How to Make MORE Money on your Blog with Video Content w/ Amber Bracegirdle from Mediavine

Did you know that you can probably make more money by publishing a video directly to your blog than you can through YouTube? In this episode, Amber Bracegirdle breaks down how to make MORE money on your blog with video content, and how YouTube fits perfectly with this strategy (and so much more!)  

Before we dive into this conversation with Amber, If your creating even one type of video content, maybe it's just Instagram stories or IGTV or Facebook Lives or maybe it's YouTube videos, hopefully it's YouTube videos, but whatever it is, you can repurpose that content across all of your social media platforms without having to spend a whole bunch more time actually editing those videos.

I created the social video blueprint, which is a free download. It's a pdf of tips and layout ideas for how you can repurpose your videos across your multiple platforms. How to create video that can be repurposed and used on multiple platforms is all laid out inside of the social video blueprint, which you can download for free at http://socialvideoblueprint.com.   I created it so that you can reach way more people with your video content without spending way more time editing your videos. 

Now let's get into this conversation with Amber.

Listen to Episode 38: How to Make MORE Money on your Blog with Video Content w/ Amber Bracegirdle from Mediavine

 

Make MORE Money on your Blog with Video Content

This episode is jam-packed full of juicy moneymaking blogging and video content information.  We're talking about a blog ad network and Mediavine is one of the networks that provide those ads.  This means as a publisher, as the blogger, when you put ads on your site, your making money because you're providing space for companies to advertise.

There is a lot of questions and confusion about Mediavine and how it works.  Amber Bracegirdle from Mediavine breaks it all down for us and tells us how we can make more money.

What is Mediavine?

What Mediavine does is handle all the technical aspects of display advertising on both mobile and desktop for bloggers.  They actually originally built the technology for their use and had no plans to start anything like Mediavine. They were just trying to make up some lost revenue when their ad company sold to another ad company and their income was cut in half overnight. 

Once you get permission to represent a site that you don't own in the advertising world, it opens up the flood gates so can represent anyone.  

Mediavine represents bloggers in the ad space. They provide the tech and automatic placements so you don't have to insert individual ad codes as you do with Adsense, etc. They also work on the other side with all of the different ad exchanges that exist. They do private marketplace deals with specific brands.  
 
According to Amber, "We basically go out and we say, listen, we have this giant portfolio of lifestyle websites that are extremely brand safe because of our, stringent vetting process.  You want their audience. And so it's our job to go out and get you guys the best possible money for your ad space."
 
So Mediavine is an ad placement agency that helps bloggers generate more income without investing a lot of time.

How does Mediavine work?

It is similar to a stock exchange. Mediavine acts as a funnel. so that all advertisers have to go through one place to get onto your website and they have to compete against each other in an auction. So it works exactly like an eBay Auction, where bids happen in real time for each ad spot and it provides a way for you to actually earn way more. Basically how much money you make per thousand ad impressions. it drives that price up because they're bidding against each other instead of cherry-picking on the exchanges for two or three ad spots.
 
The Mediavine network is almost entirely programmatic. Even the direct deals are pushed into the auction, where they're buying based on the actual audience member they want to reach.

If they want to reach someone who has visited a car dealership website in the last 30 days. They can tell from your history and cookies that you've done that. Then all of a sudden you start seeing all of the Ford advertisements because you were looking at a Ford dealership and it's more valuable to the advertiser to get in front of somebody they know will most likely be engaged as well as it's a better user experience for the actual reader because they're not seeing things that aren't relevant to them.
 
Mediavine has two sidebar placements, one at the top and one at the bottom that stays with you. and then there is an adhesion. It comes up from the bottom of the browser window, whether it's on phone or on desktop. And it stays with the reader as they scroll down the page. They also provide in-content ads and video ads.

Let's Talk About Video Ads

So I asked Amber about using video ads and she exclaimed, "It's the decade of video! A lot of ad spend is headed towards video because so much of the Internet is now video. You look at the generations that are coming up, they don't read, right? I mean they know how to read, but they don't read. They watch videos! My niece and nephew are 11 and 12, and if they want to learn how to do something, they hit YouTube. They don't go look at a blog post. Terrifying for me, but our best practice is to upload to Mediavine where we host it for you and use that embed on your website, but also uploads to youtube because it is a valuable social channel.  

She continued, "We give you the option. You can plug your youtube channel id into the Mediavine dashboard and when your video finishes playing on your blog page, it will prompt someone to subscribe to you on Youtube so that you continue to try and grow that channel."   

When asked about how much money could be made by using video, Amber explained, "The average CPM for a YouTube video is under a dollar. The average Mediavine CPM last year for video was $19.  So it's a huge difference. If you are only uploading your videos and embedding them in the blog posts they apply to and doing it as click to play, you're not going to earn very much money.  But we've seen people have like 25 to 35% lift in their overall income from video, but what you have to do is upload a few of them and turn on the 'up next' feature that lets the next video that you have play."

"You also need to be running the two different ad positions that will put a video in every blog post that doesn't have one and have it follow them down the page for desktop. And then on mobile, there's the adhesion video, which basically sits at the bottom of the browser window. We're actually redesigning it into a much cooler experience. but for right now it sits at the bottom of the browser window, and plays the first video that you have set as featured and then it will start playing any of the ones you have in your playlist for up next.  That can really, really earn you some money. But you need to create a video that sort of makes sense for running across your website."

An example of this would be on Food Fanatic, they have one has had the same five recipes be our top recipes over the year.  The video was created on Animoto. It is the top five recipes on Food Fanatic. Other examples would be a parenting blogger that created a video that's an introduction to her website showing what kind of content can be found on the site.  A video ad played before it makes a ton of money.

What Makes the Mediavine Experience Different?

Mediavine does things based on user experience, which actually tends to drive revenue higher. They provide lazy advertising, which means advertising below the fold and they are currently the only ad company doing it.  

Amber mentioned, "We realized we were actually providing more value to the advertisers because we weren't loading ads that were never seen. It's the first time in the history of advertising that someone can tell that their ad was actually seen by eyeballs. It's a score called viewability, that that refers to how much of the ad was in the viewable screen for at least one second. if 50% of the ad was in a viewable screen, you start to get a score for that. And the higher the score, the more they're willing to pay you for that."

Coming Soon

A new player is coming soon that will include lots of new features.  It will be user-friendly and is predicted to make a ton of money for bloggers.

According to Amber, "If you're not running video on your website today, you are losing money. That's all anybody wants. We met with all of our ad partners. and all they wanted to talk about was video."

They also have a new Wordpress plugin coming, Create is similar to a recipe card but can be used for other things such as book reviews, TV reviews, how-to cards, top travel places, lists, and all of these things to help you rank better with Google.  Create is optimized for speed and for advertising. It is available FREE for anyone to use.

A new Wordpress framework and that's called Trellis is going to be a replacement for Genesis will also be released in the near future.

Tips for Using Mediavine with YouTube

  • Limit Length of Video - People are less likely to watch like a 10-minute video on your website.  There are words, ads, and other things to distract them.  30 seconds to 2 minutes in length work best.
  • Use YouTube to Drive Blog Traffic - If there's a way for you to drive traffic from your youtube channel to your blog, it's a good idea to do it.  You will make more money.
  • Take Advantage of User Roles in the Dashboard - Use this new User Role feature to assign rights to a VA so they only have access to the video page to upload your videos in the Mediavine player.  They would not see other information such as income.
  • Start With Pages Having the Most Traffic - If you have videos that fit your top 10 or 20 pieces of content on your website, that's where you should start because that's where your members are.
  • Enable the "Up-next" Feature - People usually continue watching after the first video.

My Favorite Thing About This Conversation

One of my favorite things about this entire conversation is that Amber mentioned they focus so heavily on user experience. They want your readers on your blog to have the best possible experience while also displaying ads on the site and working for those advertisers to get eyeballs on their stuff, but also to help that publisher earn money on their blog. It doesn't all come down to revenue. That's not the number one focus.

It's probably not your absolute number one focus, but we have to make money. We have to earn a living. I think that's why you and I do what we do. Right? And it may not be the only reason, and it certainly may not be the most important thing on your mind, but when it comes to this area of creating content or trying something new with content, trying video, I'm trying to increase your page views with Seo, all these things that we try, all these new scary things like video and youtube.  

I think usually two reasons why, why we do things, why we, why you and I have the guts to do these new things and try these new things. One is because we want to be able to keep doing what we're doing. That's why I try new things. I want to stay in business. I want to keep doing what I'm doing. I want to keep helping bloggers. I want to continue creating YouTube videos and publishing blog posts and playing with fun new gadgets like GoPros and stuff. I want to keep doing that.

So if Amber from Mediavine says, "Hey Meredith, I think you could make a whole lot more money if you're putting videos through Mediavine instead of just embedding through YouTube, sure as heck I'm going to try that because I want to keep doing what I'm doing.

The other reason is often you want to stop doing something else, like go to a job every day. So anytime that we can learn a new skill or apply some, some new technology or some new concept to our content creation that we're already doing that is going to help us make more money and earn more revenue in our businesses so that we can stop doing something else, I'm all for that. 

I love this conversation with Amber. I really appreciate all the insight that she provided and I am already thinking about the followup episodes that will take place sometime later after this one airs because I have a lot of experimenting to do and I also have so many more questions.

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