Do's and Don'ts of Blog Advertisements

This is a rather straight forward list, geared mostly towards how you display ads on your blog. Too many times I see blogs where the ads are utterly annoying, and it just drives me insane. Would the authors go to a website with the same kinds of ads? Probably not, so why they implement these is beyond me.

DON'T

• Use ads that play audio. I used to frequent a blog for months that reviewed manga. Then, along comes those cleaning product ads. You know, the ones that are "interactive?" While they're annoying in their own way, they automatically played audio. I don't know about you, but reading quietly and then suddenly hearing "OH NO ANOTHER STAIN" is quite off-putting.
• Use ads that increase your website's loading time. This means some of the Flash heavy image ads have to go.
• Place text ads anywhere they might get accidentally clicked. Not only will the ad system you use get you on that, but it's also not reader-friendly.
• Use ads that are placed inside your blog post's text. It is terribly annoying to scroll through the blog and suddenly come to a stop because an ad pops up.
• Ask for support by visiting a "sponsor." This should be common sense, but before they had that rule put in certain companies' TOS, I used to see it all the time. Simply put, don't do this.
• Use text ads with annoying colors. If everything in your blog is tones of blue, don't use orange ads. It's just aesthetically unpleasing.
• Write paid blog reviews. That is a quick way to lose your credibility!

DO

• Try to weed through advertisers and remove the ones that are obviously scams. You have to care about where your readers might go if they do click on an ad (beyond that, those scam sites typically pay lower than other advertisers, if you could care less about your readers).
• Use text ads as often as you can! It's much easier to make sure these ads blend in, plus they aren't as distracting as image ads. Plus, it minimizes your page's loading time.
• Use different keywords to improve the advertisers you get! That way you don't have to resort to getting a bunch of different types of ads cluttering up your blog.
• Use reputable ad services! This not only ensures the highest quality for your ads, but also makes sure they're not misleading to your readers. Adsense for pay per click and Project Wonderful for time spent on your website is the way to go! Even lesser popular but still well known Adbrite and Bidvertiser have fishy kinds of ads.

Follow these rules, and you should be good to go. Another note about keyword use: using Google Adwords' keyword tool to find keywords similar to subjects you're writing about is a good way to go. The more searches and competition a keyword has, the more effective that keyword is. You can also try Googling the highest paying keywords, although they are geared to things more like tax attorneys, lemon law, and other high paying yet limited use keywords.

Bottom line is, don't expect instant gratification with any of this stuff! Blogging for money will by no means make you rich, and flooding your blog with ads will hurt your growth, not help it. But if you do your research and invest a lot of time in it, pretty soon you can pay a few bills here and there with your hobby!

Get People to Read Your Blog!

The bottom line is, you are not going to have a successful blog unless you have readers. I know, I blog for the enjoyment of it, but there's no shame in being successful at what you love to do. There are two main steps to getting readers. Step one is to have a good blog that people want to read. I've covered that a little, but there is so much more to this step, as you can imagine. Then there's step two, the step that requires you to go out there and advertise your blog.

When I first started, I thought there wasn't too much I could do to advertise my blog aside from paying for an expensive ad campaign or manage to get lucky and have someone randomly stumble upon it. Now, there is an element of luck to getting readers, but not as much as you'd think. And you don't need to spend hundreds of dollars for an ad campaign that might not even yield results. However, you will need to keep at it with lots of hard work until you finally have a good foundation of readers.

Advertising your blog can be as simple as posting on a forum and providing a link somewhere in a signature or in your post, as long as you're not obnoxious about it. The bigger the forum community, the better. But, you want to be smart about what forums you go to. People who hate technology will not want to read your blog post about AT&T phones. Don't advertise your fashion blog in a car or motorcycle forum. That'll just be a waste of your time. However, forums that have multiple niches within it are perfect; websites like Gaia are ideal for just about anything you might have to offer.

Aside from forums, there are also link sharing websites like Reddit or Digg. While Reddit does tend to frown upon what they call "blogspam," there is a separate section of Reddit for blogs. Also, the smaller Reddit communities seem more open to blogs related to their areas of interest. Again, as long as you aren't obnoxious about the way you advertise your blog, you will get a decent flow of traffic by regularly sharing your blog posts. It is important, though, that what you share this way be 100% yours. If you are caught plagiarizing in these kinds of communities, it's a quick way to get your links deleted and banned from posting new ones. It's important to be original in general, but this is just incentive for those of you who are a little "relaxed" to copying other people's words.

Then at the end of the day, there's always the old-fashioned way of advertising: commenting. Lots and lots of commenting. A big part of blogging is the networking aspect, and you have to either join or create a community for your blog to be a part of. Otherwise it will wither away into nothingness.

There is another way to get your blog read call Search Engine Optimization (also known as SEO), but that is something I'll get into later. Everything here is just the tip of the iceberg!

Eye-Catching: First steps.

Okay, so everyone wants a sleek and stylish blog, right? The easiest way to grab someone's attention is to have a nice banner. And those just happen to be my specialty.

(I made all of these so I'm allowed to post them here.)

When making a banner, this is what you should consider:
1. Use colors that in general blend well with other colors on the rest of your blog. You want it to flow nicely. But you also want to add in colors that are NOT found anywhere else on your blog, so it pops out and leaves an image in your reader's mind after they navigate away. Many times I'll see a plain black and white blog, and people wonder why I don't remember which one is theirs. Give me a reason to want to remember your blog.
2. Decide what message you want your blog to send. Look at the first banner I've selected. The writer's blog is about Hawaii. When looking at it, you definitely get a Hawaii feel to it. The second one is for my other blog, where I draw and review video games. So I drew myself drawing a Tepig with the help of De Blob and Comrade Black. You can probably guess what the others are supposed to be about.
3. ALWAYS include your title. You want people to associate the title with the image.
4. NEVER use images you are not allowed to use. Do not upload a picture of Miley Cyrus unless it is allowed. Do not steal a picture someone else did.
5. Try not to sign the banner, even if it's just going to your blog. It's just tacky to have your name up there, in my opinion. ESPECIALLY if you are giving the banner to someone else to use-- let the blogger decide on how to thank you/advertise you. It's really distracting from the image, otherwise. It's not like a painting where you SHOULD sign it so no one takes credit for it.

Now me, I'm going to break my rule and not make a banner just yet. Mostly because I only made this blog an hour ago and it's quite late right now, haha.

Til then, see you later, my lovely Suckers! (Or should I call you guys Sucks? Hm. I'll think about that for a while.)

I hate introduction posts.

They're so freaking awkward, you know? But whenever you see a new blog, you see this short and simple post saying how the person is new to blogging and how they've always thought about it, blah blah blah. But often times you'll see that blog post and there won't be anything else. Which always confuses the hell out of me.

Okay, I get not wanting to just randomly start out blogging, cause you feel awkward doing it. But don't you feel just as awkward not contributing anything substantial to your blog and expecting others to want to read it?

Also, what's really irritating is seeing people use blogs as their journals, and then they expect to make a career out of doing that. What? I mean, if you were a celeb, I can see that kind of blog getting somewhere, but if you're just making a public diary, who really is going to care to give you money for that?

These kinds of blogs are what I'm getting at. They suck. I want to help you not suck anymore. I'm not saying I'm great, but I'm saying I don't suck. I get lots of questions and offer lots of help to a bunch of new people in blogging, so I decided I'd make a blog dedicated to this sort of thing. It's a blog for bloggers, from advertising, to improving your writing. Hopefully you'll learn a few things and can make a bitchin' blog.