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Blogging for dollars - ad placement - increase your CTR by 600%

by Darren

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There’s really only so many ways to bring in money with blogs, and context sensitive ads are definitely one of them. When you run context sensitive ads, you need to really concern yourself with their performance. If you can double or triple your CTR, the same effect happens to your income. Now that I’ve been blogging for over 90 days, I’m starting to focus my attention to context sensitive ads for monetization. As the traffic grows, I want the revenue to grow along with it.

On advantages of static pages for monetization: If you looked at my portfolio of websites, you’d be really surprised to learn just how much revenue they make. That’s because I learned early: ugly websites make more money. I also painstakingly created most of my static websites based on keyword research, so they run targeted ads. Finally, I placed all my websites in fields that I KNEW paid well because I used Google Adwords to place ads and find out. Since I’m a search engine optimizer primarily, I optimized my chances of earning revenue. And it worked out great.

Blogs are a different creature altogether. You cannot expect your blog to grow by creating keyword driven pages. To write essays about “free download cingular ringtone” would be a chore, and would leave your readers running for the exits. With blogs you need to cover a subject and write material that’s interesting to users. Anything you do that is too manipulative for the purposes of monetization or search engines will make you look bad to human readers. And human readers are the sole lifeblood of blogs, even more important than temporary revenue gains.

Ad placement is your main weapon for blog monetization. If you place your ads in the best possible positions, it could mean the difference between life and death. This week I’ve made a few simple experiments which increased my CTR by 600%. Embedding an ad in the body of your blog posts to the left results in very few clicks. Moving the ad to the right, makes people notice it and click. I’ve also brought the 300×250 Google Adsense Unit in (I like to call this one the RevenueBringer). Google has been making people take notice of the ads, so I’m pretty sure these should help bring in revenue for awhile. Banner blindness can take the best of anyone, so constantly experiment to see what you’re missing. Consider also, the 300×250 ads can also run the new Video Adwords, so this can make a big difference, depending on your content.

Link units are the killer ap from Google. Make sure to add ad link units to your blog. There are two great reasons to do do:

• You can run 1 link unit in addition to 3 normal ad units, so it’s a freebie
• They blend easily into your navigation and garner many extra clicks - since the units open to a page with more choices of ads, the user chooses where to click, and the ads tend to be high-paying

Adding more ad units will almost always make you more money. Think about it: there’s more places to click, so it will tend to happen more often.

On a WordPress Blog make sure to add ad units to:

• index.php - the main page of course
• archive.php - the archive and category pages
• single.php - load this one up - its where the majority of your users will land

The “narrowcolumn” Kubrick I’m using is probably not the best template to use for ad placements, but let’s just say a 7.5%-9% CTR is very probable for that current design, depending on the depth of advertisers. It will take some tweaking, but it will be well worth it.

Hopefully these tips have been of some use, and I’ll be back in a few weeks with an update.

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