The Dark Side
Some few of you that have been reading for a bit have noticed no doubt that I have started moving specific topics out of this blog to other sites. Part of that is because those are old sites that I have owned for some time that were definitely the heart and soul of the subject matter that are having the blog postings relocated there. But beyond that, I am also moving more toward the dark side. By that I mean that I am positioning some of those things to potentially and hopefully to be a little bit better at monetization.
Before anyone runs screaming from my blog about me fully succumbing to the dark side, know that there has always been a small amount of revenue stream from here at Mephistos. Having said that, it generally only been enough to cover the hosting costs and in some years not even that. Of course, having said that, I have covered several other half started ideas being hosting at the same time as well. In the great scheme of all this though, it would be nice to be able to make just a little bit more and maybe help provide a little assistance one of my expensive hobbies. The best opportunities for that involve using advertising that has a very targeted audience with high quality content. I have the later, but not the former, hence the reason of moving things around a bit and getting things set up the way they are. Now having said all that, there are three potential money-making opportunity that I am looking at using both here at Mephistos and the medieval site, Lance of Saint Eligius and the farming/husbandry site, Travellers Haven Farms.
Kontera is the first one. This little advertising tool has a nice little plug-in for several platforms, including WordPress. The plug-in looks for keywords that the advertising broker has in inventory and automatically builds a link on the fly to any of those keywords that show up in your text. Granted, the underlines that show up in the text in random places on your blog could be a bit distressing to some readers. However, this is a very easy way to get up and going, especially with a site that is still building to a good traffic level. As noted, I have only just implemented this tool, but I am seeing some advertising occasionally pop up, conversions are still waiting to happen.
The second thing I am going to mention is the obvious of getting into affiliate of products that you use and believe in strongly. One of those that I have been using for a while here on Mephistos is Lunar Pages, which is with who I am hosting a number of sites. They do a great job and for the price I do not think I could be more pleased, especially when considering tech support speaks native English. Obviously putting up a simple 125 x 125 pixel box ad, as I have done, is a good for step. Including some text links though, like the one above, in the context of a glowing review is a great way to really push things of that nature as well.
The last money-maker and perhaps from my looking, the one with the biggest potential as traffic to your site grows, is PerfomancingAds. The basic idea here is they are a broker and likewise provide 125 x 125 pixel box ads (along with several other formats). You sign up with them and can define a region or multiple ones, you pick what kind of price you are looking for and as ads are available they will be filled. It is good to have some backup ads, like those you are affiliated with to fill in when the ads are not available that meant your criteria.
