It is the most used way to monetize blogs. Selling advertising space on websites is a great way for any blogger to make money that’s if they have traffic. However, is advertising the most efficient way of making money online nowadays? Should you include adverts on your website? If so, when should you include advertisement? All questions will be answered…
Firstly, let’s decide if your blog can advertisement. A blog needs all of the following traits (roughly) to be truly accepted to have advertisement:
- Lots of traffic – The more traffic the better! It is pointless placing adverts in the growth stage of your blog (just newly started). The only real reason a blogger would place adverts from the minute they start their blog is to get readers use to the adverts so it won’t be as big a shock as it would be if they introduced adverts later on.
- Space – Again, this goes without saying: if your blog has little to no space for anything extra such as the sidebar is full already, the adverts won’t have enough room and appeal to make any money.
- Demand – If you use pay per click advertising, this won’t matter but those blogs that want to sell monthly ad slots, demand is necessary not just for one month but for several.
- Consistency – A blog that constantly changes the colour, look, size, positioning and type of adverts will have less of an impact than those that keep their advert consistently looking the same. I found from my stats my CTR that it increases by around 10% when I keep the adverts looking the same compared to changing them once or twice a month.
It is entirely your choice what type of adverts you show be it Affiliate, PPC or monthly ad space. Here’s a article on Affiliate vs Pay Per Click Advertising that might help decide which advertising option will make your blog the most money.
Now that we know if your blog is okay to have adverts on it, we can go onto the topic whether you should include adverts on your site.
Advertisement can have its benefits to the blog as well as drawbacks:
Benefits
Advertisement of course makes money which is the biggest incentive to place them on your blog. As well as that, it can help make increase the overall look of your blog (that is if the advert blends well with your blog) and also makes your blog look popular. By this I mean a blog with Adsense PPC on must be a blog that makes money from it. An advert with monthly ad spaces sold is a blog with demand. It shows to others that you are successful!
Drawbacks
The main drawback to adverts is the fact it can turn away people from your blog. I will move onto that point later on but as well as that, adverts increase the bounce rate which is a major statistic for any type of blog. I can be seen as addicted to bounce rate ever since my bounce rate has been so disappointing (find out my bounce rate here) but if more people are leaving your blog due to clicking on adverts, then your bounce rate will increase (a general rule: the longer people spend on your website the better. Adverts stop this from happening). As well as that, many people still use Ad Blockers which cause adverts not to show. Therefore, even if you include advertisement on your website, people won’t be able to see it anyway!
Back onto my first point, adverts are most commonly not used because people think they turn people instantly away from their site. Although this is true for websites that have pop-up annoying adverts and inappropriate non-contextual adverts, you will find that most people won’t even put adverts in their top 10 list of why they left the site:
- Didn’t find the information I was looking for.
- Found the information but it is not relevant enough to me.
- The article is really long, well I can’t be bothered to read it so I’ll go back to Google and try to find a shorter article that will just sum up what I want to know (this is true!).
- The website doesn’t look nice.
- Wow it takes long to load that website, I can’t be bothered to wait (internet users have a extremely short attention span).
- This article has so many typos.
- I find the article difficult to engage with and read, especially how it’s low quality content.
- Pop-up advert! I’m leaving!
- I have to keep clicking next at the bottom to move onto the next point on the same article! I’m leaving!
- There are adverts here! (possibly)
As you can see, there are many many others reasons people leave your site with advertising being one of the very last. Advertising can also help provide useful information to the reader as that is literally the point of adverts!
Ultimately, the choice is always down to you. From my personal point of view, I think advertising should be on every blog but limited. Too much advertising can really annoy people while too little cannot provide enough income to the blogger and not enough useful information to the reader. There’s a balance you have to accommodate and getting the balance right will be key to the success of your blog with advertisement.
