The The Bloggers’ dilemma : Traffic or eCPM

Please read this post carefully since I am trying to explain a rather complex concept in a single post.

You can have traffic that converts to peanuts or You can have content that converts to gold but noone ever visits them.

Not all blog posts are created equal. Some posts can get you as much as 3-4$ per click, whereas some others get only 0.1$. Net result is the same. Your adsense earning is always pathetic.

Obviously we want to write about the first type of topic like web hosting, making money etc. There is a catch though. The reason single adsense click on a post about paid webhosting costs you too high, is because that field is way too competitive. You can write as much as you want but you are not going to get more than 100 visitors a day. 100 visitors at 20$ eCPM will get you hardly 2$!!!!!

On the other extreme you have bloggers writing about bollywood, cricket etc. These are the niches with rather lower amount of competition. So it is easy to get traffic to the blog. You can easily get 2000 users a day. But since the competition is less, eCPM is less as well (in the range of 1$). So you have 2000 users a day but at 1$ eCPM, you will end up getting only 2$ a day!!!

What is the solution
There is a strategy to solve the bloggers’ dilemma. The FMCG companies use it, automobile companies use it, even your local store uses it. The strategy is simple. Get the users with a low competition, low profit product and then migrate those users to high profit products to make money. The online sites that use this trick too well are the web hosting companies. The paid webhosting space is way too competitive with affiliate pay-out as high as 90%. So what do some smart web hosts do? They offer free web hosting to the users with the expectation that eventually they will migrate to the paid web hosting option.

You can use this strategy on your blog as well
Create a mixture of both types of posts. Get the users through lesser competitive terms like how to create proxy sites and then lead them to more profitable content like web hosting options. The strategy needs to be thought through very carefully. Like if you have site related to cricket, then do a post about online games and lead the users to that page.

You can also see the trend if you go through the Earnings report of bloggers that I have collected. Do let me know your views on this topic as this is a rather important topic facing many bloggers.

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