SEO Hosting Blog

For bloggers who are looking to earn a little extra income from their efforts, blog advertising is a popular way to monetize a blog. By including advertisements on your blog, you can get paid from advertisers either on a monthly basis or a per-click basis.

But there are some things you should know before you turn your blog into a digital billboard. Here are a few dos and don’ts I’ve come up with that will help you effectively integrate ads into your blog without alienating your readers.

• Do post relevant ads—The ads you post should be relevant to the audience reading your blog. In other words, if you’re running an internet marketing blog, advertisements for link building tools and WordPress themes make more sense than ads for online dating services and sketchy supplements. Relevant ads will get more clicks (which is good for you and the advertiser), and they’ll be more accepted by your readers.
• Don’t take up too much space with ads—The advertisements shouldn’t be the first thing I see when I visit your blog. At the end of the day, a successful blog is still all about content. So, give your content the most space, and keep the ads out of the way. I think ads are best placed in sidebars and in the header and footer in some cases.
• Do create a divider between blog content and ads—Don’t integrate advertisements into your blog content. There’s nothing more annoying than getting a paragraph or two into a post only to have to scroll past a huge ad before I can read the rest of the post. Keep your ads separate from your content. Successful blog advertising isn’t about tricking readers into clicking ads or shoving ads in their faces; create a clear divider between ads and blog content for enhanced usability and a better overall appearance.
• Don’t use AdSense text ads—Sorry Google, but your text ads just scream SPAM! Any time I come across a blog that’s filled up with AdSense text ads, I immediately lose respect for the blog. Blogs that have these ads just don’t feel credible to me, and they remind me of spammy websites that are littered with text ads.

Do you have advertising on your blog? Why or why not?

When the topic of usability comes up, it usually focuses on landing pages or your main website. But what about your blog’s usability? After all, if you want to build a solid base of loyal readers, you need to make sure your blog is user-friendly.

So, what goes into a usable blog? Here are a few characteristics of great blogs.

• Theme is Focused- If your blog is a mixed bag of different topics, you’ll have a difficult time keeping readers. Your readers want to know what to expect on a post to post basis. You can’t have one post be about gardening and another about high school football. Pick a topic, and stick with it. A focused blog attracts a highly targeted crowd that will be likelier to subscribe to your feed.
• Graphics Enhance the Content- A lot of bloggers seem to add images to their posts simply for the sake of doing so. While I think that graphics are useful in blogging, I believe they’re far more effective when they enhance the point of your post. Like the saying goes, a picture is worth a thousand words. Make your pictures count! (more…)