Economic Crisis: Is it over for blogging?

I have noticed lately an increase regarding my sports blog’s monetization and advertisers’ interest towards my personal page. When economic crisis hit the markets a couple of years ago, there was a noticeable decrease in the blog’s advertising revenue. Initially I thought it was due to the fact my blog’s pagerank had experienced a drop(PR4 to PR2 in 2-3 weeks), but given the fact that it’s a long time since it came back up to PR3, I suppose economic crisis also was to blame for the termination of several advertising agreements. Nowadays I really struggle keeping up with all the emails asking for some kind of cooperation, although I don’t complain! Hopefully it’s the beginning of a new promising era and I wish other betting and gambling blogs experience the same effect.

Advertisers started coming as suddenly as they disappeared some years ago. I recall there was a time when all the deals were expiring and no one was willing to renew. Banners and text links kept dropping off and revenue was decreasing rapidly, meaning a loss of more than 50% of my blog’s income source in 6 months’ time. Funnily enough the same happened to a couple of other blogs I own at that time, although they still haven’t shown signs of bouncing back. Blogging seemed like a hit-or-miss prospect but now I believe crisis also affected web business online. Besides I never lowered my advertising rates, even when advertisers were leaving my blog. I highly expected the Google Pagerank to come right back up.

I can’t recall why my blog’s pagerank had fallen. I do recall though what I did to improve it. I redesigned my blog, leaving out all the outbound links that were placed in accordance to link exchanging done throughout the first 3 or so years of blogging and cleaned up the blog’s sitemap. I also tried to include banners implementing the “no follow” tag in order to further increase the followed outbound links and I began blogging more often. Truthfully I haven’t keep up to the task lately, judging by all the guest posts appearing the last 2 months in my blog. I have focused lately to my recently created blogs (StoiximaOnline.com and TradingGraphs.com) as well and somewhat neglected my personal blog at Jimmakos.com. Still my sports blog is performing better day by day and I found the motivation to start blogging again.

Nowadays I mostly do business in the form of promotional articles and text ad links insertion. Advertisers are also interested in banners as well, but they seem to underperform. If your blog can’t satisfy the advertisers’ expectations, try and offer them one extra month free of charge in case the banner performs better and they renew. It’s better to keep a customer happy, than trying to find a new one. Generally experience makes a difference and if blog monetizing is what you are lacking of, keep on reading online about useful tips and advice about how to better monetize your blog. Although it may not be the most steady income source, more and more people will find eventually the web’s power and will want the best exposure available. Have your blog ready!