Just like every other aspiring writer and blogger, for many years I tried to make a full-time income from my blogs - something that is obviously very difficult to achieve.
After experimenting with several niches and blogs, I finally had some moderate success with a tech blog and grew it to around 400,000 monthly pageviews over a period of two years.
However, while the traffic was pretty strong, my earnings were still on the low side, as my site's CPM (the amount advertisers were paying me per 1,000 pageviews) was just around $5. In other words, my blog was generating revenue of around $2,000 per month, which isn't enough to comfortably live on in the US.
My Journey to a Higher CPM
I experimented with different ad set-ups and formats with my current ad network, but it was impossible to increase the CPM. This ultimately pushed me to consider alternative ad networks, and I stumbled upon AEK AdTech.
They actually aren't an ad network; they are an ad optimization agency. Put simply, they work with publishers and use their ad-ops expertise to help website owners maximize their websites' profitability.
However, they charge a fee for these services, and given my site's earnings at the time, I wasn't in a position to invest money back into the business. But, they do have some free services, including a website audit and ad network recommendation service.
As it was completely free, I decided to reach out to them, and after sharing some info about my site (such as its traffic, main geos, and current earnings), they recommended an alternative ad network for me to work with. The ad network they recommend for each publisher is different, as different networks are better suited to different sites, depending on its size, niche, audience, and other factors.
Within a few days, my site was onboarded to the new ad network and we began serving their ads. At first, the CPM was around $7 - which is better than what we were generating before, but still not quite good enough.
Over the coming weeks, the CPM continued to grow and eventually stabilized at $14. Our traffic was roughly the same, so I was now making over $5,500 per month and was in a much better financial position.
More Expansion
While I was satisfied with my blog's success, I thought it would be interesting to try to replicate this success with another site, so I launched two other blogs and tried to follow a similar blueprint.
After months of work and publishing hundreds of articles, both sites are now consistently bringing in a decent amount of organic traffic.
While they are both smaller than my main blog, they nevertheless bring in a decent amount of monthly ad revenue, as they have a CPM of $12-$15.
For the time being, my priority is to expand my three existing sites before potentially launching more blogs.
