How Bloggers Make Money With Ads
If you missed the first installment of my How Bloggers Make Money series, you can see it here: How Bloggers Make Money With Affiliate Sales
Boy, was it a crazy week! My post 67 Companies That Let You Work From Anywhere went viral.
As of the beginning of February 2015, the post had been viewed over 85k times, and I had 11k visitors to my site in one day. My previous record was around 1,700 for the same post a few months back. I’m starting to completely understand what steady traffic growth on your blog really means. It feels like a very peaks and valleys system to me. And boy is it fun.
The viral post was awesome and a great time was had by all that I excitedly told about my website’s traffic surge. I was consistently screen-shoting how many people were on my blog at the same time at it got up to 61 at one point, which isn’t small beans for this blog that is in its first year 🙂 Here’s a look:
But hands down, the best thing about all the new found traffic was that my blog started to making money from ads. I went from making .17 cents in December to making nearly $200 in ads alone.
Luckily, I already had them in place so I could reap the benefits. I also had them in some really good spots.
From an aesthetic standpoint, I don’t love having 6 ads up. The pop-up on the mobile version gets me the most. But for now, while my blog is still in its feisty teenage stages, I need it to help pay for my mailing list, my host, and my two social media schedulers – Tailwind for Pinterest and Buffer for LinkedIn, Facebook and Twitter.
Regardless – I’ve got the ads in the prime spots to make the most money without being TOO invasive and chasing my readers away. You guys ready to get your learnin’d on?! OK Here’s how bloggers make money with ads:
Get traffic
The more traffic a blog has, the more revenue the blogger makes on ads. Every time you scroll past an ad network ad on a bloggers site, they make money. They agreed with the ad networks they’d show the ads to their viewers in exchange for money. The blogger is still the one that drives the traffic, and the more the better when it comes to how bloggers make money with ads.
They use both major ad networks
There are two major ad networks that bloggers use. Media.net and GoogleAdsense. Some use one or the other and many use both. You can have a max of 3 per page with each network. These are the highest paying out of the most established ad networks. I use all 6 on my site. I think that not going over 6 is a good rule – your site can get cluttered with ads very quickly.
They know the difference between ad networks and affiliate links
Affiliate programs, like I spoke about in my last post in this series, How Bloggers Make Money With Affiliate Sales, also give you the opportunity to create images that link to their affiliate programs. To an average reader, both these affiliate program images and ad network ads look the same. But they are different. See mine, for example:
AD NETWORK AD (the little icons in the top right corner of the ads are the giveaway that they are network ads):
AFFILIATE LINKS WITH IMAGES:
They use ad plug-ins
I use and love the free Advanced Ads plug-in, but it did take me a little while to figure out. I’m not an IT wizard by any means though, so I know that this plug-in is an easy tool for a lot of bloggers to help them place ads on and around their site.
They put the ads in the right place
Above the fold is the money spot. This is the top part of your site that loads when people enter your website, before they scroll anywhere – Advertisers covet these shiny spots that load at the top of your page above, in or just below the header or your site or post titles, because everyone that comes to your site sees them. Of course you can’t put all 6 ads above the fold. But that does not mean you should put all 6 ads as high as possible. I made the mistake of doing this. Then, I discovered that the highest ad I had on my site, that was just below the fold, was getting the least amount of views. I was confused but quickly realized that it was getting scrolled past before it could completely load. I moved that ad down a ‘scroll’ or two in the sidebar and it instantly started getting more views.
THIS IS THE FOLD (put your ads network ads above it, most of the time):
They pay other people to code the ads for them
YOU GUYS I KNOW. I tried, really, really hard to do everything on my site myself. Miraculously and after tireless nights of researching, I put ad code in the footer of my site. Months later, the ad company emailed me and said I had too many ads, and that one was getting pretty much no views (which made sense, it was all the way down under my legal info in the footer of my HTML code). Then when I went to pull it out, I couldn’t remember how. At this point, I had moved on from coding myself and was starting to make money on my site (even just a few hundred a month) so I paid someone $20 to remove it. I wish I had done that a long time ago. If you don’t know anyone personally, a good place to start looking for help on this is with trusted and awesome freelancers at Fiverr.com
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They turn on both image and text ads
My Media.net ads are all text and all 3 of my Google Adsense ads switch back and forth between image and text ads. I know that text ads can seem kinda yucky, and some bloggers only use the 3 image ads available from Google Adsense on their sites for optimal aesthetics (but with a decrease in ad revenue) – but if you customize your colors well on the 6 text ads, it looks a bit like part of your site, but not in an overly deceiving way. I really do love the easy customization I did with the text ads; all I had to do was pick my colors! It is still pretty obvious that is an ad, which is good:
MEDIA.NET TEXT AD:
GOOGLE ADSENSE IMAGE AD:
GOOGLE ADSENSE TEXT AD:
They center their ads
We’re going to talk about some basic coding, but don’t freak out. It’s really easy to just center ANY ad code you put in to your site, even in the plug-ins. Sometimes the responsive ads (the ones that are supposed to change sizes based on what size device the user is one and the kind you should definitely use) are finicky about jumping to the left or the right. Take these little bad boys and hug your code with it to get it center:
CODE BONUS: That little slashy guy at the end that makes the 2nd ‘center’ look different? That’s a closing tag and goes at the end of tags to end them or ‘close’ them. 🙂 Dude you just learned code! Not really all of it, but that’s a great start and a good way to make sure your ads end up looking great on your site.
Here’s what mine looked like before and after I wrapped the center tags around the code (super easy because this ad lives in the Advanced Ad plugin which I can open right up from my WordPress dashboard to edit the code!):
BEFORE CENTER TAG:
AFTER CENTER TAG:
So there you have it. That’s my awesome list of my favorite ways how bloggers can make money with ads. I hope this post gave you some good ideas on something you can start doing with your ads and blog, too! Did I miss anything that works for your blog? Let me know in the comments below!
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Nice post! Personally I’m not a huge fan of Google Adsense. I don’t like the way the look. I think affiliate ads with image is the way to go.
Are you having success with Adsense?
Hi Robert! Thank you so much, I’m glad you enjoyed the post. I definitely agree that there are much better looking ads out there. I’m making good money with AdSense, but I am having way more success with Media.net ads and my affiliate ads (which I can make my own images for, which I love!). I also don’t get any personalized support from AdSense, but I posted on their community forums once and received an awesome response from another user, which I loved.
Hi Lisa,
Congrats on the viral post. It really is exciting when something you’ve written gets seen by so many people and so quickly, too! 🙂 I’m almost an exclusive Adsense user, myself. I’d like to reach the point one day where I don’t have to rely on ad networks for revenue — but for the time being, ad revenue accounts for about half of my income each month. Again, congrats on the viral post and here’s to more to come!
Hi Ashlee! I’m such a big fan of your site and I’m so excited you stopped by. Thank you for your kind words, I’m in the same spot as you. I absolutely love the affiliate sales over the ad Networks 😉
I just started with AdSense, thank you for helping me understand how it works, I was rather confused but I just went with what everyone else seems to use. I am looking forward to learning how to use affiliate sales, I just want to make sure I don’t cross the line between promoting what I love and selling out, it seems like a lot of bloggers struggle with that too.
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You’re welcome Cara, and thanks for stopping by! The struggle is real, absolutely. I’m definitely getting a better hang of exactly what you are describing. Especially with affiliate sales – I’ve even reached out to companies I have already written posts about (because I love them) and asked to be an affiliate, then gone back into the posts to add the links. I know this isn’t advertising like AdSense, but I always like to talk about affiliate sales when bringing up the promotion/selling out threshold ;).
I’m at the point where I just started putting ads on my site and its kind of been a nightmare. I have used Fiverr for some things in the past, but didn’t think about paying someone to help fix my ads. Thanks for the helpful tips. 🙂
Absolutely! It can be really daunting!