion on this question, both of which have their own merits:

• Run ads from day one—The idea here is if you’re thinking of running ads eventually, you might as well integrate them from the start. The reasons you might want to do this include the following:
  • Reader expectations—Starting a blog with no ads and then adding them later means running the risk of disillusioning readers whose expectations are that the blog is and always will be “ad-free.” Some readers feel very strongly about this, and changing the rules mid-stream can cause problems. Start with ads from the beginning, and you set the expectations from the start and don’t cause any upset later.
  • Consistent design—Running ads from the beginning of your blog keeps everything consistent, which is good from a reader-comfort and branding point of view, and also means that you don’t need the hassle or expense of a redesign later on to accommodate ads.
  • Earnings—Darren’s blogs were ad-free for months until he implemented AdSense; he regretted his delay later, after seeing what he could have earned. Put ads on your blog from the start, and you’ll begin to see some money right away. Of course, it might not amount to a lot, but you could be pleasantly surprised.
  • Ad-optimization experience—It takes time to learn how to tweak ads. Most of us learn best through personal experience rather than by just reading about it. The great thing about starting early with advertising is that you can experiment and try different techniques without too many people seeing the mistakes that you make along the way. This means that by the time the traffic does start to come in, you can have your ads optimized to take advantage of it.