So, you have a new blog and you want to make money out of it. Of course, the first step that you do (especially when you have set up a free blog at Blogger) is to add Google AdSense. AdSense will then provide you with ads loosely based on the keywords you have used on your blog, or whatever catchy tags you have used on your entries. But you can actually go way beyond what AdSense provides and earn more money.
The main problem most bloggers face when placing ads is choosing the right ads on their blog. To place advertisements is easy, but selecting the ones that can easily generate revenues is difficult. Most bloggers think that once they place ads on their blogs, they will start earning money-this only happens when their blogs are already popular across the net. Hence, if you want to know how to choose the right advertisements to plug on your blog and be able to generate more money, then here are the things you should remember:
1. Get to know your audience.
Like in any other business, it is important that you get to know your consumer demographics before trying to plug in money making schemes on your blog. Try to see what they are looking for in your content. Reach out to them through comments or by joining forums so you know what they want and if you can provide those needs for them. Through this you get to have an idea of which ads should you place in order to ditch income.
2. Do some experiments.
After checking what your audience wants, you can then proceed with doing experiments. By experimenting, you test the ads that you plan to place on your blog, and try to see if they were able to catch your audiences’ attention. You can also shift from different advertisements every week for a month and monitor which ones have generated a lot of clicks-by then you know which ads are truly fit for your blog.
3. Check out the different strategies in monetizing your blog.
There are two common strategies when monetizing your blog, the consistent and the inconsistent.
Inconsistent strategies are composed of affiliate advertising and PPC campaigns, where everything relies on the clicks made on to your ads. You may have 50 to 100 clicks today, or as low as 5 clicks on the next day. Yes, these ads may be simple to add and you can start putting them up your blog immediately, but you will never know when can pull them off from your blog.
Consistent strategies on the other hand, such as direct sales of banner and text ads tell you how much you make per month. In addition, you have the power to choose which ads you want to place on your blog.
Choosing the right advertisers, as well as the right advertising strategy is very important because doing so will provide you with good ROI. From this your advertisers would want to do business with you on a long term basis. Hence, what you should remember is to keep your ads relevant all the time.
Also, price your ad sales in a sensible manner, so that advertisers would do business with you. You would find it more reasonable to sell out your ad inventory at a cheaper price and get advertisers, rather than not have any ad sales at all because you are selling it at a high price. Empty ad bars can give you negative feedback; they make your blog look like it’s not worthy for advertising of any kind.
4. Stay away from annoying advertisements.
What are annoying advertisements? You were once a rabid net surfer, and for sure you have encountered pages and pop-ups inviting you to join quick money making schemes, multi-level marketing and awfully long pages full of sales talk. If you have learned to hate them, so do other readers!
So now that you are trying to do business from your blog, it is recommended that you stay away from the most hated forms of affiliate advertising, such as the ones mentioned above, for they can only ruin your path to success. If you readers find out that you are engaged in such forms of annoying advertising, they would, more often than not, stop visiting your blog.
5. Use link baits.
Remember, people love freebies and prizes. You must take advantage of this attitude for it also applies in the online business. Talk to your advertisers and ask if they can provide free stuff or small prizes which you will use as bait for your audiences. Nobody would be able to resist freebies, and all you can ask from them is to click on the ads for them to be able to claim that stuff. In this light, you can get a regular stream of targeted traffic and of course, more income.
December 8th, 2008 at 3:32 am
great tips. Right now I just use adsense and commission junction to monetize my blog. the adsense click on my blog is very low. I think this is mainly because it is a new blog without much visitors and page views.
December 10th, 2008 at 3:14 am
Nice article. It was my first visit to your blog but now I am a fan of your blog. Great contents.
About this article : Well, there are no specific locations for ads to work. Mostly ads under the post title get maximum clicks. But recently adsnese asked it's publishers to be careful enough while doing this. A single mis leading post titel can get you banned from adsense. So, lets see, how things go ahead.
December 11th, 2008 at 10:53 am
#4 is by far the most important. I realized yesterday that one of my new favorite marketing blogs has at least 15 ads per page, not counting sponsored posts. The most obtrusive one is the page curl where when you mouse over the corner it curls out and reveals an ad. That one really gets on my nerve. The rest I can ignore and some are blocked.
December 12th, 2008 at 2:26 am
another good tips is always check your competitor website and see how they put their ads.
December 18th, 2008 at 10:50 pm
Experimentation is key .. you have to try it all and see what works best for each blog.
December 25th, 2008 at 8:57 am
Nice tips u got there..
and im very agree with u..especially about experimentation..
we need to do a lot of experiment on our blog
yeah
=)
January 3rd, 2009 at 5:05 am
Hi Ahson,
There are some good ideas here which is good for me, as I am in the process of re-monitizing my blog.
I agree with you on the annoying ads topic. whenever I see a "fly in" or "hover ad" and that sort of thing, my opinion of the site automatically drops substantially.
I would also question the quality of the affiliate sign ups that you might get from these types of ads.
August 15th, 2009 at 7:06 am
great post and nice article thanks
October 8th, 2009 at 6:11 pm
Very useful. We have to be experimenting and analysing all the time to hit upon the best combination.