Adwords to generate Blog traffic.

[orion_joel]

Hi all,

I am interested to know if anyone else has considered or actually is using adwords to generate traffic to their blog. If you have or are considering it, do you think it can be a worthwhile endeavor, or just a good way to boost profits for google, and throw away money?

[vangogh]

I've thought of it, but haven't tried yet. I think there can be benefits like increasing your overall branding and even generating new subscribers.

If you're goal is to sell advertising on your blog then having a certain amount of subscribers will be necessary and will also allow you to charge more for ads. If done right you should be able to recoup your money in time. The issue though is how much it costs you to get how money visitors and will that lead to extra advertising income.

With branding the story is a little different since a direct return may not be as important to you. You may be willing to spend the money to gain attention and in so doing gain some subscribers and even links. Much harder to measure the return though.

[orion_joel]

I suppose really what you are saying is it is different to selling a product you cannot calculate a direct return on investment. Which is true to some extent i think you can track visitors coming from adwords or organically with analytics. However this still does not help you work out anything meaningful really.

I guess something that it could be used for is to give you something to play with and learn how to use adwords, and test different ads and ad styles to generate visitors. May be something that i might look to invest a little money in and see what sort of response that i can get.

[vangogh]

You can certainly track direct sales through AdWords and you can track subscribers as a result as well, but if someone subscribes through your ad and then buys something a couple of months later that's harder to track.

If you're going to use AdWords to promote your blog it's probably best to measure ROI in terms of increased subscribers. You just have to be prepared for not seeing a positive ROI in terms of money, at least not directly.

[KristineS]

I don't know how I feel about this. On one hand, if you're trying to make money off your blog and need to get people to click on your ads, doing some advertising to drive people to your blog might be worth it. On the other hand, it just seems a little odd to me. I know there is advertising for certain blogs in the form of links and badges and such, but using adwords just seems too blatant to me. I'm not sure I can explain why.

[vangogh]

I don't think there's anything wrong with it. It really isn't any different than trying to get your posts to rank. The main difference of course is that you're going to be paying for the traffic.

If I'm not mistaken I think people will sooner use the content network to advertise. They cost per click should be lower and since less people are going to click you'll pay less overall, while still getting in branding messages. Images ads probably work better for this.

[eborg9]

This is just my opinion, but the only reason to use adwords is to drive people directly to a product, sales, or squeeze page. I have dabbled with it for traffic, but for the cost per click compared to bringing people in to browse around....it's not worth it.

Better to promote a blog through normal and free channels and rely on your SEO, Content, Social Book Marking , and other ways.

I do agree with paying for listing like in Blogger and Podcasters Guide ($5 a month), but I don't think I would pay for Adwords, unless your landing page is a sales page.

JMO

[vangogh]

eborg I think it depends on your business model. Let me offer a scenario where using AdWords to gain subscribers can pay off.

One thing I've noticed from reading a lot of blogs over the years is that the more subscribers a blog has the quicker it usually grows. A blog with 500 subscribers will usually pick up subscriber 501 than a blog with 50 subscribers will pick up subscriber 51. It's probably a combination of people being more likely to subscriber to a blog that many others have already subscribed to and that the more subscribers you have the more people are out there generally spreading the word about you.

Another thing I've noticed is that blogs with large subscriber numbers have a much easier time launching new projects. A lot of bloggers are looking to run ads on their sites to make money, but the real money seems to be in getting your audience to sign up for other projects. Whether that other project is a new product you have or a membership site or whatever.

If you have 50,000 subscribers and decide to offer them something that costs $100 and 1% of your readers sign up, you just made $50,000 dollars. Pretty good just for launching. 1% conversion rates aren't that difficult with an audience that trusts you either. You could easily convert at a higher %.

The above would indicate that having a lot of subscribers is a good way to make money.

Just consider advertising. Advertisers are going to want to know about your pageviews and subscriber numbers. The more you get of each the more attractive you are to advertisers and the more money you can charge them.

You'd probably have to spend a lot on AdWords to gain 50,000 subscribers, but say you were willing to spend enough to gain 500 or 1,000. Assuming you have a good blog that might be something reasonable to spend. And as I said at the start once blogs hit a certain number of subscribers they tend to grow much faster.

If you start putting a dollar amount on how much a subscriber is worth you might find that one subscriber is worth more than the cost of gaining one subscriber through AdWords. It really depends on what a subscriber is ultimately worth to your business and how much it costs to acquire another subscriber.

[KristineS]

That's a good point, Vangogh and I'd never really thought of it that way. If your blog is primarily a vehicle for selling something, than the value of a subscriber goes way up. In that case, it might be worth spending money on AdWords.

[vangogh]

Yeah, it really comes down to what you're trying to do and how much a subscriber is worth to you. Even if your blog is just a personal one you might use AdWords as a vanity thing. The return there may not be monetary, but it still might be worth it to you.

I think you have to look at it terms of ROI. The investment is pretty clearly the money you spend advertising. The return might not be so clear, but if it's value is worth the investment they why not advertise.