Additional Tips for Placing Advertisements on a Blog

While I’m still on the topic of blog advertising, I want to bring you some more tips to help optimize your earnings.  These are tips to help the beginner with increasing advertising rates, recruiting more advertisers to your site, and generally increasing your earnings potential from your site.

These tips are intended for bloggers who place PPC ads on their site, like Google AdSense or other services, rather than other services, with charge based on independent figures, such as banner ads that you sell privately.

Ugly Ads

Often, advertising is placed in large groups, making it obvious that you want to generate a profit from your site rather than providing a service to your visitors.  When people visit your site, they immediately look for your content, services, or a term that was discovered through the use of a search engine.  Remember that advertising was first placed on websites to help support the owner’s time and expenses in relation to the website, so this is the main method that I promote when it comes to advetising.

One of the main methods that people tend to favor when increasing their return on their advertising space is by creating “ugly” ads - not in the sense that they actually devalue the ads.  Instead, these ads are able to leverage more clicks, as people are “tricked” into thinking they are links, integrated with the site, or actually provide a resource within the site itself.  

It may be a deceitful practice, but advertisers are doing it everyday to harness more revenue, despite having a large budget or great designers for their marketing.  These ads may even appear on your site should you select banner/large-size advertising on your site.

Main characteristics of these ads include:

• White space is used to make the ad blend into the area that it has been placed.
• Blue or black underlined text is used to make the image appear as a link.
• A rudimentary image has been designed, either generic or not relating to the linked-to site.
• The ad often asks a question, inviting the viewer to answer it, by “selecting” the answer on the ad.

Unprofessional Sites

Again, it isn’t difficult to find sites that have been created for AdSense or other forms of advertising, solely for placing affiliate and sponsored links.  You may think that they aren’t generating a lot of income, but in truth, they are.  The owners and creators of these sites are by definition spammers, but they know how to generate a small revenue each month from these sites, finding that they do particularly well for people searching for terms that have been “spun” off of terms found on other websites/blogs.

In a sense, nearly any blog can generate money, even if the design of the site is ugly.  You can have a site cluttered with ads, filled with empty space, and still generate the same income as one that is filled with original content, substance, and a few ads.

Characteristics of these sites:

• Very simple theme, typically the default.
• Ads (typically Google AdSense) integrated into header, footer, and sidebar.
• Little or no experience is required to set these sites up, just hosting and a domain, in some cases.
• The site provides little resources to the visitor - only “encouragement” to click on the ads.
• Little or no citations are provided to the original source of the work.
• No media (or advertisement media) is provided, signaling that the site is only intended to make money.

Essentially, even if you create an unprofessional, unorganized site, you will be able to generate an income, but not the readership that you need to survive in the competitive arena of blogging.

Other Styles

Multiple methods can be used to “attract” readers to view and click on the ads.  The main keys are that you maintain a balance between the amount of ads and how you present them, offset with a daily dose of new content.

The following tips are, once again, general in nature, so I am not providing a one-stop resource for placing your advertising.

1. Use tracking software to see where visitors are clicking, sometimes referred to as a heat map.
2. Place advertisements at the beginning, or implemented within the content.
3. Try to place advertisements “above the fold” so more visitors are able to see the ads without scrolling.
4. Don’t combine multiple formats within an area, unless you find a way to pull this off correctly without destroying your theme/design style.
5. Incorporate ads into your theme, as they will appear as links, but possible still providing resources to your readers, and some extra cash in your pocket.
6. Continually experiment with new formats and options.