Can you use a banner advert on your weblog to generate an income? By that we mean can you use one to increase your takings? There’s a big difference between something that adds to the total income you make and something that makes an takings itself, but costs you more traffic and income from elsewhere.
Free blogs
So, might you add a banner advertisement to your weblog? Of course you could, typically! If you are a few free services, for instance WordPress.com (but not the WordPress.org that you host for yourself) then such forms of advertising are banned, so the answer is “No” and the debate ends here!
Other websites
But for other systems you are allowed to add banners, either in the sidebar, the footer or within the actual post. However, do you really want to?
At first the answer must be “Yes!” and there is a chance of earning an takings, whether from an advertiser’s payments of from affiliate payments. But now look deeper into this and whether they are actually effective. That is, whether you are actually making a profit. If you use that space for a banner advert, what are the effects?
Too much is never good!
Well for a start, too much advertising round the page is going to put people off reading your site. It makes the blog look like you are just interested in your readers for what they can do for you - earn you cash. This makes them less budding to subscribe to your RSS feeds and newsletters and less impending to trust your writing and come back.
Using valuable space.
It is also taking up valuable space. To get the best from a banner advertisement you want it high up on the side bar - so that a load of people could see it and click on it. But this will mean that you have to shove the vital pieces of navigation further down the page. These are the navigation elements that will be used by readers to come back again or find more to read now, let's say most popular posts lists,RSS feeds , ebooks as incentives to subscribe and so on. By having the banner advert above these elements, your readers are budding to explore your weblog less now and in the future.
Reducing the value of other advertising
Lastly, if you are wanting to take part in sponsored posting then the value of these is decreased because of the other advertising on the page. An advertiser is less possible to pay you for an advert if you are also showing competing advertisements on the same page.
The answer?
For my own sites, I prefer to merely include any banner advertisements where they are relevant in key posts. For an affiliate product, if I want site wide coverage I will create a key post, link to that from the navigation and put the banner link into the post itself.
But yes, you could quite simply use a banner advertisement on your website, at potentially the price of reducing your readership and advertising from other sources. It is up to you what works best.
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