Money elusive for bloggers

The Life: With more than 176 million blogs now vying for visitors on the Internet, cashing in with advertisers is not easy - but it is possible.

Bloggers such as Susan Macaulay are searching for ways to monetise their online presence. Jeffrey E Biteng / The National

In the past 24 hours, about 102,425 new blogs went live around the world.

But with more than 176 million blogs vying for visitors on the internet, according to market data from BlogPulse, Susan Macaulay of Dubai faces stiff competition in trying to make hers stand out and win a slice of this region's growing advertising market.

Ms Macaulay, whose blog is featured on her website, AmazingWomenRock.com, is hoping to dip into the US$160 million (Dh587.1m) that is expected to be spent on online advertising in the Arab world this year. That figure is projected to grow to more than $250m next year, according to Isam Bayazidi, the chief executive of ikoo, an online advertising network in the Middle East.

Yet some creators and curators of online content, including Ms Macaulay, have found it much more difficult than they anticipated to get advertisers to show them the money.

The former business communications coach started her site three years ago and has spent much of her time trying to drive up traffic in hopes of enticing advertisers.

Her site now features more than 2,000 pages of original and aggregated content of interest to women, and the number of visitors to the site has gradually increased from virtually none in 2008 to about 15,000 per month during the early part of this year.

When one of Ms Macaulay's pages got a mention this year via StumbleUpon.com, a popular site that recommends some of the best content online to its followers, traffic to her site surged to a total of about 150,000 visitors over three months.

"My site went absolutely wild," says Ms Macaulay. "I thought I'd hit the jackpot."

But she struggled to monetise her site - its template could not accept standard advertising banners.

"It was just a disaster," says Ms Macaulay, who frequently posts updates about her website on social media sites such as Twitter and Facebook.

"Since 2008, my income has gone to zero, virtually, and my social capital has gone through the roof," she says.

So Ms Macaulay relaunched her site in September, with a template that could support ads. She then tried hiring someone who would be willing to seek out advertisers and work on a commission basis, but no one seemed interested. Unwilling to throw in the towel, she recently tried a more unconventional approach: creating ads to run free alongside her content.

"I didn't want the space to be empty," she says, "so I created ads for people who had supported me in the past or who are part of my network."

Today, Ms Macaulay's site also offers advertising packages starting at $27 for a month and a maximum rate of $517 for a lead ad that would run for three months.

The best way to increase the likelihood that visitors will actually click on a website's ads, and thereby boost an owner's revenue, is to ensure that the marketing messages are related to the content on a particular site, says Tatiana Khair, a digital marketing consultant based in the UAE.

"It is better to see targeted ads," she says.

Ads that are unrelated to the content of a site or that are merely created to fill space, by contrast, typically do not interest visitors.

They "might be useful if the website has lots of hits, like more than 50,000 per day, but not for small websites", says Ms Khair.

Many bloggers and website owners have turned to online tools such as Google AdSense, which generates money for site owners who host ads and keeps a cut of the revenue.

AdSense also matches ads with websites according to the content of the sites and features tools for owners who can "gauge how hard their site is working for them", says Mohamad Mourad, the regional manager for Google in the Gulf.