Make Money from Your Blog by Monetizing Your Archived Posts: A Mini-Guide

I wrote about not monetizing a blog too early in a previous post and also listed several benefits of avoiding monetization until your website receives consistent daily visitor traffic and a strong reader base.

Some of the advantages mentioned includes greater emphasis on content and increased potential for social media marketing.

I’ve decided to follow up with my original post and offer one very useful monetization tip which will allow you to subtly display targeted ads while maintaining the emphasis on content and traffic building.

Monetize Your Archived Posts: An Introduction

So you’ve build up a decent readership and have started getting regular traffic from search engines. You want to make some extra money from your blog but am afraid that you’ll alienate your regular readers by suddenly putting up advertisements on your erstwhile ad-free blog.

The solution is simple: Begin your monetization plan by only putting up ads on older blog posts that are in your archives.

This is a perfect setup because monetization on a per-post basis does not affect the general experience of your regular readers, who would have already read all the recent material on your blog.

Benefits of Post-Level Monetization on Archived Posts

After a blog post has moved off the frontpage, it falls into the categories and archives section of the blog.

Most of the time, these posts are only read by the most adventurous reader and are mostly seen by referral and search visitors who arrive directly at the post itself and not at the actual blog homepage.

In light of this, the advantages of monetizing your archived posts is two-fold:

• Targeted and Relevant Advertising. Post-level monetization allows you to put up very targeted ads according to the content in each post. For example, I have a post about Wordpress Adsense Templates and I can easily monetize that by putting up an affiliate ad for Adsense Ebooks or Google Adsense’s referral program.


• Avoid Ad-Clutter. When you’re initially monetizing your blog, it is very important to avoid excessive ad clutter because they can irritate your readers. Post-level ads on archived posts are largely invisible to most regular readers and allows you to avoid putting up site-wide advertisements on your homepage or sidebars.

Five Guidelines on Monetizing Your Archived Posts

Determining which posts to monetize is really a personal preference so I’m going to just offer several guidelines which might be helpful:

1. Blog posts currently on your homepage should not be monetized. They are still easily accessible by visitors and ads should not be placed on them yet.


2. Set a timeframe. I personally would only monetize any posts that are more than a month old. Then again, the age of your blog might vary so you’ll have to adjust the timeframe to suit the size of your archives.


3. Find your popular posts. Take a look at your stats package to find out which blog posts consistently receives the most search and referral traffic. Make a list of these blog posts and see which one fulfills the previously set timeframe. These are the ones that you will want to monetize first because they provide the highest returns on investment.


4. Choose a monetization method. There are several ways to monetize your archived posts. This include putting up affiliate links, contextual ads like Adsense or even link selling through ad networks or direct advertising options. If you are on Wordpress, I highly recommend using the Adsense-Deluxe plugin as it will speed up the ad insertion process.


5. Optimize your ads. This involves making sure that your advertisements are highly relevant to your blog or post topic because they’ll receive much better click through rates. Ensure that they are displayed prominently while not adversely affecting your actual content.

Monetizing Bugulab Post Archives

As you will know, I’ve avoided monetizing Bugulab for quite a while because I wanted to fully concentrate on building regular traffic and a strong reader base. Monetization was not a priority for me at all and it still isn’t.

Bugulab has been experiencing continuous upward growth in terms of daily traffic and readership over the months and this is something that is personally rather satisfying.

I’ve decided to take my own advice and will be monetizing the older posts in Bugulab archives. These posts will include 100% relevant affiliate links, direct link sales or contextual ads networks such as Google Adsense.

There won’t be any ugly inline pop-up ads from Kontera or Intellitxt and all of the new ads will be placed at the end of each post or textually within content (with disclosure) because I have absolutely no intention of harming the clarity and readability of any content on this blog.

If you’re looking to monetize your blog but don’t know how or where to start, take my advice and try using post-level ads on your old archives and popular posts. You might be surprised with the results.