How to Monetize Your Blog With Lijit

Lijit: Custom Search, Stats and Advertising for Bloggers

Besides having a great name like Lijit (yes, we receive MC Hammer jokes all the time) we also pride ourselves on providing value to bloggers and publishers with our free custom search, statistics and advertising.

What IS Lijit?

• Custom Search: The Lijit site search indexes all of your online content – your blog, your social content (YouTube, Twitter, Flickr, etc,), as well as your blogroll of sites you link to and trust. As a blogger, you’re creating content and publishing it everywhere online such as contributing to other blogs, tweeting, taking photos on Flickr and creating videos on YouTube. Lijit takes all that content you’re creating online, organizes it and then makes it searchable and, ultimately, discoverable for your readers. Our search is super flexible and has many different style options to ensure it matches your blog’s layout and theme – after all, at Lijit, we’re all bloggers so we’re hyper-aware of look and feel. Check out I Can Has Cheezburger, Toni’s The Happy Housewife, Problogger or Neatorama – all using different versions of our search.

• Stats: We also provide you with stats that uncover reader intent, teach you about your readers search behavior, traffic and popular content. Learning about what your readers are searching for and how they spend their time on your site is gold to any blogger – it helps you understand your community. Personally, my favorite statistic is “Last Searches That Returned No Results,” because I am usually able to write a blog post based on that search statistic and give back to my readers. Check out this live link to our CEO, Todd Vernon’s Lijit stats page.

• Monetization/Advertising: Enter Lijit’s Advertising Services. We help you monetize through two avenues:
  • Display, Front Page Ads: We provide cost-per-mille (CPM) campaigns that are premium and contextually relevant to your blog or website. We support standard advertising sizes and our advertising is non-exclusive. We are designed to work alongside the other advertising you’re already running and there is no cutoff in terms of pageviews. Everyone is welcome to our advertising services.
  • Search Ads: These are cost-per-click (CPC) text-based ads in your search results.

An imperative piece and prerequisite to our advertising services is using the custom search.

The search sits across every site in our network of over 12,000 publishers. Unlike other advertising service providers we know your site’s content, reader demographics and reader intent which allow us to yield better ad performance and provide you with the most relevant, advertising campaigns. Installing our ad tags and using our advertising is easy, we even have video tutorials!

We Like Our Users, A lot:

We value our users; we listen to them and interact with them daily, on a personal level. The search not only helps you, but encourages readers to dive deeper into your content. The stats help you understand your readership and we strive to grow your online revenue through the advertising we provide. Furthermore, all our services our free: our business model is an ad revenue share.

If you’re interested in signing up with Lijit just head to our homepage click ‘Sign Up’ and you’re off to the races. Furthermore, if anyone is attending the upcoming (and incredible) SavvyBlogging event in Breckenridge, a few Lijit employees and I will be attending the luncheon on Saturday, July 10^th. We’re happy to answer any questions you have and of course, meet everyone attending.

Feel free to email me, Grace: grace at lijit dot com. I’m happy to help sign you up, provide you with advertising and answer any questions you have. If you tell me you came from SavvyBlogging I will set you up with our special customization features!

Grace Boyle is the Publisher Services Manager at Lijit in Boulder, Colorado. She helps recruit and acquire strategic publishers to Lijit’s growing network and serves as an account manager for existing publishers. Like the rest of the team at Lijit, she blogs and can be found on Twitter. She loves blogging, laughter, the mountains, snowboarding, , traveling and wine.