Ads are everywhere, both online and offline. If you’re not using an adblocker, you probably see hundreds of ads a day, many of which you may not pay any attention to. That brings up the question, how should you deal with placing ads on your blog?
There are plenty of ways to monetize a new blog, but ads are one of the most straightforward. You place some on your website, focus on getting more traffic, and wait for the money to come in. The problem is, ads usually aren’t that lucrative. However, you can also use them the other way around and pay for ads to bring you traffic.
In this article, I’ll give you a breakdown of how online advertising works. Then we’ll discuss whether it makes sense to pay for traffic or place ads on your blog. Let’s get to it!
How Online Advertising Works (In a Nutshell)
The concept behind online ads is simple – you pay for space within websites, apps, social media platforms, Search Engine Result Pages (SERPs), and more. Those ads can be simple banners…
…sponsored blog posts, or social media publications. Those are just a few examples. The idea behind ads is to get people to click on them, which nets you traffic. As you might expect, most ads try to convince you to do something, be it download an app, purchase a product, or sign up for a service.
In most cases, you pay for each click your ad gets (i.e., Pay-per-Click or PPC). Online advertising platforms enable you to set budgets, specify when and where you want your ads to run, and then they take care of it. You can also pay for views without guaranteeing clicks but the consensus is that approach doesn’t work as well.
There are two sides to the online ads equation: the person who pays for them and the property that publishes those ads. Let’s talk about both!
Should You Pay for Ads for Your Blog?
A lot of websites pay for ads to direct traffic towards themselves. However, in most cases, they do this because they have a model in place to monetize that traffic. Take this social media ad, for example:
Its goal is to get you to buy a specific product or at least make you browse their store in case there’s something else you like. Let’s say you’re the publisher, in that case. A single click on that ad could cost you $0.5, but if you make a sale, you earn $50. Of course, not everyone that clicks will end up making a purchase, but as long as it’s profitable, then you have a winner.
The problem, in the case of blogs, is the way we monetize them often doesn’t translate well to paid advertising. Let’s say you run an affiliate marketing blog. If you pay for clicks, then you’re shelling out money to get people to read your posts, which isn’t cost effective.
On the other hand, if you use your blog to market services or products you provide on your own, then paid advertising may make sense. Keep in mind that paying for clicks can get expensive fast, so you want to take it slow at first until you optimize your sales funnel.
How About Placing Ads on Your Blog?
I’m not a big fan of ads on websites, and I’m not the only one. Nowadays, I’d rather not use the web at all if I don’t have access to a browser with an adblocker. That makes me the worst possible kind of advocate for online ads.
Even so, there’s money in online advertising. However, don’t expect to earn a lot of it until your website starts getting a lot of traffic.
Once your blog has enough content and a little longevity (about six months or so), you’ll be eligible to join programs like Google AdSense. Then you can place ads on your blog and see how well they work out for you.
Ideally, you shouldn’t rely on ads alone to monetize your blog, though. By the time you grow your blog to the place where ads make you a decent amount of money, you’ll have enough traffic to monetize it in plenty of other ways. There’s affiliate marketing, promoting your services, selling courses, and much more.
If you do decide to monetize your blog using ads, you need to be very careful about how they affect the user experience. People are used to ads being annoying, so you don’t want your blog to become an online billboard.
Most online advertising platforms enable you to experiment with different formats, so you can find whichever one works best for your blog. That testing phase is essential, not just to keep your blog user-friendly, but to find out if there’s a format that earns you more money.
Conclusion
Ads are a tricky topic. Almost everyone hates them, but a large part of the online economy depends on advertising. Google alone earns billions from advertising every year, and they’re far from the only ones. There’s big money in ads, both in displaying and paying for them.
The problem is, you need a lot of traffic on your blog for ads to earn you a decent amount of money. However, it’s mostly passive income, so it makes sense to combine it with other monetization methods. Paying for ads, on the other hand, is unwise unless you lead that traffic to a sales page that can get you a return.
What do you think about placing ads on your blog? Let’s talk about it in the comments section below!
Image credit: Pixabay.