How Guy Kawasaki Can Better Monetize His Blog

Guy Kawasaki has one of the most-read blogs on the Internet, How to Change the Word: A Practical Blog for Impractical People. With a PageRank of 7 and a Technorati ranking in the low 40's, it's definitely one of the Big Ones. Earlier this week, Guy posted some stats about his blog, including his total AdSense earnings for the year. And that got people talking. Because his AdSense earnings were $3350, or about $280/month. Which really isn't a lot for a blog with that kind of visibility.

But Guy doesn't use AdSense anymore, and a bit of snooping with the Wayback Machine doesn't seem to indicate when he stopped using AdSense. It looks like he was using something else by August, so that monthly figure is probably more like $500/month. I just don't know, I'd have to ask him to be sure. Still, $500/month doesn't seem like much for that kind of blog, does it?

AdSense is not the only way to monetize a site/blog, of course. Cursory use of the Text Link Ads worth calculator shows he could easily make at least $350/month from their ad program. Probably more. He also has a huge readership via his RSS feeds, so some kind of ad insertion there would likely prove useful enough.

But my focus is AdSense, so let's get back to monetization via AdSense. First of all, Guy and anyone else who has a blog should read my posting How to Get Relevant AdSense Ads - Especially for Bloggers to make sure thye understand how to “tune” a blog for AdSense.

Unlike most blogs, Guy does not have a traffic problem: while you can have traffic without money, it's hard to have money without traffic. So he's in a much better position to monetize his content than most bloggers.

Looking at the current layout of his blog, he really has very little space devoted to ads. There's an “Ads” section and then there's the list of jobs. If all he did with AdSense was slap an ad unit on the right side of the blog then I can see why he didn't make a lot of money.

Really, it's not rocket science. On a permalink page I'd put an ad at the top of the posting, right under the content — just like this page — and then one at the end of the posting — like this page. That's two out of a possible total of three ad units used. For the third ad unit, I'd put a 350 by 200 image ad up at the top right of the page somewhere, prominent enough to attract advertisers who want to display their image and video ads via site targeting.

For the home page, things are trickier because of the up-to-three-ad-units rule — obviously you can't have two ad units on each posting in that case. The 350 by 200 image ad should definitely be here, it's really the best page that advertisers might target. So for the other two ad units I'd probably just stick them between the first three postings.

I'd also look at using a horizontal link unit near the top of the page, as that usually makes me money on my blogs. But style-wise it might not fit in too well, in which case a vertical link unit on the right side with all the other links would be the alternative.

Of course, the price you pay for making ads more prominent is having the ads interfere with the content. I'm sure Guy thinks the usability of his site is very important and it he may feel that placing ads in optimal layouts like I just described would interfere with the readability of his essays. He does, after all, make a lot of money indirectly through the blog, and that may suit him just fine.

You're welcome for the free analysis, Guy. Just put me on your blogroll, that will be payment enough

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Eric Giguere wrote Make Easy Money with Google and Uncommon AdSense. His goal is to get his AdSense blog into Matt Cutts' Guy Kawasaki's blogroll.

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