In my series on How to Get Started Blogging, one of the first things I talked about was deciding what you’re blogging for: money, career, or something else. That series focused on blogging for your career, but if you’re interested in going after money, there’s a WordPress plugin that I’ve found helpful.
Whydowork AdSense will automatically insert Google Ads on your posts older than X days.
You can be as aggressive with it as you want. You could choose to start with small discreet ads on all posts, and then after 7 days, switch to ginormous big flashing ads.
During January, I ran an experiment. When someone came to my site to hit articles over 21 days old, they saw three big Google ads, but no ads were shown in my RSS feed or in my recent posts on the site. That way, my regular (well, some of you are irregular) readers wouldn’t think I was shaking the virtual cup. I made between $2 and $10 per day, averaging about $4. Woohoo, retirement, here I come!
I can’t decide how I feel about this. I really hate ads (thank God for the AdBlock Plus plugin for FireFox), and I’m blogging for my career (not money), but $120/month in free money is a free vacation every year. Plus, nobody seemed to notice it – or at least, nobody said anything. Decisions, decisions.
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Dude, go for it. In around 5 years, you could get a mid 70's Stingray Corvette. 🙂
Seems like perfectly targeted marketing to me. Your regular readers don't get bothered, but people hitting your archives for some timely information are (probably) actively looking for a solution to a problem. If your ads actually help them solve that problem, then it's win-win.
Wow, helping people AND getting a Corvette. You guys are great. 🙂 That's it, the ads are going back on.
Putting ads on your old posts is a great idea. I've also been looking at the No Adverts for Friends plugin which won't show ads to people coming from certain sites or people who have left a comment. I wonder if it would play nice with the one you are using.
I'm giving it a shot, but the setup is foreign to me as I've never blogged for moolah before. The plugin is activated and I'm trying to determine how to tell them who I am and where to put my money. There is no "Put Money In Here" textbox. Yikes, this might require an extra 15 minutes for me to do research.