AskMeAnything Sunday was live
So I setup my streaming software and I pushed Start stream in the YouTube interface. I had a great time and talked for 30 minutes straight about my experiences of the past two weeks. I had a blast talking about the lack of Media.net results I saw and how AdEx.network is a great option to round out the ad space on your blog. At the end when terminating the stream I found that YouTube did not stream at all. Instead I had to push the streaming button one more time. Ouch.
Needless to say that this session was a bust with regard to recording. I decided to use my notes from the session though and go through the whole thing again in this blog post.
This is an attempt to redo this morning's session here on my blog.
So let's get started.
Welcome this is another section of AskMeAnything Sunday, January 26th 2020. In the past two weeks I have been slower creating content for the blog because I spent a lot of time researching advertising Networks. Interestingly I find myself reading a lot of the PINs I re-distribute out of curiosity, which is another slow down albeit a good reason.
If you have read the previous AskMeAnything session you know that my AdSense account has been terminated for no good reason by Google. One of the things which I did this past 2 weeks was to resubmit the appeals for the AdSense account. Of course I have not yet heard back for anything from Google at all.
Researching replacements options for AdSense and AdMob also took a amount of my time. As such I signed up with the AdEx.network platform as well as investigating additional advertising platforms for my Android apps. But more about that later.
I have also added the ability to insert direct ads for any company or individual who wants to see their ads on my blog. This is to help broaden my possible revenue streams from this blog. This could also help you in case you want to go that route. My affiliate program is another way to earn money for you, and in turn for me.
One of the things I really like about these AskMeAnything Sundays is the fact that it gives me time to reflect and see what has been going on the past couple of weeks. It also gives me a chance to see if I have been following my own advice. Quite honestly looking back to the past 2 weeks I have honestly not followed my own advice.
But let's take a look at things in detail
Media.net results
In most articles you see that Media.net is listed as the number two option after AdSense. I went ahead, signed up and added it to my blog to test this assertion out. My Media.net results so far are less than convincing.
I had a total of over 2,400 impressions in January and I have received a total of $0.00 in income through Media.net. One of the things that I wanted to do was to get in contact with my account manager at Media.net. I want to see if it is possible to increase the revenue for a blog with very few monthly visitors. If this is possible it would really open Media.net as a viable alternative to AdSense.
I have read in the past that other people have had good success using Media.net on their blog. Achieving an CPM off around $1. Other blogs have even achieved better results utilizing Media.net as compared to AdSense.
If your blog has less than say 5000 views / month you may want to first focus on growing your audience before attempting to earn through ads.
I will continue to investigate additional options to see if monetization for low traffic blogs is possible at all in 2020 and beyond.
AdEx.network
This network is an interesting candidate as it is using the blockchain technology to buy and sell advertising. The crypto world is full of possibilities. AdEx is based off of the Etherium blockchain which is a contract based blockchain. This allows AdEx.network to be very transparent to both publishers and advertisers.
I have implemented AdEx.network a few days ago and have so far received about 100 impressions. At this point I can see that I have earned about 0.01 DAI. DAI is a crypto-currency which is pegged to the dollar. That means its value is within a few percentage points of $1.
The income which I will earn is paid in DAI. In order to convert those to dollars you have to use a crypto-exchange like E.g. Coinbase.com. Once I receive a dollar payout I will have to then pay taxes on the earned income as usual.
Bottom line is to be open minded and not be scared about Crypto currencies.
MoPub for Android
In January I received about 1.7M ad-request through my Android apps, which resulted in about a 150k impressions with the fill-rate of between 8% and 11%. For these impressions I received about $25.86 which is about 10% of what I used to earn through AdMob.
At this time I want to investigate if I can sign up for the Facebook Audience Network to get a better return on my impressions. However, I do not want to spend too much time on my Android apps. The current income of about $30/month does not warrant me investing much more time into this avenue.
My largest app has achieved around 1Million installs on the Android play store. It becomes harder and harder to achieve 5-10 million installs due to the strong competition on the play store. This business model may only be viable if you can capture 2 ore more apps in the 10Million+ range. With AdMob you can earn a decent income with less installs.
Going forward I need to revisit some of the blog posts and YouTube video tutorials on how to grow your blog using Pinterest. Looking at my current stats on Pinterest there's something which is not working out as it should be. The numbers for January are approximately the same as the numbers from December. So far I had 19.4k impressions, an audience of 17k with 149 engaged and a total of 12 clicks.
I am intentionally open about all of my findings and stats to show you that everyone is struggling in the beginning. Also not every blogger may reach the realm of profitability. As it stands I have invested more into this blog than I have gotten out. These results are after 4 month working almost every spare minute on this blog.
One of the things I need to do more is to apply for group boards again in Pinterest. These boards are the gate to distributing your content and provide visibility to an audience which is not yet part of your subscribers.
Looking at the numbers from Pinterest I believe the issue to be the lack of content on my blog. I need to focus more attention on creating additional content for my blog. In the past few months I have created around 4 blog posts per month. Going forward I would like to increase this to something closer to 6-8 posts per month. These numbers are a direct reflection of the disappointing Media.net results I achieved this month around.
Please let me know in the comment section below how many blog posts you create per month. There may be a good average number hidden in our cumulative knowledge.
Tailwind
In December 2019 when I signed up for Tailwind I was still receiving a good income from my AdSense account and that's why I signed up for a full year. Quite honestly I am glad I did sign up with Tailwind as it allows me to schedule pins in advance and that in turn allows me to focus more on other things around blogging.
At this time I'm using tailwinds mainly to pin other people's content. The main reason is obviously the lack of content on my own from my blog. Growing my Pinterest audience can only be achieved by creating additional valuable content for my blog.
Blog expenses
My blog expenses in January so far have been $0 which go hand in hand with the Media.net results I achieved in the same time span. While this is a good thing in general I would have liked to have some money available for marketing and additional tools or content for my blog. As it stands I will have to bootstrap my blog like most other people do.
Blogging
I have released my 4th blog in January and I am currently working on the next blog entry as well as my income report for January. It is always good to invest the upfront effort to then be able to release the income report close to the first of the month.
I already went over the disappointment of the Media.net results on my blog and how I am scouting for better ad-alternatives for low traffic blogs ( like yours ? ). I am also looking into alternatives to AdMob.
In general I believe that I am spending too much time and effort on researching additional income revenues. I have also spent a good amount of time on planning out 2020. As part of the all the planning sessions I also had to investigate some good and free SEO tools to find out which blog posts are in demand.
Reflecting back a little bit I believe I have to spend more time on creating valuable and unique content for my blog. Some of the ideas for new blogs are for example to write about my personal experience with GroundFloor, Fundrise, Stash, and Mint.
And finally the last thing that I want to get a head start on by the end of January is to have a 7-Day email course for people to sign up to my email list.
That does it
Please comment below and let us know how you grew your blog and which resources you were using.