"Does anybody earn money from their blog?" Topic

Nice simple question…does anybody actually earn any money from their wargames blog?

Having just passed the 200k mark on my Shedwars blog and now regularly achieving 12,000+ hits a month is there any money to be had?

cheers

You could sell advertising space…

Ad space. Forget google AdWords, you need companies to pay you X per month as you're on hosted account you can't install software to manage pay per click billing or anything.

If you're lucky you might make fifty quid a month, you won't get rich with small traffic in a small niche.

Bloggers make the easy mistake of confusing hits with unique visitors.

I spend for the fun of it….

Make and sell a limited edition figure…?

Another option is to get regular readers to sponsor you – but you'll probably find not many people will.

I don't and it can matter that a visitor sees the site as independent if you review or comment on product.

high traffic ones could, but it really depends as "blog" is a pretty loose term these days

My site attracts 10,000-15,000 unique visitors monthly, generating 250,000 hits. Average stay last I checked was over 8 minutes, average # of pages visited was 7 (but menu pages inflate that – you know, sort of table of contents type pages).

I have my first paid advertiser. They paid me $35 USD to have their ad up for a month advertising an Ancients game for the iPad.

On madaxeman.com I am running around 300k page views per year at the moment across the site (from Google Analytics), and using some fairly low-impact Google Ads alone I just about manage to cover the hosting costs for the site.

I also have a blogger site which feeds content to my main site that is linked to the same Google Ads account, and that allegedly gets 3-4,000 hits per month on it's own… which seems highly unlikely when compared to the tracking stats from the main site. On that basis I'd second the poster who said bloggers traffic stats might be somehow inflated.

My site also carrys Amazon and eBay affiliate network listings. Amazon is pretty marginal in terms of effect – but eBay is by far the best. Goes to show that wargamers buy more figures than books.

pm me if you want any details

tim

mailorderrussianbrides.com does.

Hi Eric.
For what it is worth, if I visited what I thought was a gamer/hobbyist's blog and saw adverts, I would immediately exit.

I have three blogger blogs and have earned $200 USD in six years.

So, not really.

Mike Bunkermeister Creek
Bunker Talk blog

Cheers Guys

Guess Ill pass on general advertising…don't want it to upset the readers

Tim, in the analytics settings can you filter out certain traffic? Could be that it's counting hits from crawlers and bots.

Eric, serving Google ad words may be worth investigating. Just make sure that you configure them correctly, lot of mistakes are made when folks ignore how to feed tag information back into the ad serving. Relevance is the kry to success, if you've been publishing stories on ACW, but google is just feeding in ads for GW products, then there's plenty of ways that won't connect with your audience.

What I do know is that 12k a month isn't as spectacular as it sounds when it comes to ad words. I have no clue what the click through rate average is for wargaming links, but lets assume its 0.25%, and 0.25% of 12k is only 30 clicks. Imrpoving relevance can make a big dirrerence, so take a look at what's involved in tweaking the settings. If you can get it over 2% from a publishers perspective your doing pretty darn good.

Display ads like banners you serve etc may be worth more per ad unit, but then you've got to consider what 30 clicks are worth to your advertisers. Maybe see if any wargaming advertisers offer revenue sharing programs for customers, or if they are prepared to do pay per lead models. This way you only get paid if the traffic you send along become customers, but then you can charge a lot more than 5c a click.

I wouldn't worry about advertising upsetting readers, if your writing what an audience wants to read they tend to just focus on that.

McW – the blog numbers come from the stats on the blogger back office – I also run proper Google Analytics on the blog, so I guess I can compare them if needed.

With Google adverts, keywords are important but you have to bear in mind that the "relevance" is also generated from the users own activity on other websites – so everyone will see their own tailored adverts, and Google will do the heavy lifting of making sure that they are relevant to each person. Relevance is also about not making the adverts intrusive – if I'm writing a battle report or painting guide on my site I always try and make sure that (most of) the eBay or Amazon listings that appear next to it are relevant.. its kinda like "you've just read about his, so Ive made it easy for you to click here to buy one"

One other thing to consider is that one additional reason to stick adverts on a blog is that it provides some tangible feedback about how popular it is – measuring the traffic is interesting in itself, but if people are clicking on adverts they are interacting with the site as well, which is always a nice bit of feedback to have for what is otherwise a thankless task. If you get to buy yourself even a single beer off the back of it sometime, even better!

Finally I'd be amazed if there were a significant number of people who'd actively ignore interesting and good quality online content on the basis that it had relevant adverts next to it. And if these people do exist in any numbers, you'll probably not find them on advertising-supported wargames content sites like TMP anyway :-)

I'm aware of the keyword setting, and contextual is nice, but just letting google serve the ads means they often serve ads that aren't out of context for the user, but probably very out of context for why the user is on a wargames blog. An example of this would be I've recently been lookjng at buying a new car, but if I'm on a blog for FoW then I'm likely not thinking about a new car at that moment, but I may be in the frame of mind to pre order the new Barbarossa book. However if the site publisher just relies on the out of the box ad words settings then chances are I'm seeing Ford ads.

This is really noticeable for certain key categories that Google gets big dollars for like education. I recently researched a bunch of MBA degrees from various unis, and now whenever Google gets a chance all I see are ads for MBA and business courses, because there's a lot of demand from advertisers in that space. On the other hand I had been doing a lot of reading of reviews of the Neo for Iwata airbrush on painting sites, and eventually on a painting forum I got an ebay ad that I clicked on and then followed on to buy a couple of neos and some accessories. I think I've even made visits to amazon via your site madaxeman!

But we are so talking small beer money here it's rarely worth the work. Ebay and Amazon are better to deal with from what I hear, but I've only dealt with Google and Microsoft, and for websites that at the peak were getting more than 12k page impressions every five minutes.

I earned some money from a former blog (not related gaming at all – the furthest thing from it actually) but not through advertising – the above commenters are right that it sometimes puts people off.

What I did was write a fairly short ebook on my niche blog subject and made it available to download for a couple of quid and I was surprised that it did reasonably well (admittedly, I was surprised to have more than one buyer!)

So perhaps if you fancy trying your hand at writing rules or guides etc, I imagine with the traffic you get you could see some return. Just an idea.

The answer is "it can but isn't likely". You can make more money writing a book about making money off blogging, than you likely will from the blogging itself.

Thanks for all the great comments guys…

Having run the blog for three years I just wanted to think about its evolution. You have all given me some great food for thought.

PAtreon is cool for getting a kick back from your readers. They support you but you kinda have to produce something. Like reviews or tutorials stuff like that. Just blogging your adventures will probably not get many takers but you could try.

The real money is in video. A buddy of mine did some hurst arts tutorial videos. He has like 1k subscribers and over 10k views total and got $100 USD check not to long ago plus probably $50 USD+ in the account waiting for the minimum to send out. It's been like a year and he only did 12 videos. Battle report videos generate a lot of hits but take some time to do right. Same with painting tutorial style videos. Reviews might as well. Not many people reviewing a lot of stuff that TMPer types enjoy.

Funny you say that about Video the next Shed Wars TV episode is in the pipeline…;-)