Making Money with Advertising on Your Blog
The emphasis of this blog is on how blogging can work as part of an overall business strategy, especially for marketing and communications. Not so much on how to generate income directly from the blog itself.
However, the two are not incompatible. As well as having advertisements for its own products or services, a business could well decide that it made sense to run advertisements for other companies’ products or services, without that detracting from the blog’s purpose.
This needs to be handled with care, especially with contextual ads served dynamically by another party. I’ve had the situation more than once that I looked at my blog and saw a number of ads appearing that I wasn’t happy about, for example:
- ads for the services of direct competitors - could be very confusing for readers as well as needlessly complicating for my own advertising efforts
- ads for products in an industry I was part of, products which I regarded as second-rate, to say the least, and therefore products I did not want advertised on my site
One of the best known contextual ad products is Google’s Adsense, described by Marziah Karch on About.com:
AdSense are Google contextual ads that you can place on your blog, search engine, or Web site. Google, in return, will give you a portion of the revenue generated from these ads. The rate you are paid varies, depending on the keywords on your Web site used to generate the ads.
You can see Google AdSense ads on this site and others, tagged “Ads by Google”.
Some people have had some challenges with Google Adsense. Wendy Piersall has posted about this on her always informative eMoms at Home blog. Her post, Banned from AdSense? What’s Your Blog Advertising Alternative? helpfully lists, with comments, eleven other options besides Adsense.
Another advertising option I like, but which is not contextual although ads are rotated, is BlogKits . Owner Jim Kukral is a full-on dedicated blogger: I’ve found him a great guy to deal with, very responsive and keen to help. He is very clear about the kind and quality of ads you can expect to see. Apparently the fact that BlogKits ads are not contextual means that you can run BlogKits ads and Google Adsense on the same site without having any grief on that account from Google.
Darren Rowse has a stack of information about blog-based advertising in his Tips and Hints Toolbox collection of posts on ProBlogger.
Tags: Adsense, advertising, BlogKits, Darren-Rowse, emoms-at-work, Jim-Kukral, Wendy-Piersall
1 opinion for Making Money with Advertising on Your Blog
Kian Ann
May 4, 2007 at 7:01 pm
Hey Des,
Great post. I think whether or not to put ads really depends on the ultimate objective of your blog (or website). In a page where you want to get people to take a certain action which you have planned (like sign up for a free course), it might be good to take out the ads.
The good ads are normally written in good copy - and that attracts traffic away. ;)
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