When You Should Put Ads On Your Blog
When You Should Put Ads On Your Blog
Ah, the age-old debate over when to start making money from your blog. I am confident that if you ask 100 bloggers what they think about it, you will receive 101 different responses. Rather than trying to come up with a clear solution or a certain number of months to wait before bringing up some advertising, let's look at the advantages and disadvantages of monetizing a blog early on in the game vs waiting a longer period.
Many people are unaware that we did not begin running advertisements on our own websites until years after they were launched. Food Fanatic was in the hundreds of thousands of sessions a month club before we put ads anywhere for at least two years after we established it.
What Are Ads?
By now, you should be comfortable understanding how websites display advertisements and/or provide paid-for content. To recap, here's how it all works: A website hosts and maintains a website advertising space. A webmaster (blogger) assigns specific keywords and categories to relevant website content and then displays them to customers.
Ads provide a pay-for-performance model, which makes them much more attractive to some businesses than others. For instance, if you operate a business where success is based entirely on the quality of your work (i.e. you are a salesperson), then any extra income that you get will go straight into your bank account.
I always receive a confused expression when people ask me what ads are and how I use them. The answer is quite simple – you can create a wide variety of ads on your site. In the simplest terms, ads are text, links, images, or badges. Ads can provide you with information about your website visitors, as well as the opportunity to sell your products or services.
Many bloggers use ads to provide their own services, but you don't have to be a designer or web developer to create them. Advertising your blog in blogs has a multitude of benefits. When you advertise on your blog, it's not like you are making any actual money unless you receive an ad credit. You run a link that appears in your sidebar or an ad unit within your post, and then a company pays you a fee for putting that link on their website.
Advertising works as follows: you pay for exposure through banner ads, pop-ups, sponsored social media posts and so on. While advertising can be a very lucrative way to monetize your blog, you will need to know how to advertise effectively to make the most out of it.
Advertising strategies and tactics are incredibly complex, so it is important to choose the right source, and you need to understand the impact that ads can have on your blog. However, a variety of studies have shown that advertising can be very effective. The different sources of revenue that can be used can vary significantly, as the type of reader will play a significant role in what type of ads will be effective and what type of advertising will not bring a return.
Advantage Of Putting Ads On Your Blog
It saves you the time and effort of trying to promote your brand. If you use sites like Google Adsense or Adsense to post your ads, you don't need to find sponsors, create websites, design banners or brochures, etc. You can give the product link for the ad, but other than that, you can sit back and wait for customers to come to you.
You will learn more about your audience by tracking their activity and patterns. You can compare and contrast what you do with what other people do and figure out what works more importantly. Imagine how many lost customers you could have avoided by checking out the right influencers, analyzing the right websites and Facebook groups, and considering all the options beforehand.
One advantage is the Return of Investment (ROI). Your blog is free to use. No account fee. No monthly subscription. Your blog exists for free in the world. To help users get the best possible return on their investment, you may use a unique affiliate link, which you can use to automatically earn a small commission from your sale and purchase decisions.
This helps boost your revenue in two ways: Your readers decide to purchase. They visit your affiliate link to read about the product and then purchase the product or service (through one of our affiliate partners). You receive a commission from the sale. When you run ads on your blog, you can measure your campaign's impact on the user journey.
You are in control. You control the information, and you are the only one who decides if it works or not. This gives you a level of “flexibility” that few other startups have when the market is soft. You are guaranteed money. When you try to monetize a blog, you risk very little.
With ads, you are almost guaranteed to have enough to keep doing what you want and allow you to build an ongoing income stream that will let you survive downturns in the industry. The primary reason why it is best to get your blog running with ads as soon as possible is because of the following three advantages:
- You have a better idea of how your audience responds to ads before you begin spending thousands on advertising. It will take some time to get a good feel for the types of ads to place. You will be able to reach out to more customers and get a better feel for their needs.
Disadvantages Of Putting Ads On Your Blogs
The only real disadvantage is the time it takes to set them up and pay for them. While that is not long, if you have a large-scale website, it will take time. You may have run a profitable blog for years and have paid for the web hosting and domain fees on your own, but suddenly you are stuck with a huge web-store full of products that cost you thousands of dollars in inventory, all of which you can't afford to take offline.
So, you finally decide that it is time to start making money. The first thing you think about is an advertising and how to bring in some money. Unfortunately, due to budget constraints, you decide to put ads on your own site, using Adsense and their custom coding, but without thinking about their placement, timing, frequency, or other aspects of running the ads. Some days you will get a single sale and others a couple of “Oh—$ 100.
The biggest disadvantage of having ads on your website is the increase in traffic but the decrease in revenue (i.e., visitors). When your website is already full of readers, you want them to buy your stuff, so ad placements can sometimes create more issues than solving them.
If you have only one or two products or services on your blog and you put ad placements at the bottom of every post, your website visitors may never notice them. Yes, you could still make money, but it may be more challenging and take longer for you to see the results. Why is that? Here's what it means when it comes to ranking your website: If you put ads at the bottom of your blog post, it will always be seen by your readers, but they will see more ads over time.
Anytime you decide to put ads on your blog, you create some potential for a downside. It doesn't have to be a downside in the form of losses, but there will always be risks. The greatest risk of putting ads on your blog is that your readers will get overzealous, and they will click on them for the wrong reasons.
They'll click on them without thinking about whether it is worthwhile. They'll click on them simply because they're there. A lesser-known risk is that they may look for alternative websites in their attempt to remove your ad. If you have a major competitor and your blog's content is similar, you can quickly fall into obscurity. You can also take a hit in the form of possible social backlash. Perhaps people will view your ad as tacky.
Monetizing Early
While you might expect that bringing in sales early on would be profitable, that's not necessarily true. You are in danger of having too much of a product in your inventory rather than too little. A perfectly sized website would be perfect to use as a testing ground. It would be best if you tried out as many approaches as possible before you end up with hundreds of them.
Try everything, see what works, and decide what doesn't. Make sure you create a series of resources. You can quickly create a series of videos or a series of posts on how to do something on your site. Test a different type of post or a different format. Maybe you should invest in a search engine optimization (SEO) site or optimization software.
There are three simple reasons why many bloggers start running advertisements even though they were running a bare-bones business prior. First, the bloggers themselves wish to monetize, and second, the advertising seems to make sense. For example, why wouldn't you want to earn a few extra dollars if you are consistently bringing in new visitors to your website?
The third reason for blogging early is an important one, and I will address it first. It is a fallacy to think that everyone who has a blog wants to make money from it. In fact, a big group of people feel a blogging blog is a vanity project. It is not important enough to them to make money at it. In fact, they would rather be doing something else with their time. Think about it.
Let's say you decide to monetize your blog right away when it's launched. There are a few factors you will need to consider. It would help if you thought about your niche and how viable it is. If it is a real niche and provides quality content, it will be a good market.
On the other hand, if it's not a very popular niche, you will need to think about generating any traffic for your website. Now that you have identified the niche, you need to decide which type of ads you will run on your blog. Do you think you can make money from certain types of ads, or are you going to have a hard time monetizing your blog on certain types of ads? Remember, once you start running ads on your blog, it will look very similar to any other blog.
Monetizing In The Long-Term
Advertising on the front end of our websites was phased in over some years, as we really began getting a handle on what worked well and what didn't. Sure, we had plenty of requests for advertising before we got it started, but what worked and what didn't we were able to learn from overtime.
In other words, a lack of knowledge is no excuse to let money slip through our fingers. Understanding how advertising can enhance a blog's traffic, branding, and overall visibility makes it much easier to make an educated decision on when and how you should start this valuable part of your overall business. We also have researched just how long it takes to see a return on investment from advertising so that our readers' time is not wasted and money isn't thrown away.
Advertising is one of those things you have to keep on top of. Most bloggers won't even make a dime from their first article, and that's ok. But if you invest enough time and effort into the marketing of your blog, you will slowly start to see results. As you build your audience and write quality content, your blog will become more relevant, and your readers will trust your work.
As you build your social media presence, people will be drawn to your blog for their insight and other blog content you are writing. This is where you start to make money. Your audience and your brand will become known to your targeted audience, and those people will start to trust you and become engaged in your content.
Think about the Facebook Marketing Academy. While many early adopters make their money quickly by bringing on advertisers, some companies that advertise early on may find it difficult to succeed or may be hesitant to spend money on a service that has not yet proven itself. If you're already running at full speed and are already paying other people to promote your products, you may already be attracting a steady stream of potential customers.
How Long Should You Wait Before Putting Ads On Your Blog?
When you are just starting, you may want to hold off on ads as long as possible, hoping to improve your blog or establish trust in your readers first. However, you will be ready to put a bit more money into your blogs after some time. The key is to make sure you are not burning through all your money within a short period of time before you begin generating revenue.
If you find that your blog is not bringing in enough revenue to support your blog, you might want to add some ads to see if this is the cause of the problem. Ads on the internet have the power to make people stop what they are doing, click and buy something from you.
To a certain extent, you have to do what you feel is right for your blog, but for the sake of getting into it sooner rather than later, let's look at the advantages and disadvantages of putting ads on a blog as early as possible vs waiting a longer period.
The first advantage is that it will often take people a few weeks to “get to know” your blog and decide whether it is right for them to buy ads. If they purchase an ad, it will probably have a dramatic impact on your traffic very soon. You won't have to deal with the trauma of running ads in the very beginning. If you wait a while, you may end up being stuck with ads that you are barely getting any traffic from.
I'm going to borrow from a blog that is one of my favourite reads. It's called Ellington's Wager. The author clearly puts a lot of work into this blog, and I've come to learn a lot from this blog. Ellington states, “As a first-time blogger, I decided to wait a year to allow my niche blog to gain some momentum.
When I launched it back in November 2012, it had barely 4,000 page views a month. Once I started generating significant traffic, I decided to look for advertisers” This makes sense to me. It can take a while for your blog to develop into something you could potentially run ads on, and this is your space to develop your own style, keywords and domain!
Advantages Of Waiting Longer
You will build up a base of loyal readers who may never even consider buying anything off of your site, making it harder for them to choose which posts to read on your blog. You can get your initial money-making products in the marketplace while you still work on the site's front-end, testing them with potential customers. Your monetization efforts will be measured over a much longer period of time.
First, when you wait for longer, you do not have the immediate pressure to make your blog a revenue-generating machine. Your blog will be able to find its own feet as it grows, finding its own feet as it grows. No matter how good a product or service you are, you can still run out of ideas after six months or so, and that is where advertising is invaluable.
You can stick to an editorial calendar and decide when you feel like running an ad. At the same time, if you don't run a revenue-generating ad for a while, the traffic on your site starts to slow down. We discovered this early on and had to develop solutions to ensure that our traffic did not drop. Secondly, you can use your advertising budget to help you with marketing efforts on a wider scale.
Don't Run Advertisements Until You Have Traffic and Good Content
The biggest mistake many bloggers make is trying to bring in income before they actually have a traffic base to cover the costs of the ads. If you are generating the content, and content marketing is really your niche, you need to get traffic to recoup the expenses.
The traffic has to be there before you can start to experiment with selling advertising space. There are also many other costs to consider, like paying for the server space to host the ads. If you have a robust website that will allow you to display many ads, you can become one of those annoying ones with all those annoying, repetitive pop-ups. This means that you will be able to generate good ad revenue right away.
What Is The Best Time To Start Advertisements On Your Blog?
One of the big reasons many websites do not see the expected traffic increase after making money from advertisements is that some people have not tried anything yet. It's simply easier to start taking orders in the beginning.
This is just a general rule of thumb, and you must consider all of the other factors that will affect the outcome. You have to ensure that your site is ready to receive traffic from advertising. Your site must be fully optimized for search engines.
A growing volume of information on your topic will make your blog far more attractive to clients and visitors. Your audience must be ready for this sort of new content and be interested in visiting your blog.
In the past, we have looked at several different factors that determine when you should start advertising, with some of the top ones including the Number of
- Active Blog Posts and Visits Your Content is Getting,
- Your Current Online Market and Traffic,
- Cost-Effectiveness,
- Monthly Average Visits and Your Current Income.
- Advertising after Blog Posts Has Been Up For 2-4 Months.
The numbers of visitors to your blog are already going up – so adding a slight additional push with some advertising offers plenty of opportunities to make money from your site.
Conclusion
How long you wait to monetize your blog is entirely up to you. It will be one of the most important decisions you will ever make as a blogger. You need to thoroughly research the options available to you so you can make the best possible decision.
I trust you enjoyed this article about When You Should Put Ads On Your Blog. Would you please stay tuned for more articles to come? Take care!
JeannetteZ
Your Opinion Is Important To Me
Thoughts? Ideas? Questions? I would love to hear from you. Please leave me your questions, experiences, remarks, and/or suggestions about When You Should Put Ads On Your Blog in the comments below. You can also contact me by email at Jeannette@WorkFromAnywhereInTheWorld.com.
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