Jamdo Marketing Blog

An interesting problem for bloggers is that product blogs are largely monetised in a different fashion to content blogs.

A recent guest post by Wendy Pierall over at ProBlogger brought my attention to the fact that I had had a similar conundrum recently and tackled it in a quite different manner.

Her problem?

regular blog visitors came to my main site for content (and not to shop), it made sense to create a separate blog just for the products and services that they would be interested in.

Wendy made the realisation with the help of Jeremy Shoemaker, that she might like to seperate the content element of her blog from the product element. A “content post” is a post where you can wax lyrical about your niche and write
linkbait articles etc. A “product post” is where you write about a specific product with the intent of making an affiliate sale. Their solution to marry the two was to create an entirely new product blog at Shoestring Smarts quite seperate from the original content blog at eMoms At Home.

That solution is fine and I think she will be successful.

However, if you have a content blog and you don’t want to start another site, then I would like to propose another potential solution - one I used myself recently.

A few things first though - this is basically how I see some of the main differences between a content blog and a product blog:

Content Blogs

• primary goal is any type of monetisation
• Adsense can take prominence
• Kontera is a good monetisation option
• cpm is a good way to monetise
• mass traffic is the goal - the more visitors the better
• giving free links to other relevant sites and resources is good
• easy to write linkbait which is good for SEO

Product Blogs

• primary goal is to make an affiliate sale
• Adsense is not ideal
• cpm is a distraction
• Kontera is a distraction
• targetted traffic is the goal (ie. traffic looking for something specific)
• the fewer (non-affiliate) links on a post, the better
• difficult to use linkbait for SEO

Firstly, on my blog, I planned to have both content posts and product posts on the single blog installation - a quite different solution to that used by Wendy, who went for a whole new site.

So, I wanted to figure out a way whereby I could keep the single blog, but have adsense, CPM, MyBlogLog widgets, Flickr widgets etc on the content posts where having page link leakage was not such a problem, and for the product posts have no leakage such as adsense etc.

The monetisation strategy of the two types of posts is fundamentally different so I needed two distinct post templates all from within the one blog installation.

Basically what I came up with was this.

Firstly I made seperate categories for the products that I was going to write about. Then I installed the Wordpress Category Visibility Plugin. This allowed me to NOT display any product posts on the main page - they would be shown only on their category pages. That way I was able to not upset the regular readers with constant product posts (regular content blog readers want tips, how to articles, stories, pics etc - not product descriptions).

That sorted the first issue which was to take care of the regular readers and maintain the visage of a content blog.

Next, I installed the Post Templates by Category Plugin. This allowed me to alter the post template according to specific categories, thus allowing me to remove all of the link leakage from the product posts that appears on the home page and content posts. While the content posts are monetised and made richer with adsense, CPM, Kontera, MyBlogLog, Flickr etc, the product posts have none of that and can concentrate on directing the visitor through the affiliate links of the product, much like a good sales letter.

The main benefits of this solution as I see it are like this:

• product posts can have the advantage of the link profile of the content blog
• a content blog can continue to linkbait better than a product blog alone, and therefore increase overall site SEO
• I can be more confident in using PPC to direct paid traffic to the product posts without worrying about link leakage so much
• regular readers don’t have to be subjected to comparatively boring product pages
• product pages can do very well in search engines

Now, this was a little mucking around and it did take me a while to figure out how I wanted to do it, but in the end I managed to monetise the two different sections of the site with two different strategies.

If you have a content blog like eMoms At Home and you want a product blog like Shoestring Smarts, then I suggest that the way I laid out may even be a superior strategy to building a whole new site as it allows the product section of your site to have all of the SEO benefits of your content blog without upsetting your regular readers.

Share This