Placing Ads on Your Sidebar (Affiliate ads, Banner Exchanges)

Placing Ads on Your Sidebar (Affiliate ads, Banner Exchanges)

The concept of earning from a blog has been discussed several ways and a multitude of times all over the net. This money goal revolves around the concept of selling things where there are people who are passing by, and right now, blogs as windows to people’s lives and thoughts are popular. However, there are some people who still do not want to place advertisements on their blogs. Here are some of the reasons that I learned by talking to other bloggers who keep their blogs ad-free.

“Only my friends and family visit anyway” – Of course, with a personal blog, you don’t expect much traffic from other sources, initially. However, as you post more and more, you will see that with or without search engine optimization, your blog will attract people who are looking for the topics you talk about. Unless you keep your blog private by placing a password on all your posts, the search engine robots will continue to visit your blog and send traffic from relevant sources.

“It clutters up my blog and divert attention from my stories” – This is the most common reason why other people won’t place ads. They are really building an online diary and they don’t expect to earn from it. They could also be feeling guilt about making money off their visitors. If you don’t want to place ads that could bring you cash, you can simply put your favorite charity’s banner on your blog to help you out. Perhaps a friend has an offline business that he wants to promote? You can create a small banner for him and paste it on your blog. The beauty of web 2.0 is that you meet so many people online and opportunities to help out aren’t scarce.

“I don’t know how” - You’d be surprised at the number of webmasters who are too proud to ask for help regarding their blog modification. Wordpress could be tricky to navigate if you don’t use plugins and if you don’t want to explore the other features of your admin panel, particularly the widgets section. Basic knowledge of HTML is not difficult to acquire. Just remember to copy your php codes to a notepad before experimenting so that you can easily revert back to the original when you break something.

To those who want to monetize their blogs but don’t know how, here are a few tips:

1. Join an affiliate network and choose the products that you want to promote – You can be sure that your favorite brand will have a banner that will fit your sidebar perfectly. They will give you an HTML code to place on your sidebar. The effortless way to do this is to add a text widget on your admin panel’s widget section (for Wordpress users) and paste the HTML code on the text box (right below the spot for the title).

Use a Google Adsense Plugin for Wordpress – Plugins like AdsenseDeluxe and MightyAdsense will make your Wordpress blog advertisement placement easy. These usually require you to simply input your adsense code and the plugin creates ads for you for putting on your sidebar of post body.