I was just now thinking about one of the other questions from Wednesday’s PR roundtable… “Do you make money from your blog? Do you accept advertising?” I’ll provide a detailed answer later, but the short answer is, right now, I don’t make money from advertising. In the past I tried Google ads and non-targeted affiliate links, and found them to be a waste of time and web space. Right now the only links on my blog that make money are to my targeted affiliate stores and websites.
However, there’s the question of what to do with the space on the right sidebar currently occupied by the Obama banner. It’s time for that to come down… Barack has won. I wouldn’t have a problem putting an ad there, as long as it was for a product or service relevant to Downtown Memphis, so that it added value to this blog rather than subtracted from it.
After doing a little thinking, it occurred to me that the best ad I could put there would likely be one for a real estate agent who sells condos and houses Downtown (and possibly in other parts of Memphis as well). But how would I price it? I can post details of my non-RSS traffic (those who use RSS feed readers wouldn’t see the ad), but I’m not sure how to convert those pageviews into a dollar amount that makes sense. I’d also have to deal with the fact that I have several friends in that industry who might expect preferential treatment, treatment I can’t afford to give them since my goal is to maximize revenue from that space.
So here’s what I’m thinking… what if I were to let the market set its own price? I could run an eBay auction for that ad space for the month of December. I’d throw in an hour of my time designing an attractive ad, if needed (the winning real estate agent would have to supply their own website to link to). I’d post my non-RSS pageview numbers for the past 20 days and let people figure out for themselves how much it’s worth to be the only real estate agent on my blog, with their name and contact info in a prominent place on a blog that averages better than 1,000 non-RSS pageviews on weekdays.
Not sure if I’ll do it yet, but am seriously considering the idea… if you have thoughts, shoot me an e-mail at paul@paulryburn.com.