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Ever wonder how much it actually costs to advertise on a blog? This is how much some of the top bloggers charge for promotion on their sites, as well as some services you can use to market your products on blogs.

Tutorial Blog

300.000 unique visitors per month
Alexa Rank: 18699
PageRank: 5
6.000 RSS readers
Tutorial Blog runs two kinds of ads, 5 200×90 pixels images on the sidebar for $300 a month, and text ads below that for $100 a month. Source.

John Chow

200.000 unique visitors per month
Alexa: 2377
Pagerank: 5
Almost 10.000 RSS readers

John Chow sells multiple ads on his blog, spread between the main page, posts and rss.
468×60 pixels top banner sells for $1000 a month
300×250 Embedded Ads: In most recent posts on main page, RSS and all single posts for $500 a month.
125×125 Button Sponsorship x 8: $500 each
Product review posts: $400 a post.
Feature Site Sponsorship: $240 per month (two months minimum)
Post Level Text Ads via text link ads
RSS Text Ad Sponsorship: $200 USD.
Source

The Deck: (A list Apart, 37 signals, Veerle’s Blog, and many more)

Pagerank: Upwards to page rank 8 for some

The Deck is a partnership of many influential bloggers. Only a single ad is shown in every page on the network. 18 ad sports are sold each month, which translates to 5.55% of page views across the network to display your ad. 120×90 pixels and up to 75 characters of text for $5500 per month. Additionally, advertisers can buy a “day of impressions” at $3100 per day. Source

Shoemoney

200.000 unique visitors a month
Pagerank: 6
Alexa Rank: 2564
Over 11.000 RSS subscribers

Shoemoney has 5 advertising areas on his blog.
5 rotating 468×60px banners: $950 per month, per spot.
Exclusive Featured Sponsor static 120×600px: $3850 per month (featured sponsor)
Sidebar: $350-1500 per month per spot depending on size.
The Launcher spot: Rates for this spot start at $2950 per month
Source with image map of ad positions

Text Link Ads

Text-link-ads.com is a marketplace for bloggers to sell ad spots on their web sites. You choose to display ads on specific posts or site-wide and advertisers can buy these spots on a monthly basis. The TLA staff chooses the ad price for each spot based on backlinks, traffic, Google page rank and other values.

There are thousands of blogs available to advertise on, and prices start from $5.00 upwards thousands of dollars per month.

Review Me, Pay Per Post and similar services

Using these services advertisers can both place opportunities for bloggers to review their products, or view listings of bloggers willing to review products for a payment. These reviews have the benefit of being posted as normal posts on the blog chronology, not as ads, defeating banner blindness on most users.

I signed up for the Clickbank affiliate program today. I was looking for advertisements to add below the entries in the separate post pages and did not want to go with adsense or text-link-ads yet. Signing up with clickbank was mostly painless and within 5 minutes i was looking at the affiliate marketplace. I picked up a “Profit from blogging / SEO” (affiliate link) and added it between the entries and the comments on separate post pages.

Things i like about Clickbank:

Many affiliates to choose from.
Clickbank has hundreds of affiliates to promote on each category. You’d be hard pressed to find a niche you cannot cover.

You do not have to use their code or widget
Just link to a page to the Clickbank domain with your id in the url, and if the item sells, you get a percentage of the money. You can use your own text link, or create an image yourself. If you know a little bit about design you can create some decent banners for the products you’re promoting.

What i don’t like about Clickbank:

Way too many skyscraper sites
Most of the affiliates i checked just have a single page with horrible design and the classic by now “authentic satisfied customer” stories, but i guess you use whatever sells the best. These kind of pages always come with affiliate programs, but i would be more inclined to link to a page that looks at least decent.

Too many “Get rich quick” schemes
The top search results for “SEO” all reveal amazing opportunities to earn a million dollars a month by tricking adsense, or getting a top Google spot in a month.

Conclusions:
I found Clickbank adequate as far as affiliate programs go. You might have to look a little beyond the top spots to find a program you feel comfortable promoting but there are many decent deals for bloggers.

Blogging for money has become a million dollar business, top bloggers make thousands of dollars each month for paid reviews and displaying ads on their sites. I took screenshots of the visible portion of some of the top blogs and counted how much of that was paid space. The screenshots below are taken from a maximized Firefox window with three toolbars, at a resolution of 1280×1024. You can click on each screenshot to see a full size shot with the ad areas highlighted in red.

Problogger.com

Problogger runs two ad areas above the fold, one 477 x 70 banner and one 312 x 473 box with several ads. 17.76% of the total space is ads.

Copyblogger.com

One of the better designed blogs, copyblogger displays just one ad area with multiple smaller ads, at 280 x 483 pixels. Total screen real estate: 115.920 pixels, 11.37% of screen space. Of all the sites i tested, copyblogger displays the less amount of ads.

Dailyblogtips.com

Like Copyblogger, Dailyblogtips has a single ad area with six ad boxes at 284 x 467 pixel size. 13.01% of the displayed page was ad space.

Johnchow.com

John Chow is the most referenced blogger right now and has a total of 5 ad areas on the first screen of his blog. These include the donate link, “get reviewed on these blog” link and the such. 283.842 pixels for ads above the fold for a total of 27.86% ad space.

Stevepavlina.com

Steve Pavlina’s personal development blog. Still maintains a clean layout, mostly because of the adsense text ads. Three links including the donate button, a total of 206.820 pixels. 20.30% ad space.

Shoemoney.com

Adsense-like vertical ads and image ads to the shoemoney store. Two of the ads run below the initial page displayed. 14.69% of the total space was ads.

Conclusions

This was a fun thing to research, and i have to admit i was surprised by the results. Selling ads slowly turned from a way to pay server costs using adsense to a full time job marketing products for many bloggers. One of the things that should be noted is that there’s more than one way to do this test. For example taking a screenshot of the full main page and not just the main screen radically alters the results, some of these bloggers run multiple ads below the main screen, while others don’t.