Earning Income on your Blog with Ad Networks

Have you thought about earning passive income from your blog by integrating ads into it?

By doing so you will be earning money.. even while you are asleep!

This post outlines a few different ways you can earn an income on your blog with ad networks.

Google Adsense Tools and Approaches

Google AdSense is the largest self-serve advertising network on the planet. If you have a website that you want to monetize without selling ads directly, AdSense is a very good bet.

Many webmasters find that when they place AdSense ads on their site, they’re not earning nearly the amount of money they want to make. This is to be expected.

AdSense doesn’t start out working right out the gate. Instead, you need to tweak and refine it. Here are a few tools and approaches to take to improve your AdSense earnings.

1. Blocking Advertisers

Browse your site regularly and see what kind of ads are appearing. If you see ads that are unrelated to your site appearing or ads that detract from the user experience, take them out using the “block ads” feature.

Start by clicking “Allow and Block Ads” in the top navigation bar.

Edit the advertiser URLs.

Then type in the URLs of the advertisers you want to block.

2. Finding the Exact Color

People often try to match AdSense colors with their website colors using the color palette. Unfortunately, a lot of people don’t realize that even though a color might look similar on your screen, that doesn’t mean it’ll look similar on everyone else’s.

The best way to match a website’s color is to do it exactly. The easiest way to do that is to simply comb through the HTML or CSS and look for where the code specifies the background color. Take that color hex code and plug it into your AdSense code.

3. Avoid Sponsored Links or Advertisements

Google explicitly forbids people from putting any texts above its advertisements designed to draw attention.

You can’t put “Click Here,” you can’t put “Take a Look at Our Advertisers,” you can’t even put “ads by Google.”

The only two things you can put above AdSense ads are “Sponsored Links” or “Advertisements.”

These two pieces of copy almost always reduce click throughs. Though you can add these to your links, don’t do it unless there’s a good reason to.

4. Use Blue Underlined Links

People are used to seeing links in blue. They’re used to seeing links underlined. These two in combination can tap into existing user psychology to make it more likely that people will click.

Some people say that it’s better to use your site’s main colors in the ad rather than use the traditional blue. It really depends on the site. Sometimes traditional blue will outpull a blending strategy, while at other times blue links are what works.

Test it both ways.

5. Optimize Your Keywords

If you’re not getting the ads you want to show up, it may have something to do with your keyword optimization.

Google AdSense works by reading your site and trying to figure out what your page is about. It uses keyword analytics to figure out the overall topic, as well as Latent Semantic Indexing to figure out related topics that your readers may also be interested in.

If the ads that are showing up aren’t the ads you want, it might not have anything to do with the message of the content – Just the words.

Try sprinkling in a few more relevant keywords. One easy way to find relevant keywords is to type your main keyword into Google, then scroll down to the related searches area. Try to add in a few more of these keywords into your content.

6. Understand Custom Channels

Channels can be a rather difficult concept to understand in the beginning. In most split testing systems, you have a Variable A and a Variable B, you test them against one another and see who wins. Channels doesn’t work like that.

Channels works more like a property. An ad can have any number of properties – It can be square, it can be red, it can have Times New Roman as its font and it can be placed in the main content area. Another box might have a completely different set of properties.

By tagging your ads with all their various properties, you’ll be able to see exactly which properties work better than others.

For example, you might find that all red ads perform better than blue ads. However, you wouldn’t know that if you simply tested Ad A versus Ad B. Instead, you might have ads A, B and C running concurrently, and after several tests you find that all ad versions tagged with color Red outperform those tagged with color Blue.

In other words, channels allow you to spot patterns across a wide range of different variables, instead of forcing you to test one ad against another.

Learn the channels system as well as you can and split test often. The more you test, the better your chances of finding a winning system.

These tips, especially blocking underperforming ads and using channels, can help you refine your campaign over time and continually improve your profits.

AdBrite Tools and Approaches

AdBrite is one of the largest self-publishing ad networks around. It’s also one of the oldest networks. If you’re choosing not to use Google AdSense, AdBrite is a great alternative.

In addition to the standard text ads, AdBrite also offers a number of unique ad types. It offers video ads that can auto play when the page loads, full page ads where users click to continue and in line ads were users roll over to see the ad.

Here are a few AdBrite tools, tips and approaches to help improve your CTR and increase your earnings

1. Use Ad Rotation

AdBrite allows you to use special code that only displays AdBrite ads when they can beat the CPM of other ad networks.

In other words, if you have another network you’re registered with, such as Chikita or AdSense, you can set it to only display AdBrite ads if you could make more money from AdBrite. You do this by setting a “price to beat” CPM.

Anytime the earnings drop below the “price to beat” CPM, it displays your old code instead. When it’s above the “price to beat” CPM, it displays the AdBrite code.

2. Use Auto-Approve

AdBrite wants you to make money. The more money you make, the more money they’ll earn. Though AdBrite gives you the option to require approval for any ad before going live, it’s usually better to use auto-approve.

You can still go into the system later and disapprove any ad that you don’t like. However, by allowing auto-approve, you can let AdBrite do most of the hard work of optimizing the campaigns for you.

3. Allow All Ad Types

Likewise, it makes a lot of sense to allow all the ads you can, rather than forcing AdBrite to be selective.

One warning about this choice: Sometimes AdBrite does have some rather racy or provocative ads. If you run a very PG-13 kind of website, you might want to set it to the safer option.

However, for most sites, you’ll earn the most revenue by letting AdBrite run whatever ads they want. They’ll never show straight up pornographic ads on your site. Again, any ads you don’t like you can disapprove later.

4. Try Autoplay Video

Video ads can sometimes generate a lot more revenue than any other types of ads. This is especially true if you let the videos play audio automatically as well. This gets the videos to instantly capture a user’s attention and get the to click on an ad.

Unfortunately, this can also seriously detract from the user experience. If you have a captive audience, or if you get mostly new traffic rather than recurring traffic, using autoplay video with autoplay audio ads can be a great way to jumpstart your revenues.

5. Test Full Page Ads

Much like how video ads can earn more than static ads, so can full page ads. Full page ads take up the entire screen. Users are faced with the ad until they click “Continue” to view the content.

You can choose how many pages you want users to see before they see a full page ad. Naturally, the fewer pages before they see one the more you’ll make. However, you want to make sure you give them enough page clicks for free that they have a good impression of your site and won’t just leave when they see an advertisement.

Avoid using this ad on pages that you’re optimizing for SEO; as it could affect your rankings.

6. Augment Earnings with In-Line Ads

In-line ads won’t provide you will a full time income. However, they can add a nice side income to the income you earn through the rest of your ads.

In-line ads work by creating a double underlined text. Whenever someone hovers their mouse over that text, an advertisement appears above it. When someone clicks that ad, you earn a click.

Adding in-line ads doesn’t detract much from the user experience; but you also won’t earn too much. However, turning them on is extremely easy and it’s almost free money.

7. Site Description & Keywords

Having a great website description and strong keywords is crucial to AdBrite success. Unlike AdSense, where most advertisers target by keywords, with AdBrite a lot of advertisers like to target sites directly.

That means that in order to earn high paying clicks, you need to write a description that attracts advertisers.

Write your description as if you were writing marketing copy. Catch attention and sell the special points of your website.

Make sure to type in a few common keywords to make your site easy to find for potential advertisers.

These techniques will help you find top notch advertisers, make the most of AdBrite’s many ad formats and get the highest paying ads to display on your site.

Chitika Tools and Approaches

Chitika offers a unique method of targeting users: Through the search keywords that they landed on your site from. Most other ad networks work in a contextual manner, meaning they read your site and try to figure out what it’s about. Chitika takes a different approach: It uses the mindset that the user was in when they came to your site.

Here are a few tips for using Chitika to maximize your earnings.

1. Combine it with Google AdSense

Google AdSense’s policy forbids the use of AdSense with any other contextual advertising network. However, Chitika’s technology doesn’t use contextual advertising.

As a result, using Chitika in conjunction with AdSense isn’t against AdSense terms of service. Since AdSense only allows you to use 3 ad units per page, using Chitika can help you drastically boost your ad revenue.

Using both AdSense and Chitika at the same time also increases your chances of showing the right ad to the right person at the right time. Sometimes contextual advertising will do the trick, while at other times search-based advertising is better off.

2. Set Your Fallback Option

One option Chitika provides that people often don’t take advantage of is the fallback advertisement option.

Sometimes Chitika just can’t come up with the right ads to show people. In that case, it’s best to provide Chitika with a fallback ad to show.

The ad can link to an affiliate product or to a partner website. It’s easy to just put up an ad for an Amazon product, a Clickbank product or an eBay search to earn a bit of extra revenue when Chitika can’t come up with a good ad.

3. Use Mobile Ads

Chitika is one of the few ad networks that works properly with mobile ads.

Most networks will just block mobile traffic, because many advertisers find that mobile traffic doesn’t convert as highly as other types of traffic.

Chitika however will just display mobile ads to mobile traffic. If you have a mobile version of your website, make sure you install Chitika on it.

4. Block Non-Converting Merchants

If you find that a certain merchant keeps coming up on your site but isn’t earning you much in revenue, you might want to try blocking that merchant for a period of time to see if it changes anything.

Also, you can block ads from appearing by keywords. If a small subset of people land who land on your site come from keywords that are completely unrelated, you could just choose to have Chitika not display any ads at all.

5. Select Ad Disabling

You can choose to disable ads that are targeted towards select users and only show ads to search targeted users. You can also choose to disable display ads and CPM ads from showing.

You’ll want to do this only if you’re finding that a certain type of advertising is delivering sub-par results. If that’s the case, disable the ad type and let higher performing ads take the limelight.

6. Place a Map Unit in the Footer or Sidebar

One easy way to make a big of extra cash is to put a map unit in the sidebar or footer bar. These units simply look like rows and rows of links. Because they look like they’re part of the site’s navigation, people are very likely to click on them.

Just choose “Map Unit” under “Unit Type” in the ad creation screen.

This is what a map unit looks like.

These tips will help you maximize your earnings from every visitor that lands on your site. Chitika offers some truly unique features, such as the ability to work with AdSense and display ads on mobile. Make sure you’re taking advantage of everything Chitika has to offer.

Checklist for Improving Clickthroughs

Now that you have your ad network ads up and running, how can you make sure they’re earning the maximum amount possible? Setting up an ad isn’t as simple as just putting up the code and hoping it works. In fact, the first time you put up your ad code, there’s a good chance you’re only earning about 30% of what you could be earning after testing.

So how can you improve your clickthroughs and earn more from your ads, without having to increase your traffic? Follow these tips.

1. Test Main Space Ads

The highest CTR ad for most people is to place a large block ad above the fold, right inside the text of the content. For example:

If you’re using an ad network that doesn’t have this ad option, you can create it by stacking two smaller ad units one on top of another.

2. Use the Google Heat Map

Google has provided us with a heat map of where people’s eyes tend to go when they’re on a content site. Using this heat map can help you figure out where the best places to put your ad units are.

The darker the area, the more attention it gets.

Just because an area is lighter doesn’t mean you shouldn’t put ads there. Just expect to earn less than an ad unit in the center. For strategic reasons, many sites choose to put ads on the sides rather than in the middle, where it would get more clickthroughs.

3. Mind Your Long Term Customer Value

The sites that earn the most from ad networks are also the sites that pay the most attention to long term customer value.

Rather than trying to squeeze every last drop of revenue out of every visitor, it’s also important to make sure that everyone who visits your site has a good experience.

People who come to your site and find great content are much more likely to come back again. They’re much more likely to link to your site as well, resulting in more backlinks.

Placing ads in prominent spots will help you get more clicks; but try not to sacrifice too much of your design aesthetics. It’s entirely possible to design a great looking site that incorporates prominent ads.

4. Use Click Tracking Technology

One way to figure out both what’s working right now and what could be improved is to use click tracking technology.

Click tracking technology shows you exactly where people are clicking right now with their mouse. This allows you to see where people are not clicking, as well as places where they’re clicking that you might be able to place ads.

Sometimes people click on the strangest places. Places that you simply wouldn’t expect if you didn’t have click tracking installed. By figuring out where these places are, you can monetize them.

Two of the most popular options are CrazyEgg and Google Analytics’ In-Page Analytics.

CrazyEgg provides click tracking technology, as well as a whole range of other features.

You can view your click results in numbers, as well as in Heatmap format. You can view where people tend to scroll, as well as distinguish exactly where each click came from depending on search terms and traffic sources.

CrazyEgg is a paid service, starting at $9 a month paid annually, depending on how much traffic your site gets.

Google Analytics provides a free in-page analytics tool that does something similar to CrazyEgg. You can’t view the results in heat map form; but all the data is laid out in an easy to understand manner right on the page.

The stats are shown on the left, the clicks in number form inside bubbles within the page.

These kinds of analytics tools can help you figure out where the best places to place your ads are; as well as which ads you might want to move.

5. Test Different Media Types

Many ad networks allow you to choose from a variety of different ad types. AdSense for example, allows you to choose between just text ads, just image and flash ads or a combination of both. AdBrite allows you to choose text, image ads or a number of creative options, such as full page “click to see content” ads.

You never know what will really work for your site until you try them. Some people find that image ads vastly outpull text ads for them, while others find the exact opposite.

6. Blend vs. Contrast

There are two main approaches you can take with your ads. You can try to make them blend in as much as possible into the rest of your site’s design, or you can make them stand out.

Some sites work better with the first approach, others with the second. Again, you really won’t know which works better than the other without testing it.

7. Test Until Statistically Significant, Repeat

If there was one rule of success when it comes to ad networks, it’s to always be testing.

Find a tool online that lets you check whether your results are statistically significant or not. As soon as you have 98% reliability or higher (note: 95% isn’t enough, because that means 1 out of 20 tests will be wrong) move to the next test.

Never just let your ads run. Always look for ways to improve your results, whether your testing is big or small. Sometimes you’ll have huge jumps in results. At other times, you’ll see mostly incremental improvement.

These are some of the main things to keep in mind when optimizing ad networks.

Enjoy!