Image of various advertising services logos.

Advertising on a blog can be such an adventure. You know people are making money doing it, but the trick is to implement it successfully on your own site. Today I’m going to share some simple tips on how to make advertising on your blog more effective. It’s not enough to advertise, you have to have a strategy. These techniques should help you become more effective in making ads work for you on your blog. After all if they aren’t effective how will you ever make money?

One of the most commonly made mistakes by blog owners, is placing ads in out of the way places. As a general rule, the closer your ads are positioned to your content, the more likely it is that they will get clicked on.

I know I said that you want ads close to your content, but don’t place them so close or use so many ads that they overwhelm your content. Content on your blog should always be central, more is not better its just more. Strive to achieve an appealing balance.

Organize your ads in attractive grids that are easy for the eye to follow and you will get more users to interact with them. If the ads are a jumbled, un-centered, cluttered mess, they will appeal to no one and they will see little or no action.

Don’t crowd your ads, leave white space/negative space between them so they are displayed attractively. This goes a long way to making your ads easy on the eyes. No one wants to look at an unattractive display of anything. You want to entice and draw the reader’s eye, increasing the likelihood that they will click on an ad.

Rotate the position of your ad blocks. Move them around every week or so, so that regular readers do not become desensitized to them. If you move them around – the brain will register that something is different and the reader will focus on them again.

Position ads in areas known to give good performance. Lots of research has been done on where to place ads on a website or blog for optimum response. Read Blog Advertising Success – Optimized Ad Placement for more information on ad positioning.

Use an advertising service, such as Google Adsense that provides contextual sensitive ads, ones that automatically reflect the content on your page. For bloggers, this is ideal, because a blog by it’s very nature is always changing and context sensitive ads will change with your content. Serving content sensitive, targeted ads to your readers means there is always something fresh to catch their interest.

When selecting affiliate, or other products to advertise, make sure that they are in keeping with your central topic or niche. You want your ads to appeal to your readers interests so they will be more inclined to click on them. For instance, if you have a blog about child rearing you don’t want to run ads for adult sites. Use your common sense when choosing ads and you will see increased performance.

Actively promote your blog in order to increase your readership. Blog advertising is most effective on higher traffic sites. All the best advertising techniques will do nothing for you if you don’t have a high volume of users coming through on a daily basis.

My best advice to help you achieve advertising success on your blog, is to implement all of the above techniques and be patient. Be willing to experiment with different types of advertising and don’t give up. It takes time to become successful with ad campaigns and you will find that it requires a great deal of trial and error, but I know you can succeed in effectively monetizing your blog.

How about you? Do you advertise? What works for you? What do you struggle with? Would you like to suggest a topic for future articles? Please share it in a comment below.