Howdy! Sean here again with another marketing and monetization article. In my last post regarding how to make money with your blog, I gave a brief overview of the three main ways you can start earning some cash with your blog. In the beginning of the article I briefly discussed how you can earn money with ads and as promised today I am going to go into a lot more detail regarding ads.
Now Ad Networks are probably going to be one of the first ways you may try to earn many with your blog because it is relatively simple and straight forward, at least that is what most people think. You may just throw up an ad or two in your blogs sidebar and just let them sit and forget about them, but you may not know that you can make a huge increase your earnings with just a few simple adjustments. The main things I’m going to discuss in this article are all the different Ad Networks you can join, Ad Placement, and Daisy Chaining Ads.
This post contains affiliate links. Please see my disclosure policy.
Ad Networks
After scouring the far reaches of the internet you may become extremely overwhelmed with all the different Ad Networks available for you to join. When deciding upon which Ad Network to join their are multiple factors you have to look at and the main one should be is how these networks pay you, which will either be CPM and/or CPC. For those unfamiliar with these terms –
CPC – The Ad Network will pay you every time someone clicks on one of your ads.
CPM – The Ad Network will pay you a certain amount per 1,000 impressions.
Some other factors you may want to take into account is the min. amount required for them to pay you, the length you have to wait for your earnings to be approved, and lastly make sure to find out what type of publishers the ad network has, for example BlogHer would be good for this site, but would definitely be pointless for some random tech blog.
My personal preference for an Ad Network is definitely Adsense which is NET30 and only requires a minimum of $100 to payout, but if for some reason you may not be able to use Adsense here is a list of some of my other favorite Ad Networks to use.
Lastly with this topic I wanted to mention how when your Blog starts gaining a lot of traffic it may become more profitable to sell Ad Space directly to advertisers. Doing this lets you throw out the middleman and be in direct contact with the advertiser, where you set your own prices. You can even use sites like BuySellAds to advertise your available Ad Space for your own desired amount.
Ad Placement
I stumbled upon this subject some time ago when I first got into Internet Marketing and was pretty astonished with how certain spots on your website will generate more clicks than other spots. When changing the layout of one of my older sites I actually managed to double my earnings. Now after moving your ads around don’t expect yours to double as well, I had a pretty horrible Ad Layout when I was a novice.
Now you may be curious as to where the hottest spots are on your blog for ads and to assist you just look at the image from Google below displaying the various ad spots and how “hot” they are.
I’m constantly experimenting with Ad Placement and as you can tell from the Ad Heat Map above that the hottest spots for ads are going to be directly in your post and a above the fold ad (like the leaderboard ad we have below our main menu). But now we come to a cross roads because when it comes to having ads in places like directly in the post you may get some angry readers (although I have never come across any) who don’t enjoy having ads shown right in front of them. So basically you will have to determine if the benefits out weigh the consequences. Personally I usually always have had in-post ads as they are always one of my top earners and I have never really had any “consequences”, but again this is all up to you.
Daisy Chaining Ads
Now you’re probably wondering what this means, well lets say for example you have a Chitika ad running in your sidebar, but what would happen if for some reason Chitika can’t find an ad to place there (which happens more than you think with some ad networks), they will just display a generic announcement or most likely just a blank space. Well with Daisy Chaining you can set it up so that when there are no ads to run, instead of showing a blank space, it will pull an ad from whatever Ad Network you have setup as the next link in your Daisy Chain. So your Daisy Chain might look something like this
Chitika >> Sovrn >> Adsense
So when Chitika can’t show an ad it will go to Sovrn and if Sovrn can’t pull an ad up it will go to Adsense (which typically always has an ad to show). You can easily see the benefit in doing this since you won’t have to worry about losing out on money when your Ad Network can’t find an ad to display. Once I finish experimenting with this more I will release an article with a more in-depth guide on setting up a Daisy Chain and my earning statistics.
Now these topics are only some of the main ways to increase your ad earnings, there is still a little more you can do, like changing the font and background color, but this should be enough to get you started on monetizing your blog. Also before I end this I wanted to mention that you should be careful with how many ads your sticking on your blog especially above the fold ads, just try not to overdue it.
Feel free to leave a comment if you have any questions and I’ll try to get back to you with some answers. Make sure you subscribe to our Blog Marketing Newsletter below for exclusive tips and much more!
There are some great ideas here!! I have a few different ads running on my site now, and I’m trying to figure out the best placement for them, to generate the most income. I have one placed before the fold, but even there, I’m not getting the views I’d like.
I likely, need to enhance my viewership, which has been slow going for me. :-\
Anyway, I’m pinning for later!!
I have not yet used ads on my blog yet, I plan to but its not yet time 🙂
Ad placing is always a complex subject for me. I am always tempted not to bother them and focus on the content.
I’m actually the same way! Creating great content is priority if you want to be successful!
Excellent tips. I have all my ads on my sidebar because I like to keep them all in one place.
That’s the one thing I have problems with, great suggestions!
Great tips! The thing I really can’t stand, though, is the ads right in the middle of a post.
Thanks for the suggestions, but I really don’t like being interrupted from a post with an ad. I understand they are more visible there, but it still bugs me.
Very god tips, I’m going to share these to people who are fairly new to the blogging world.
Interesting. I didn’t realize you could switch between ad networks.
great tips, i have been blogging for a few years now and it is nice to be making some ok money
This is great advice! I can see this as being perfect for both new and experienced bloggers!
Thanks for the advice. I am in the process of thinking about monetization and your post had great tips.
I have only used Google Ads on my site. How you you think some of these compare to Google when it comes to income?
Great idea for ads. I need to make sure I double check my ad placement.
Great tips! I have 2 ads, both from moms affiliate, on my blog right now.
I’m just getting into this and considering monetizing. Your article has proven exceptionally useful and I’m bookmarking it for when the time comes. Thanks a ton!
Thank you so much! I still have soooo much to learn about monetization.
Thank you, We just started a website and are looking for the best way to monetize our site. Google Ads isn’t
an option right now.