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Blogging for money part 4: placing advertisements on your blog

In the wide world of Internet advertising, there exists a plethora of options and techniques to monetize your blog  through advertising. When the web first began, services like Google AdSense, ClickBank and Chitika did not exist. The only way to advertise would be to place custom image banners that linked to a particular product or service that was being sold. This technique is still used by many advertisers today and it will be touched upon briefly in this article (because it is the most basic) but it should first be mentioned that these highly customizable advertisements are not a good choice for low popularity, low traffic blogs. Serious custom banner advertisers are not going to pay monthly commissions on a blog that receives 2,000 visitors per month; unless the traffic is highly targetable for that particular product or service, it just would not be as practical as some of the other methods explained in this article.

Image banners typically come in industry standard sixes: 729×90 (also called a leaderboard), 485×60 (full banner), 234×60 (half banner), 125×125 (square button), 336×280 (large rectangle), 120×160 (skyscraper) and 160×600 (wide skyscraper) are the most popular. Various other sizes are used but the above are the most common.

Bloggers who agree to feature an image banner on their site usually get paid a monthly rate. Depending on the amount of traffic and value of the visitors, the monthly rate can range anywhere from $10 to $1,000 per month. Some site owners will use a script to report on the CTR (click through rate or the number of times the image is clicked on) of particular advertisements and impression count. It is rare for site owners to charge through impression count (the number of times the banner image is actually viewed) but some advertisers may prefer it.

Featuring image banners on your blog is something that probably should not be considered until you have over 1,000 unique visitors per day. Even then, you should wait till advertisers contact you (generally through your blog’s contact form) rather than looking for advertisers. You are much more likely to be paid a higher monthly rate if the advertiser has contacted you rather than vice versa.

Monetizing your site through pay per click (PPC) advertisements

Pay per click (PPC) means that you are paid every time a visitor clicks on an advertisement featured on your blog. Because of their seamlessness and feasibility, PPC methods are the most common choice for bloggers to make money from their blog. Services like Google AdWords allow Internet marketers to create their advertisements for their particular products and services and complementary services like Google AdSense provide a means for those ads to be displayed on websites and blogs throughout the world wide web.

Signing up for a Google AdSense account (so that you can start serving their ads and be paid per click) is a simple 1 step process that only requires you have a billing address (so you can be paid) in the U.S. and other countries. In can sometimes take a few weeks to be approved for AdSense but, if you have no prior history with the program, you will typically be accepted within a week.

Once you have your Google AdSense account, you can immediately begin serving ads on your blog. Simply sign in to your AdSense account, select your options (how big and what color you want your ad to be), generate the code and place it on your blog. Google will automatically crawl your blog to determine what links/images to display on your advertisement. You can chose to display image only or text only ads before you generate your code in your AdSense account. Keep in mind that, after you first place the code, Google takes some time to crawl your page and may not display the ad for 10-15 minutes.

If nothing displays on the ad for over an hour than it is likely you do not have enough content on the page you are placing the ad on. You should always place your advertisements on content rich pages that have a lot of text (at least 200 words). Google’s spiders are best at crawling text and determine what to display on AdSense ads through keywords contained in surrounding text.

That is essentially how pay per click (PPC) works. There are services that vary from Google AdSense’s model; some services, such as Chitika, display ads based on where the visitor is from or what search term he used in a search engine to arrive at the page. AdSense, however, is the most popular and most bloggers resort to AdSense because it is simply the most reliable high-tech ad service out there.

Once you begin serving advertisements with AdSense, you will be able to track the amount of clicks your ads get, as well as how much you are paid for those clicks. All of this can be done by signing into your AdSense account which will report, daily, impressions for your ad channels (a setting you must configure when creating the ad code), CTR, amount paid per click and various other statistics. Your daily AdSense report page will look like this:

CTR is the click through rate or percentage of times an ad viewer actually clicks on an ad. Page eCPM is the amount of earnings per 1,000 ad impressions. A CTR rate of 2% and an eCPM of $2.00 is considered good. There are a variety of ways these statistics can be improved (i.e. changing ad placement, changing content) but I will not detail those ways in this article. All of the statistics for the screen shot above (the first screen you see when signing into AdSense) are the combined statistics for all the AdSense ads you may be running. For individual statistics, you must assign channels to individual ads; then AdSense will collect data for those channels and display them in your reports.

Making money blogging through affiliate links

Monetizing through affiliate links is probably the second most popular approach for making money blogging. The method usually involves placing a text link or image link that takes visitors to a third party site that is selling a product or service. When that visitor makes a purchase at said third party site, the affiliate is credited a commission (percentage of sale) payment. Affiliates and vendors (those who sell products) are connected with each other through affiliate programs like ClickBank. The affiliate program, known as ClickBank, not only provides the means in which the affiliate link can be tracked (crediting commissions for each sale) but also handles all payment processing.

There are many transactional logistics involved when a sale is made through an affiliate link. That is why affiliate programs make it so much easier for vendors and affiliates by providing:

• A means in which the customer can make a payment for a product or service
• A means in which the affiliate (the individual who referred the customer to the product or service) can be payed a commission
• A means in which the vendor who provided the product/service can be paid

In addition to the above, an affiliate program provides the means in which affiliates find out about a vendor in the first place (and then make the decision to promote the vendor) as well as vital analytical data (i.e. how many visitors you send through an affiliate link for each sale). With that being said, using an affiliate program like ClickBank is absolutely necessary for bloggers looking to monetize their site through affiliate links.

Important things to remember about making money on your blog by placing advertisements

Using PPC program like Google AdSense and affiliate programs like ClickBank are probably the two single most popular methods of earning money blogging. There are other methods such as selling private image banner space (touched on above) and selling your own product (not through any affiliate program); but PPC and affiliate programs are probably the most important and certainly best for beginners.

Here are some important things to remember should you decide to make money from your blog through advertising:

• Do not bother placing ads if you have no visitors. Too many affiliate links and AdSense ads can hurt your search engine rankings, so if you are not advertising to anyone, there is no need to place advertisements on your site. First get the visitors, then consider advertising to them.
• Avoid placing too many advertisements throughout your site. This will subtract from the quality of your site and, in addition to getting poorer search engine rankings, you will get less returning visitors because they will view your site as overly spammy.
• Consider ad placement and surrounding content above all for pay per click advertising. Where the ad is placed on the page will greatly affect your CTR (click through rate) and the surrounding content will determine what will be displayed in AdSense ads.
• Consider your site visitors’ demographic when placing affiliate links. The same rules apply for ad placement but you should also consider what products and services your visitors will be interested in (based on demographic) when choosing an affiliate product to promote.
• Do not (for one minute) think that you can fool Google by clicking on your own AdSense advertisements. Their intricate system will flag your account and possibly suspend or cancel your account. After this is done, there is no way you can apply for another AdSense account unless you are doing so under a different name.

Thanks for reading the blogging for money article series! You have now made it to the top of the blogging for money pyramid and can now understand all the essential elements of a blog that earns revenue.

If you have not read any previous articles in the series, I encourage you to follow the links below.

Blogging for money part 1: the need for unique and quality content

Blogging for money part 2: frequent blog posting

Blogging for money part 3: search engine optimization

Tags: advertising, affiliate marketing, blogging for money

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