A blog main source of revenue is in most cases by advertising. However, to know when to add ads to your blog can make a big difference to the growth but also to the authority of your blog. Blog advertising can be in different forms. Below are listed the most common forms of advertising used by blogs.
- PPC (Google AdSense, Media.net, Bidvertiser, and Chitika)
- In Text (Infolinks and Kontera)
- Affiliate Marketing
- CPM (Usually banner ads )
- Private Ads
- Sponsored Posts
When one should Add Advertisements to a Blog?
When I started blogging three years ago, I made the mistake to flood my blog with tons of ads from different advertisers. As such, many readers were annoyed. I was left with a bunch of annoyed readers and made only a few cents in 3 months!
Not at all motivating isn’t it? Then I decided to remove all the ads and to concentrate only on my content. Eventually, that step brought in more faithful readers who were visiting a blog that:
- Loaded quickly
- Had nothing to distract them from the content
- And also a blog which was supplying useful information
Once I had a large readers base and was getting around 3000 readers per day, I then added a minimum amount of ads on the blog at strategic positions only. Within one month, that blog became one of my main source of income without repelling any of my faithful readers. The question is WHY?
The answer lies in the ratio of ads on your site to that of your readers base.
Let us see why people will advertise on a blog. Advertisers want to showcase their products or services to potential customers and will pay, only if a publisher can send a minimum amount of potential customers to him.
Now, if you have a blog which is one week old and you are getting only ten daily visitors (who are mostly your friends or other bloggers), this will not be useful for an advertiser. Let’s examine how the different ads method mentioned above will perform on a blog receiving between 50 to 100 visitors a day.
1. Effect on PPC
Let us look at the best PPC available, that is AdSense. AdSense will pay you if someone click on ads that you show. From my experience, the minimum amount that you can be paid per click is €0.01 (I use Euro) and the average pay is normally between €0.05 to €0.20 – Sometimes you can be paid more but it is very rare as the highest paying Adsense ads are most of the time displayed on Google search results.
So assuming you get paid €0.20 per click, and you have 100 daily visitors. With a 336×280 ads slot above the content, you can expect a CTR of about 3% (we are reasonable here). So you will have three clicks per day and get about €0.60 a day. That’s about €18 per month. However, you should also consider the fact that when you start a blog, you will mostly be having readers that already know you and they will be the same persons coming again and again. They will not always click on your ads. On the worst side, these readers can even find your ads annoying.
So, do you prefer to have a very slow growth and repel some readers for a mere €18 per month? I’d say no!
Effect on In Text Ads
Infolinks is a great way to support an already well-performing site. However, I strongly advise against using it on a new blog. Intext ads normally have a greater CTR than PPC. On my own blog, I can get up to 10% CTR for Infolinks. However, this is useful only if your blog is having a large traffic base as Intext Ads are paid less than PPC.
Another important point is that In Text Ads such as Infolinks normally opens the Advert Landing Page in the same window. Therefore each time someone clicks on ads, it is like you are pushing a reader away. It could have been a reader who would have subscribed to your RSS feed, but he went away.
If you have 10000 visitors and between 500 to 1000 went away, it’s still fair. However, if you have 100 readers, and 10 of these went away, it is much!
Effect on CPM
CPM ads pay you per 1000 times the ads appears on your site. So even if your readers do not click on it, you will still be paid. You must have heard that some network pay $1 to $3 per 1000 impression right? What they do not tell you is, that this is the maximum that you can get paid per 1000 impressions. The average is well below that figure, and it also depends on the referring country of your viewers.
The average pay for CPM ads is often around $0.50 per thousand impressions unless you are a very popular blog with hundreds of thousands of monthly views.
Assuming you get 100 visitors a day, you will earn $1.5 a month and also a huge amount of potential subscribers repelled because they found your blog so filled up with totally unrelated adverts! (Eg: Those Jackpots ads).
CPM ads are good only for big traffic sites. I started using this type of ads only after I started to get over 5000 unique daily.
Private Ads
The advantage of private ads is that there is no middleman commission involved. You discuss directly with the advertiser, and you get paid for the duration of the ads. Again, let’s assume you get 100 visitors a day. How much do you think an advertiser will want to spend on your site per month?
This depends on the niche of your blog. A blog about boots for soldiers can get some advertisers even with 100 visitors daily because the niche is small. However, a blog about new technologies might never get an advertiser with 100 daily visitors as there are far more similar blogs out there that are offering much better deals and opportunities for the advertiser.
A private advertiser will advertise on a blog only if the blog can send him a good amount of potential customers.
So as you can see, it is wiser to first build your blog, grow your content and then later think about monetization. Every time a new blogger in my country asks me about monetizing a blog, my answer is always “The Google Example“. That is every great work starts with the main objective first and for a blog, it first has to be useful for readers. Then later on think about monetization.
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