Should You Advertise on Your Blog?

This guest post has been written by Steven Snell, a web designer and blogger at Vandelay Website Design.

Blogging is an income producing activity for a lot of people. Of course, one of the most common ways to monetize your blog is by including paid advertisements. New bloggers face the dilemma of knowing when to start advertising. While I don’t think there is necessarily a right or wrong answer, we’ll take a look at some of the pros and cons.

There are basically 3 different approaches to making money through advertisers:

1. Sell ad space right away.
2. Build traffic to your blog without ads, then start selling ads when traffic is significant.
3. Don’t use ads at all (make money from some other method).

Some of the pros of selling ad space on your blog:

1. Revenue. Obviously, the most important reason to include ads is to recoup your expenses and hopefully turn a profit.

2. Ads are increasingly more accepted than they were a few years ago, especially on blogs. Most blog readers understand that bloggers need to offset their expense and get something monetarily for the time they spend on the blog.

3. Selling ads may be more stable than other ways of monetizing a blog. For example, affiliate revenues may be up and down, but if you can keep your ad spots occupied it will be steady income each month.

4. Easy money. Once you’ve built traffic that is. Advertisers aren’t hard to find for high-traffic blogs, and once you’ve built the traffic the advertising shouldn’t require a lot of work on your part.

Some of the cons of selling ad space on your blog:

1. They can be distracting to visitors. In order to achieve long term success you will need your visitors to be able to focus on your content.

2. They can sometimes chase visitors away. Some readers still do not like ads and they may leave if your site is full of them (shouldn’t be a problem unless you go overboard).

3. Finding advertisers can be hard for low-traffic blogs. If you can’t find advertisers you can either wait until you build more traffic or use affiliate programs to substitute for ads.

4. Takes time to maintain if you sell ads directly. Third party services can handle most of the work for you, but they’ll keep a chunk of the money.

5. Too many ads can create a cluttered blog. The look of your blog can be affected if ads aren’t used properly.

6. You can loose visitors when readers click on ads. The point of ads is to draw attention and visitors, but that means they will be leaving your blog (at least temporarily).

Ok, so I listed more cons than pros. However, the first pro, “revenue”, is a huge reason to use ads.

If you are going to use ads on your blog, here are a few tips:

1. Choose advertisers that fit well with your audience.
2. Avoid flashy/moving ads that can be extremely distracting.
3. Cut out the middleman. If possible, run the advertising program yourself instead of using a third party.
4. Place ads carefully to avoid annoying your readers.
5. Consider using the bottom of your RSS feed for addition advertising space.
6. If you can’t sell all of your ad spots, use affiliate programs.
7. Make sure your layout can handle ads. Not all blog themes are designed to allow ad space.
8. Set up an advertising info page for potential advertisers to learn about your traffic volume and your rates.
9. Find other blogs on similar subjects as yours and contact their advertisers to see if they would be interested in advertising on your blog.

Hopefully these tips have been helpful. If you’ve learned anything else through your experiences please share in the comments.

Tags: advertising, making money online, pros and cons