Revitalizing an Old Blog with Google Video Units
A few months ago I had read an article on Blue Hat SEO about creating a video blog web site. I selected a niche I knew well, guitars, and started building a blog based around guitar videos. Unfortunately, I found it not to be that fun of a project and I didn’t concentrate on building traffic or other promotions. Finally, I stopped working on it.
I had let the Guitars On TV blog do nothing for a couple of months. It just sat there, yet another dead blog on the Internet. Then Google Video Units came along. I put one at the bottom of my pages here and I even put one on Guitars On TV but I didn’t integrate it well, until today.
I redesigned the site slightly to build it around a largest video unit, as seen here:
I made the home page a new static page rather than the standard most recent posts. I put a sitemap list below the video unit on this page. I also moved the standard blog items, like recent posts, down to the bottom of the sidebar and moved Adsense skyscraper ads into their place. The goal of the design is to get a visitor to interact with the Google Video Unit viewer to look at guitar videos and, hopefully, click guitar related ads.
I’m probably not going to spend much time promoting the site but, if it pulls in a few extra dollars a month it will pay for itself. Last month it earned $2.80 so maybe it will improve on that. I’ll report on it again in December to see how it does.
Do you have a dead blog or unused domain just sitting there, doing nothing, earning nothing? Have you considered using video units as a way to improve their monetization? What do you think of the idea? Leave me a comment and let me know.
UPDATE 6/24/2008
Over the course of this test that lasted about 3 months I found that the Google Video Units did not work well as compared to regular Adsense ads and certainly not as well as eBay Partner Network ads. With EPN ads this site now easily meets and exceeds the niche blog goal of earning an average of $1 a day. I don’t recommend Google Video Units at this time.
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