Blog advertising
Blog advertising is one of the best ways to make money through the use of a blog. If you are unfamiliar with blog advertising, a quick overview of the different kinds of blog advertising methods available for use is a great way to learn about options that might be available to you. Many blog rings have their own resources and ways to get businesses to advertise on their blogs. The most important thing to remember is that most businesses only want to advertise on a blog that is popular enough to make their advertising payments worth while.
The first kind of blog advertising is contextual advertising. This kind of advertising is where the blogger places ads that are relevant to the content of his or her site onto the blog page. The ads are usually pay-per-click, which will be explained later. Reviews are another form of blog advertising. Companies will pay bloggers to review their products. Some companies only pay for favorable reviews, while others pay for honest reviews. This kind of advertising is mostly for more popular blogs.
Text Link ads are another form of blog advertising. These ads are based on the textual content of the blog in people’s comments and the blog itself. This form of advertising is rarer than many of the others, but it is an option.
Direct ads are spots that a blogger can offer for visitors to his or her site to purchase directly to advertise in. This type of advertising is usually limited to blogs about businesses topics or people who know each other, but it is a form of advertising that can be very effective. This makes it a win-win situation for the blogger and the advertiser.
Affiliate advertising may be the original form of online advertising. Affiliate programs offer a set of ads that are placed somewhat randomly on all the sites in their program. The sites are usually paid when someone clicks on the ad or purchases a product from the affiliate site.
The last type of blog advertising is impression ads. These ads are paid based on the number of times they appear on the blog. Impression based ads are not as popular as such advertising programs like affiliate programs or similar programs.
Pay-per-click ads pay every time someone clicks on the ad from the blog site. The incentive for these ads is to get more people to visit the site and click on the ads. Some bloggers ask their patrons to click the ads to support the site.
Pay-per-impression ads pay for each time the ad appears on the site. The incentive for these payment programs is to place these ads as many times as possible on the site. Pay-per-action pay outs give the biggest payments. These ads pay for every action that someone takes as a result of their ad such as making a purchase or signing up for e-mails. Since this happens infrequently, the amount paid for action ads is higher than the other forms of advertising. As stated before, it is best to have a variety of ads on your site which use several different payment types.
Critical e-commerce metrics
The e-commerce web sites have unique critical indicators that set them apart from other types of sites. Examples of e-commerce web sites include ticket sales, books, CDs, videos, and even SAAS (software as a service) web sites. Profit per order (profit / orders): Profit per order is an indicator of the average profit each web site sale generates. Many companies have a steady stream of high volume, low margin products the bread and butter of their business; and a limited number of low-volume, high-margin products that create great one-off profitability events. If your site has a mixture of high-margin and low-margin products, it would make sense to measure them separately.
Profit margin is expressed in a percentage: ‘The average profit margin of our online sales was 26% in October, which increased to 32% during the Christmas buying season’.
Conversions: The number of sales your site generates is a key metric from which several others can be derived. Conversions are simple numbers: ‘We had 350 sales from our web site in May.’
Conversion rate (number of conversions / the total number of visitors): This metric measures two things: the value of the traffic that is coming to the site and the ability of the site to turn visitors into paying customers.