Earlier this month I announced the new design for my blog, Life In Student Ministry. At the suggestion of my designer, I removed most of the Google AdSense blocks in the new design to clean up the clutter. There's been both positive and negative aspects to this.

The Positive

My site's bounce rate dropped instantly and the very next day my traffic increased by 1,000 hits per day. By removing AdSense, there's less to direct people away from my site, plus there's not as much distracting visitors from my content. Furthermore, removing AdSense cleaned up the look and feel of the site dramatically, giving it a more professional feel, increasing the level of perceived credibility for first-time visitors and thereby boosting user engagement and the growth rate of new subscribers.

The Negative

My site's revenue dropped from about $300/month to $75/month, which is a very significant drop for a guy like me who depends on that income stream to keep the site running and under development. Additionally, I just removed the largest AdSense block from my site this morning, so that income will drop to about $22/month from here on out. At that rate, I may end up just removing the last block, too.

Rethinking Revenue Streams

All this has caused me to rethink everything about my site's advertising and revenue streams.I've been selling out pretty much everything from ad spaces to audio and video bumper intros for the podcasts. But in so doing I feel that, especially on the website, I've given my audience too many avenues for leaving my site. Plus it clutters and distracts from my content. The more ads I have, the lower user engagement there is.

So, now I'm thinking that having fewer ads is better both for me (higher user engagement) and for a potential few advertisers (less competition from distracting brands). Ultimately, it's more attractive for my site's visitors (i.e. less advertising clutter = better design = higher perceived credibility = higher user-engagement = better for the 1 or 2 brands who are advertising).

If I limit the number of advertisers to the four 125x125px blocks in my sidebar, I seriously need to find an alternative source of funding besides advertising income. The site costs about $150/month just to maintain, but breaking even is not an option because then there's no room for growth and future development (like launching new designs and new projects like MinistryQuestions, Online Missions Trip, and the YM Mentorship). MinistryWebsites.biz is a project I started to help fund LISM and, while it's moved past the break-even mark, it's growing too slowly to consider it an AdSense replacement for now. (The only advertising I do for that service is in the sidebar of LISM.)

Possible Solution?

I'm thinking about going toward something more like a site sponsorship. I'm not really sure what that would look like, but maybe it would be more along the lines of a package deal: 125x125 ad block for a month, a sponsored review/interview (both via text and audio interview), highlighting a promotion of some sort the advertiser offers exclusively to my audience. The value of this could be on-going because once the review/interview is published on my site, it's indexed by Google and will forever be seen by future potential customers searching for reviews even long after our sponsorship agreement is over. The value of the phone call interview recording is that it ads a very personable aspect to someone's brand where the audience hears a real voice along with someone's heart and passion. We all know people connect better with a real person behind the brand rather than just the brand itself. That's what people will remember more than a logo or URL.

There could be additional perks thrown in for sponsorships that last longer than a month (like an additional 125x125 ad space, short "sponsored by" header or footer description and links) but like I said, I'm still thinking through all this, so I'd appreciate to other ideas and feedback.

The downside to all this, of course, is that site sponsorships require more work on my part. With AdSense, I copy and paste some code into me design and it's completely maintenance-free after that. Since blogging is not my full-time job or anything, a revenue stream that is completely hassel-free is very attractive, so I have to weigh the extra leg-work of site sponsorships into the decision, as well.

Thoughts? Ideas? Anyone ever seen something like a site sponsorship?