Revenue Channels

At some point in time, once you have established a decent level of traffic, you will need to sit down and decide on how you will derive revenue from your site.This will protect you from the risk of any single income source drying up and leaving you with no backup plan. This kind of approach is specially
suited if you are running a subject specific, profession oriented blog like say, on architecture. You may also decide that advertising may not be the best option for your blog. This approach is rare but not unheard of and is usually applicable when you already have a successful offline business and want to enlarge your reach through the web. Advertising is by far the most lucrative option and the most popular choice. Given the wide range of advertising options, it would indeed be difficult to miss making money from your blog if you have a decent level of traffic. Contextual advertising enables advertisers to display advertisements that closely match with the text of the content on your Web site or blog. The most famous of these is Google’s AdSense program.

Contextual advertising is useful when your blog is primarily an information only blog. Some of these networks may also offer interstitial ads—the type that floats in from the side. This type of ad is unpopular, especially with blog visitors due to the high level of irritation caused by having an ad rudely thrust in your face without any warning. The one big difference between contextual ads and display ads is the payment mode. In contextual ads the usual payment is on the basis of clicks. This type of advertising is the most lucrative option. Advertisers will directly deal with you offering to pay premium rates for ad spots on your blog. This can either be text based ads or even image or video ads. The revenue from the ad will be all yours. Even if you do not have a large traffic base you can still sell targeted ads on your blog if you take a little bit of time and effort.  Working with smaller companies will be much easier as they will be more amenable to work with you than larger companies.  The distinction between affiliate programs and other types of ad programs is in the revenue model. In an affiliate program, the revenue model is usually measured in terms of CPA—Cost Per Action as against CPC (Cost per Click) or CPM (Cost per thousand
impressions). Indiscriminately posting affiliate links and images of products on your blog should be avoided. Experiment with the different products and placement plans to determine if they work. If they do work focus on how you can improve it.

Provide partial feeds that show an introductory snippet about the post and force the users to visit the blog to read the full post. OR the blog author may decide to forgo the revenue potential through site visits and give them full feeds. Primarily because users are more amenable to subscribing to full feeds than partial feeds. This in turn will result in higher ad impressions and hence increased ad revenue.