Wise Startup Blog

Advertising is your blog’s lifeline. We’re all trying to provide a great resource to our readers in our blog’s content, but we need to pay the bills and sever costs can get expensive. Optimizing your advertising is a way to reduce the amount of clutter your readers see and also provide the least amount of annoyance in typical online advertising.

Starting off, I’ll tell you that you should not have interstitial ads, popup ads, popunder ads or flash ads anywhere on your minimalist blog. Perhaps if you’re a celebrity blogger or you’re blogging on ringtones, then maybe you could consider these types of intrusive ads. Personally, though, I would say nobody likes popup ads, even if they do click on them.

Optimizing Your Blog for Adsense

Optimizing your blog for Adsense is an easy process, though it does take some learning, tweaking and practice. You want to guarantee you can provide the most conducive learning experience for your readers, but at the same time presenting them with the most relevant, appealing advertising content. Remember, everyone is a consumer, you just have to give your readers the opportunity to be a consumer. Also, if you’re worried that nobody wants to see ads. If your readers are in the market for a hotel room, they may help you out by simply clicking on your link to go to the hotel website even while they could have just gone to Orbitz.com etc just as a way of saying thanks.

Optimize Adsense Placement with Channels

Channels are a confusing concept, but once you have the general idea they’re really easy to master. A channel is simply a location on your blog. Your sidebar, your homepage, your single story page, your “single-post top square”, etc. And it’s a location you can name yourself. Just determine the easiest name for you to remember and name them.

When creating your ad units, add them to specific user-channels. Then, when you’re viewing your Adsense reports, you can look to see which ad units are doing the best. This is where the best optimization comes. You look at your performance, and try to tweak and fiddle with things to make your ads perform to their highest levels.

Naturally you’ll find that some locations just do better than others. For me, my sidebar does really well. I can attribute this to its location always on the side of every page or possibly because it contains 6 ad units or maybe because it’s next to my “top post” information. Whatever it is, find that commonality and try to replicate it. On every page, include an ad in the same spot. Test it for a month and see how it does. If you see an increase, try it in other places and learn your tolerances.

Advertising is a numbers game. If you can get 1% of your readers to click on your ads, you’re going to do well. 2% click-throughs is doubling your value and an excellent optimization mastery.

Placing Adsense Within Content

The best type of advertising is when we don’t see it as advertising. When I see a preview for the new Batman: Dark Knight movie, I am excited about. The preview is simply a commercial asking me to spend my money, but since I want to see the movie and it interests me, I like it.

You need to apply this same way of thinking for advertising on your blog. If your readers are in the market for domain hosting, and you happen to be featuring a great hosting provider in your post or in the Adsense content, you’re putting two and two together and making your reader happy, because you’re providing him with great information and because he is looking for a host for his new startup blog

When determining where to place your Adsense content, look for ways to turn the advertising into editorial. In the example above, I have placed advertising right into the opening header of my article. Users will (1) see the information (2) be more likely to click on it since it’s optimized to my article information and (3) not be offended by the content due to annoying popups, etc.

Incorporating the Adsense content within the main body of an article is a great way to break up content and give your readers the opportunity to possibly click on the advertisers helping to make your blog stay online.

Optimizing Your Adsense Color Scheme

The biggest element in creating advertising that isn’t distracting to your readers is making sure the advertising content is matched with the styling of your blog. The easiest way for me to do this is to take a screenshot of your blog. Then, pull up your favorite photo-editor, I use Photoshop.

Once in Photoshop, take the eye-dropper and pull up the HTML color codes for each element. Take note of what color your links are and what color your text is, and match that to your Adsense color options. For each element, experiment with what looks best. Don’t be afraid to try some different combinations and see what looks best.

Optimizing Adsense Should Be Fun

When going through all of the steps, be sure to have fun when optimizing your blog. Adsense is a great product, and it makes it possible to allow you to do what you do best, blog. And leaves the advertising and content-choice up to Google, which is what they’re good at. Let us know your tips for optimizing your blog for Adsense in the comments below.