Scraps Of Mind

Advertising on Blogs

Almost all craft blogs carry some sort of advertising, even if it’s just hosting banners and blinkies for friends.

A couple of weeks ago we started to explore the world of advertising on craft blogs, and we took a look at direct advertising methods and affiliate promotions.

In this article we’ll have a look at some other advertising options that you might like to consider for your scrapbooking and craft blogs.

Google Adwords

You are probably familiar with the Google ads that can be inserted into the text or the sidebar of your blog. And now they also offer graphic based ads.

The way they work is that every person who clicks on a Google Adwords link on your blog will generate a few cents of income for the blog owner. So in order to get some reasonable income you need to have a large number of clickers.

Google selects the ads based on the context of the words in your post. What this means is that, depending on what you have talked about in your post, the ads will try to match. So if you talked about a scrapbook layout of your son riding his new bike, there’s every chance you’ll find your readers presented with ads about bikes.

You can set your Google Adwords to appear in your side-bar, above or below your post or even in the middle of the post itself. Statistics have indicated that a higher percentage of visitors click on ads placed inside your post than in the side-bar.

I recommend that you monitor your statistics firstly to work out where the optimum ad placing for your blog is, and also to see if they are actually worthwhile at all. I tried Google Adwords on Scraps of Mind in early 2008 and the results were not exactly stellar. So I removed them. After all, if no one is clicking on them, they why give them valuable blog space?

And please don’t stick them all over your blog. As a reader I do find it annoying to keep having the post interrupted by a block of ads. And I’m sure I’m not alone.

Text Link Ads

Text link ads are not as popular as they once were. But many websites will pay for you to host their link on your blog.

There are a number of brokers who will find text link advertisers for you so you don’t have to go looking for them. All you need to do is sign up to a free account with the broker and add some code they provide you in a widget on your side bar. They will then populate the widget with text links as they find the advertisers.

You have the right of refusal if you don’t like the site that your blog is being linked to so you don’t need to worry about hosting porn links or anything like that.

I have previously hosted text link ads on Scraps of Mind from TLA and that generated a nice little income stream.

However there is a downside.

If you are at all interested in your Google page rank then this is not a good strategy. Google frowns on link buying and selling and will downgrade your page ranking accordingly.

This actually happened to me last year when Google smacked me down from Page Rank 4 to Page Rank 2. It’s OK to have links with the ‘no-follow’ tag but the brokers do not use that because it’s not what their customers want.

Advertising Networks

There are a number of advertising networks you can join who will serve ads to your blog without you needing to do anything, apart from add some code to a widget in your sidebar.

Some are like Google which require your readers to click on the ad to generate income, and some are like BlogHer (the network I belong to) which relies on page views to generate income.

These network ads tend to take up a lot of your blog’s side bar and will usually require prime placement. So you need to have sufficient visitors to be able to generate enough views and therefore enough income to make it worthwhile.

I like the BlogHer network because I feel comfortable that they will only serve up ads that I would not be embarrassed to have on Scraps of Mind. And also their ads are targeted more towards women who make up the large majority of my readership. But there are many other networks to choose from.

And if you use an advertising network perhaps you could share some details about it and whether you find it worthwhile or not.

By the way I am not opening this up as a free advertising pitch for networks. I will be moderating to make sure that we are not spammed with advertisers pitching their products. But if you are hosting ads on your blog from an advertising network it would be great if you could share in the comments below your opinion of the network and whether it generates the revenue you expected when you signed up.

In-Text Ads

There are a number of ad networks you can join who will do robot scans of your posts and put links on various words and phrases which will take the reader to other sites selling products.

So if you were writing about your son’s first bike ride you would find all references to bikes would have links to web sites which sell bikes. As well as other words linking to other different sites.

You can usually spot these links as they often have a double underline on the link. And these days many of them have a little pop-up viewer that gives you a little preview of where the link is going.

I must admit I am not a fan of this advertising. I think it is distracting in the post to have links that go off to lots of different sites which don’t actually have any relationship to the article. But I guess that is just a personal thing.

Entrecard

Many Scraps of Mind readers use Entrecard and they will know that Entrecard is a form of advertising.

No cash actually changes hands. Entrecard Credits is the currency in use here. And you can earn credits by visiting other blogs who host Entrecard and ‘dropping’ on them (clicking the gold button next to the current ad-of-the-day). Also by having other Entrecard users come and drop on you, as well as by hosting Entrecard ads in the little widget like the one you can see in my side bar.

Actually Entrecard have just recently introduced a scheme where you can sell your credits for cash. So this can now also become a revenue generating opportunity.

But the purpose of this advertising is to get more exposure for your blog to a wider audience of readers. You don’t actually earn money from it, unless you sell your Entrecard credits. But it would be fair to say that if you can increase the number of visitors to your blog then you are potentially increasing the opportunity for more people to click on your other ads.

Having said that, the real purpose of Entrecard is to be able to access a new audience of readers. And I know that I have been fortunate enough to have gained a number of new scrapbooking readers on Scraps of Mind since I started using Entrecard.

When you visit other Entrecard blogs and drop on them, most times they will return the visit and drop on you. And when you place an ad for your blog on their blog (all paid for with Entrecard credits) then that will also increase the numbers of visitors.

So it’s an easy way to promote yourself, although it can be quite time consuming to visit so many blogs.

Less is More Advertising

So almost every blog hosts some sort of advertising.

But remember that advertising is only going to be effective if your readers can actually see it. So I would strongly recommend that you don’t overload your blog with advertisements.

There is a phenomenon known as ‘ad blindness’ where people see so many ads that their brain just shuts down and blanks them out. And if that happens then your ad might as well not be there.

So give some thought to the amount and placement of your advertising and then the whole experience will be a positive one for both the blog owner and the reader.

And we all love a win/win scenario, don’t we?

What advertising do you host on your blog? Perhaps it’s something we haven’t covered in this article.

And do you find it effective or is it just taking up screen space for nothing?