How many times have you created a blog, put a ton of effort into and even threw Adsense up on it and still felt it wasn’t any where near it’s full potential?
This happens all the time!
In the world of blogging nothing is easy… except setting up your blog in the first place.
Once you are ready to go and have content being posted on your site, then visitors flowing through it, it’s up to you to monetize that baby and make it work!
Let’s take a look at what Lotti had going for him on his blog in the screenshot below.
As you can see, the main source of lead generation and revenue for the site what based on the Google Adsense on the left side of the page.
It’s not in the best placement and the design of the site could be better, but not a big issue right now.
When talking with Lotti about his site, he said it was making enough money from Adsense to pay the writers of the site, but it was quickly dropping in revenue (around 80%) since 2010, even though traffic was still on the rise.
“It got increasingly difficult to support the editorial staff and website costs through adsense revenues alone.” – Lotti
So what’s a blogger to do?… As mentioned, he could have played around with the placement and site design to see if any higher click rates would help.
I applaud Lotti for what he did next, which was completely revamping the site and turning it into a lead gen site!
You can click here to visit his site and see the updated live version or just view the screenshot below.
You will also notice he did a complete redesign of the site and it’s looking really professional and nice right now!
Since the site is targeting people who are researching “annuity rates”, once they come across the annuity calculator they are likely to fill in the form field. This annuity calculator is a huge draw for the site as it’s no longer pushing leads elsewhere, but generating leads for the site owner.
When asked what drove them to make the complete facelift of the site, Lotti had the following to say:
“We had to explore various options, including having our own banner advertising model but it was felt that it would be too difficult to manage and the demand would probably not be there as our site’s monthly traffic is in the low five figures – too low to attract big spending advertisers.”
While this sounds like a great concept for many bloggers to follow, again we must impress upon the fact that it still takes a lot of work to setup a quality site, target the right audience and then know what to do with the leads once you start getting them.
“We found a partnership agreement with a lead generation company who pay us a commission for each lead. It’s transparent and easy to manage.”
So there you have an excellent example of a boring blog that was making money but on a downward path, turned completely around and is now a money & lead generating machine!
The next time you have a blog that isn’t living up to it’s potential, be sure to explore all options before closing down shop and giving up!
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