Blogging is fun. This is why we do it. Literally millions of blogs have sprung up in the last years; this wouldn’t have happened if there wasn’t a serious fun factor involved. But there are also quite few bloggers out there who earn a decent amount of money with their blog, some of them even blog for a living.
At some stage of their blogging experience, most bloggers will have asked themselves the question if they should put up advertising on their blog to generate a few extra bucks. In a way, the decision for or against advertising is quite fundamental. There are good reasons to use advertising as well as there are reasons to oppose it. To make up your mind, please consider these pros ans cons:
Pro Advertising
- You have the chance to earn money (duh).
- You might drive search engine traffic to your site from people who are interested in the things you advertise. This may be beneficial to your blog, if you manage to offer these people useful information so they will come back to your site.
- After your site has got some momentum you might even be approached by people who want to advertise on your site, eventually resulting in even more traffic
- With a careful choice of advertising partners you can offer your readers something they really want to have. This can even result in stronger reader bonding to your blog as opposed to a blog without ads. But as you can imagine, this is not an easy feat to achieve.
Contra Advertising
- There are always some readers who feel repelled by any form of advertising. They feel that a bloggers with ads on their sites have sold their souls. The actual percentage of these readers is of course highly dependent on your niche.
- Too much or too intrusive advertising can have a negative effect and will drive readers away from your site instead of attracting them.
- On a blog about anything visual, advertising can distract your readers. The more “artsy” your blog is, the more you have to take this into account. You would have to find a way to integrate the ads into your visual concept which sometimes can be very difficult if not impossible.
- Placing ads on your blog does not mean instant income. In the worst case, you might have spent hours upon hours fine-tuning your advertising system and still get no or only minimal return.
I made up my mind and decided to place advertising on my blogs, but I try not to overdo it in order to avoid putting off my readers.
Putting up advertising is an important decision and should not be taken too lightly. Every blogger should think thoroughly about this vital issue.
{ 2 comments… read them below or add one }
Very Recently, there has been a good deal of inquiries by the
FTC against blogs and website promoters
for not revealing their advertising revenue, or potential
connections with ad networks.
What are your personal ideas concerning how this could hurt
the blog world?
As I am not from the US, I can’t really make a qualified comment on this. I don’t know the legal side, but I can’t imagine that bloggers could be legally forced into publishing how much they make from advertising. The tax side would be an entirely different topic, though. Perhaps it was the intention to hunt down tax avoiders.