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!

What do you want to blog about?

Forget a pretty website. Forget domains, GoDaddy, Yahoo, Google, Blogger, WordPress... Forget followers, comments, and anything else.

You are NOT going to have a good blog if you don't know what to write about. And so many times I see many people just using their blog as their diary, as I said yesterday. Unless you're a celebrity, not many people want to read about your daily lives. And general blogs are just so annoying, too! You have to have some sort of common theme to your blog, otherwise there is no point in following you. Don't even get me started on those blogs that just post something they find on the internet and do nothing else.... Now, there ARE a few exceptions to this rule, but you have to already be a very good writer to pull this off.

But you don't have to be a very good writer to have an interesting blog. It helps, but if your subject is interesting, you'll get readers that way too. And the great thing about writing is that the more you do it-- the better you get! So don't worry, it'll come along.