Should You Advertise Your Blog?

Update: I misunderstood what arbitrage really is when I wrote this, so my main point is fatally flawed. Thank you, Maki from Dosh Dosh for pointing out my mistake. I’ve rewritten the post, which follows. The text of the original post is below the rewritten post for comparison.

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Should you advertise your blog? That depends on what you hope to get from advertising and what kind of advertising you do, though I’m specifically talking about online advertising. There are many reasons why you might advertise, such as building a brand and attracting qualified traffic. There are many avenues for advertising, from display ads, pay-per-click (PPC), and paid links or posts/reviews.

What do you want to get from advertising your blog? Possibilities include:

• Qualified customers or leads
• Greater amount of relevant traffic
• Exposure and branding

If you’re selling something and your blog is designed to help you do that, your ads may be designed to attract qualified buyers or to get sales leads or prospects. If you earn money through advertising, then you want greater numbers of relevant traffic more inclined to click on your ads. Regardless of your business model, advertising can help expose you to more people and present your brand. Your brand can carried by advertising based on how the ads are designed visually, what they say, and what sites you advertise on.

You also have to consider the cost of advertising. If your blog makes money, you can afford to advertise and it makes sense to do so in order to feed growth. If not, advertising might give you the traffic boost you need to become profitable. And you can continue to advertise after the initial boost in order to further your growth.

Advertising can become expensive and be difficult to do well, which is why we pay ad agencies to do it for us. This increases the cost even more. Pay-per-click advertising, based on selection of keywords, can be cost-effective because you can automatically cap your spending.

So as not to be in danger of further going outside of my area of expertise, I’ll leave it at that, and in the future stick to blogging topics I know more about. If you want to see my erroneous original post, keep reading, and be sure to check out Maki’s comment afterwards.

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If you’ve been wondering if you should buy advertising in order to increase traffic for your blog, perhaps I can help put your mind at ease. Unless you are running a business that already has a solid business model that isn’t based on advertising revenues, you probably shouldn’t advertise your blog.

In other words, if you’re running a business (of any size, from single freelancer to large company) then you make money by selling products and/or services. In this case, you should advertise your blog, because this is complimentary to advertising your business. If you do not sell anything, it is difficult to justify spending the money to advertise your blog (although it doesn’t have to be expensive, and many people justify hosting and domain costs with their enjoyment from blogging).

But what if you make money through advertising? Should you also then buy advertising? Many people have and will continue to do this, but you have to really careful about it, anymore. The practice of earning revenue from advertising and then spending some of that money on advertising your own blog is known as arbitrage. For most bloggers, this would mean earning money through Google AdSense, and then purchasing ads through Google’s AdWords. Ideally, you take a percentage of your AdSense earnings and funnel that back into your AdWords campaign in an ever-increasing amount. Sounds great, doesn’t it? There’s only one problem.

Google doesn’t like it.

Google wants you to have a “real” business model: selling products/services. If you do, then you can engage in a little arbitrage on the side and the big G won’t terminate your AdSense account. But pure arbitrage is a no-no. Otherwise, paying to advertise your blog is a bit of a losing game.

So, in short: if you sell something, advertise your blog, if you don’t, then don’t advertise.