How to monetize your old blog posts

When a post is published on your blog, the first persons to read it are your loyal visitors : RSS subscribers, Twitter followers, people from social bookmarking sites… But after a week or so, 98 percent of people reading the post are comming to your blog from search engines.

As it is a known fact that search engine people will be more likely to click on your ads, what about displaying more ads on old blog posts?

Why old posts are so important

On a quite new blog like this one, It is obvious that most of the traffic is comming from RSS subscibers, Twitter, and social bookmarking sites. But on the other hand, established blogs as such as Cats Who Code or WpRecipes receive a lot more traffic on “old” post, comming from search engines. The reason is quite simple : The more indexed posts in search engines you have, the more chance you have that people will visit your blog after typing a request on Google.

This is why some blogs are updated only once or twice a month and still receive lots of visitors.


Good example : 4 of the 5 most viewed pages of my blog Cats Who Code are older than 3 months.

Search engines visitors and advertising

It is a quite known fact that people comming from search engines results pages are more likely to click on advertisments than your regular visitors. The reason is that search engines visitors are looking for something in particular and if your blog post didn’t brought them an answer (or that they want more info) they will probably click on an ad if relevant to their needs.

On the other hand, regular visitors are used to your blog and read it often because they like it. They aren’t looking for something particular, they read each of your post like people reads the newspaper every morning.

WordPress hack to display ads on old posts only

As I know that most of you are using a WordPress blog, I though I could share this very usefull WordPress hack with you. Its purpose is pretty simple: It get the post date and compare it with today’s date. If post date is X days older than today, the code will display ads. Otherwise, nothing will happens.

The following function have to be pasted in your functions.php. If you are using the Thesis theme this file is named custom_functions.php.

function is_old_post($post_id=null){
   $days = 15;
   global $wp_query;
   if(is_single() || is_page()) {
      if(!$post_id) {
         $post_id = $wp_query->post->ID;
      }
      $current_date = time();
      $offset = $days *60*60*24;
      $post_id = get_post($post_id);
      $post_date = mysql2date('U',$post_id->post_date);
      $cunning_math = $post_date + $offset;
      $test = $current_date - $cunning_math;
      if($test > 0){
         $return = true;
      }else{
         $return = false;
      }
   }else{
      $return = false;
   }
   return $return;
}

Once you successfully inserted the code in your function.php file, you are now ready to call the functions in your single.php template as shown below:

<?php if(is_old_post()){ ?>
INSERT AD CODE HERE
<?php } ?>

That’s all. This code have been found on the very good French blog Monetiweb, so credits goes to them!

Displaying ads only to search engine visitors

If you’re looking to target search engine visitors only, another option is to detect the referrer (ie. the last page the visitor was on before going to your blog) and show him ads if he comes from a search engine.

The following WordPress hack will do that job perfectly. To apply it on your blog, insert the code below in your theme functions.php file.
Note that the $SE array is where you specify search engines. You can easily ad new search engines by adding new elements to the array.

function scratch99_fromasearchengine(){
  $ref = $_SERVER['HTTP_REFERER'];
  $SE = array('/search?', 'images.google.', 'web.info.com', 'search.', 'del.icio.us/search', 'soso.com', '/search/', '.yahoo.');
  foreach ($SE as $source) {
    if (strpos($ref,$source)!==false) return true;
  }
  return false;
}

Once done, open the file where you want to display the ads and paste the following code :

if (function_exists('scratch99_fromasearchengine')) {
  if (scratch99_fromasearchengine()) {
    INSERT YOUR CODE HERE
  }
}

Save the file, and you’re done. Thanks to Stephen Cronin for the hack!

If you’re blogging using WordPress, don’t forget to check out my WordPress hacks to make more money online list if you haven’t read it yet.

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23 Comments

  1. Posted December 2, 2009 at 3:45 pm | Permalink

    Very useful tips you provided here. I was actually thinking about this issue for a while now. Before, i used to display adsense on my blog post (wraped around text style). However, I found it quite anoying, if i see that on blog posts. I am sure my readers do as well. So, I can use this to put ads on older posts.

    Thank you for sharing this useful tip.

  2. Posted December 2, 2009 at 4:05 pm | Permalink

    @Ali Papila : Thanks for the kind word! I’m glad you enjoyed the post. Definitely, ads are anoying for loyal readers, but we shouldn’t hesitate to display it on old posts for search engine visitors.

  3. Posted December 2, 2009 at 7:40 pm | Permalink

    Thank you for this great post Jean. My blog is fairly new, but when it gets a little older, I will look more into this, and thankfully, I already have a guide to follow!

  4. Posted December 2, 2009 at 7:47 pm | Permalink

    @Design Informer : Your blog is pretty (Just as this one!) but it is already full of quality article. I’m pretty sure than in one year, it will be a success. Keep up the good work!

  5. Posted December 2, 2009 at 8:08 pm | Permalink

    Really well thought ! You wrote a great post again Jean.

  6. Posted December 2, 2009 at 8:19 pm | Permalink

    This is a very interesting read, I’ve been noticing that some of my older blog post have been responsible for a good deal of my search engine traffic. In an effort to increase traffic, CTR and such I have been increasing the frequency of my post and the variety of my content.

  7. Posted December 2, 2009 at 8:24 pm | Permalink

    @Roberto Blake : Yes, old post + old post + old post = lots of traffic, this is why the most posts you have, the most traffic you’ll get.
    Btw saw on your website that you’re from NYC…What a great city! I love to go there for vacations!

  8. Posted December 2, 2009 at 10:23 pm | Permalink

    Useful tips, monetizing old post :D

  9. Posted December 3, 2009 at 3:04 am | Permalink

    great

    thank you

  10. Posted December 3, 2009 at 6:11 am | Permalink

    Wow, really great hack. We surely can optimizing our blog more by use this hack. Thanks for sharing.

  11. Posted December 3, 2009 at 11:02 am | Permalink

    Thanks! Thanks for the great post.

  12. Posted December 3, 2009 at 1:41 pm | Permalink

    very interesting. was wondering how someone would go about this, if possible, and how older post’s, if they did, bring in more traffic by new visitors & so forth… ya basically turned my early morning thought into a solution! thanks & keep ‘em coming!

    - MexiChriS

    p.s. i love the site, it’s so beautiful, it just never ceases to amaze me when i visit!

  13. Posted December 3, 2009 at 1:48 pm | Permalink

    Great idea of versioning my blog posts and rewarding loyal visitors …

  14. Posted December 3, 2009 at 2:03 pm | Permalink

    Thanks Jean for writing a beneficial post. I hope you will keep on writing like this.

  15. Posted December 3, 2009 at 4:34 pm | Permalink

    Very useful tip. This way my subscribers won’t see any ads as they will read the post in first few days. So, I get clean blog and ad revenue at the same time.

  16. Posted December 4, 2009 at 2:54 am | Permalink

    I wrote this same code in javascript if you don’t have wordpress:
    http://francedroy.com/post/268304598/how-to-monetize-your-old-blog-posts-using-javascript

  17. Posted December 4, 2009 at 4:00 am | Permalink

    Wonderful hack for thesis theme! Between Jean, where the ads will be displayed within the blog post? Before content, middle or end of content?

    That’s a very useful hack though, thanks for sharing Jean!

    Cheers,
    Lee

  18. Posted December 4, 2009 at 2:21 pm | Permalink

    @France Roy : Interesting code, thanks for sharing!

    @Lee Ka Hoong : This hack can be applied on any theme, not only on Thesis. Ad placement depends of where you’ve pasted the second piece of code.

  19. Posted December 7, 2009 at 6:20 pm | Permalink

    This is amazing post…really great.

  20. Posted December 19, 2009 at 10:44 am | Permalink

    great deal. there is really no need to show ads to everyone ’cause they are just annoying…

  21. Posted December 19, 2009 at 11:16 am | Permalink

    @Gerrit Fries : “they are just annoying” but they are my salary… And they allow bloggers to work a lot and give free content to people. Not so bad, isn’t it?

  22. Posted March 13, 2010 at 2:20 am | Permalink

    Hello,

    you can also modify the code so it shows Ads only to those, who came to your site from anywhere but links on site itself.

    function scratch99_fromasearchengine(){
    $ref = $_SERVER['HTTP_REFERER'];
    if (preg_match(“/catswhoblog.com/”, $ref)) return false;
    return true;
    }

    This way, you can disable showing Ads to ppl browsing your website or comming from any link you place on any CWB subdomain. It’s not a magic but somebody might find it useful as I found this blog an interesting reading.

  23. Posted June 22, 2010 at 10:18 pm | Permalink

    Thanks for the nice article!

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