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Posts Tagged ‘ads’

Add Ads Now or Later?

A question I get a lot and that is even debated around the interent is when to add ads to your site. Obviously everybody has their own opinion, but let me tell you why those with the opinion to add ads later is worthless.

There are numerous arguments for both sides, but the one I like to use is that people can’t complain about something they have never experienced.

There are many stories of successful ventures, companies, or whatever that eventually needed to throw up ads. Customers obviously complained about this because now they had to deal with all these advertisements.

If readers experience your site with ads from the beginning, then they know what to expect and won’t be surprised. Again, you can’t complain if you never experienced it another way.

Proponents in favor of adding ads later in your site’s life say that you should focus on customer experience and building your content and readership before jumping into the world of advertisements.

I see a couple problems with this:

  • You are throwing away money. For every visitors with no ads is wasted money. Time is money; visitors is money.
  • My previous argument – can’t complain about something never experienced. How will your current visitors feel about the new “ad” experience?

Now I do need to ad a disclaimer to this. Less is more. Do not bombard your visitors with ads, and make sure they are quality ads. Avoid pop-ups and other intrusive campaigns. Less is more.

Increase Revenue with Fixed Ads

Whenever I look back at some of the stuff I could of done differently when I first started making money online, the one that stands out the most is utilizing fixed ads.

By fixed ads I mean they are built into the template. For example, on this post you can see a 300×250 ad, which randomly displays one of 8 predetermined ads.

While banking off affiliate commissions can definitely make you money, it is also really risky. Who really knows how well something will convert month to month? In a perfect world, all your income derived by ads would be paid by somebody at the beginning of the month.

Moreover, with the help of a wordpress plugin like ad-rotator, the same ad won’t be appearing on every single post on your site. To take it one step further, depending on your demand you can also offer multiple slots in the single ad spot.

When I first started creating websites I was using the Adsense deluxe plugin. While it is still a great tool for inserting random ads on a post by post basis, how can you really monetize the ad spot other than having advertisers paying post by post. I can already tell you that most won’t want to do that.

One more reason, you can increase revenue through fixed ads is when you decide to sell your site. Anybody can say how much their site makes a month, but was it just through randomized ads thrown many different places or was it through a structured advertising scheme?

Bottom Line: Before you go throwing up ads here and there think about consistency. While there are many free and premium templates that can better help you manage ads, as long as your have created fixed spots within your theme, the possibilities are endless.