When a New Blog should Add Advertisement?

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A blog’s primary source of revenue is, in most cases, advertising. However, knowing when to add ads to your blog can make a big difference to the growth and also to the authority of your blog. Blog advertising can be in different forms. I listed below the most common forms of advertising used by blogs.

  1. PPC (Google AdSense, Setupad and Monetag)
  2. Affiliate Marketing
  3. CPM (Usually banner ads )
  4. Private Ads
  5. Sponsored Posts

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When should one Add Advertisements to a Blog?

When I started blogging three years ago, I made the mistake to flood my blog with tons of ads from different advertisers. Many readers were annoyed. It left me with a bunch of annoyed readers and made only a few cents in 3 months!

Not at all motivating, isn’t it? Then I removed all the ads and concentrated only on my content. Eventually, that step brought in more faithful readers who were visiting a blog that:

  1. Loaded quickly
  2. Had nothing to distract them from the content
  3. And also a blog which was supplying useful information

Once I had a large readers base and was getting around 3000 readers per day, I then added a minimum amount of ads on the blog at strategic positions only. Within one month, that blog became one of my main source of income without repelling any of my faithful readers. The question is WHY?

The answer lies in the ratio of ads on your site to that of your reader’s base.

Let us see why people will advertise on a blog. Advertisers want to showcase their products or services to potential customers and will pay, only if a publisher can send a minimum amount of potential customers to them.

Now, if you have a blog which is one week old and you are getting only ten daily visitors (who are mostly your friends or other bloggers), this will not be useful for an advertiser. Let’s examine how the different ads method mentioned above will perform on a blog receiving between 50 to 100 visitors a day.

1. Effect on PPC

Let us look at the best PPC available, which is AdSense.

AdSense will pay you if someone clicks on ads that you show. From my experience, the minimum amount that you can be paid per click is €0.01 (I use Euro) and the average pay is normally between €0.05 to €0.20 – Sometimes you can be paid more but it is very rare as the highest paying AdSense ads are most of the time displayed on Google search results.

So assuming you get paid €0.20 per click, and you have 100 daily visitors. With a 336×280 ads slot above the content, you can expect a CTR of about 3% (we are reasonable here).

So you will have three clicks per day and get about €0.60 a day. That’s about €18 per month. However, you should also consider the fact that when you start a blog, you will mostly be having readers that already know you and they will be the same persons coming again and again. They will not always click on your ads. On the worst side, these readers can even find your ads annoying.

So, do you prefer to have very slow growth and repel some readers for a mere €18 per month? I’d say no!

Effect on CPM

CPM ads pay you per 1000 times the ads appear on your site. So even if your readers do not click on it, it will still pay you. You must have heard that some networks pay $1 to $3 per 1000 impressions right? What they do not tell you is, that this is the maximum that you can get paid per 1000 impressions. The average is well below that figure, and it also depends on the referring country of your viewers.

The average pay for CPM ads is often around $0.50 per thousand impressions unless you are a very popular blog with hundreds of thousands of monthly views.

Assuming you get 100 visitors a day, you will earn $1.5 a month, and also a huge amount of potential subscribers repelled because they found your blog so filled up with totally unrelated adverts! (Eg: Those Jackpots ads).

CPM ads are good only for big traffic sites. I started using this type of ad only after I started to get over 5000 unique daily.

Private Ads

The advantage of private ads is that there is no middleman commission involved. You discuss directly with the advertiser, and you get paid for the duration of the ads. Again, let’s assume you get 100 visitors a day. How much do you think an advertiser will want to spend on your site per month?

This depends on the niche of your blog. A blog about boots for soldiers can get some advertisers even with 100 visitors daily because the niche is small. However, a blog about new technologies might never get an advertiser with 100 daily visitors as there are far more similar blogs out there that are offering much better deals and opportunities for the advertiser.

A private advertiser will advertise on a blog only if the blog can send him a good amount of potential customers.

So as you can see, it is wiser to first build your blog, grow your content and then later think about monetization. Every time a new blogger in my country asks me about monetizing a blog, my answer is always “The Google Example“. That is every great work starts with the main aim first and for a blog, it first has to be useful for readers. Then later on think about monetization.

If you like this post do share it and leave your comment. Any question related to the topic? Ask.

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Authored By
Kurt is a webmaster and Wordpress front end developer based in Mauritius. He is the owner of 2 popular satire news websites and recently launched his new blog WPSpells.com which is all about Wordpress tips, mods, plugins and theme reviews.

26 thoughts on “When a New Blog should Add Advertisement?”

  1. Hadharm Hiidee

    Nice content here Kurt. Most new bloggers just want to enter into blogging and start making money without any traffic whatsoever. The funniest part is they flood the pages with ads and this get most visitors annoyed as you said earlier.
    Thanks for sharing this great resource.

  2. Sreehari Sree

    Great post bro.
    Helped a lot 🙂

  3. Blessing Noah

    Hi Kurt Tewin,
    I used to worry so much about advertising on my blog in the first few months of my blogging career. Now I know better – Grow your reader base and worry about advertising later. Thanks for sharing this informative post.

  4. Muhammad Daniyal

    I have no words to say you something, only I want to say you that you’re my big inspiration and learn a lot from your blog posts.

  5. Resham Panth

    That’s quite informative post. I Too believe that ads should be displayed only after you get high traffic, else it’s no use..

  6. Babita tomar

    Nice post. I was searching for such information. The information has been given in this post is really helpful especially for new bloggers. One more thing is required to become a successful blogger and that is ‘patience’. Keep going.

  7. Divyansh

    I have been blogging on blogger for fun about cbse and other university for 2 years but just 3 months back i shifted to custom domain with ads when i learnt about its income benefits from your site. thanks for this.
    I want to asks you about:
    What network will suite me the best. I have around 3500 visitors a month.
    “I have one more important question. Can i use other CPM networks along with google adsense. Won’t it anoy google and ban my adsense account? ”
    If i can use other networks can i use ozonemedia and value click along with google adsense?
    Please reply soon

  8. Rajan Balana

    Thank You So much For Guidance . Thanks

  9. Robin

    Harsh this is the post which i really like and i was searching for such an good advise…. really kewl post.

  10. Namit Gupta

    Came to know some good concepts about advertising on blogs. Thanks for the informative post.

  11. Omer Greenwald

    I’m new to blog monetization so this is very useful information for me. For the time being I only use affiliate image ads in the sidebar until I have more traffic. thanks

  12. Techno-Pulse

    Informative. Once again, Content is the King 🙂 everything else will follow…

  13. DiTesco

    Very well said. The key here is the advertising to content ratio. Not overdoing it will most likely generate more conversions and if you are after the “big $$”, advertisers would prefer to see their banners with a site that has less ads than a lot. This will make their ad more visible and possibly generate more conversions. Kudos. This post is echo bound:)

    1. Kurt

      You’re right. Just wanted to share something else based on your comment:

      Those using adsense, it is wiser to use one single adsense block than completely filling a single page with 3 slots. Placing one slot only at the best position (eg between title and content like in this blog), will give a better earning as more high-paying-ads will compete for that single slot.

  14. yusha

    Well elaborated post. When a blogger to add advertising to a blog then person should go with the flow of time, readers and have a specific target.

    1. Kurt

      @Chaya & @Yusha: Thanks for the read. Yusha you somehow resume my whole post in 3 words “Flow of time”. That’s it.

  15. Chaya

    Nice informative post.
    It’s better to have some readers and to focus on content prior to adding ad networks to a blog.

  16. Vivek Krishnan

    Great post Avish. It is important to know when your blog is capable to advertise!

  17. aatif

    this is such a great post , even i am not using many ad network on my blog , i just want to concentrate on my content .

    1. Tushar

      i too believe in concentrating on content

      1. Kurt

        @Aatif @Tushar: Thanks. Had a look at your blogs too. Nice articles. Gonna stay in touch. And as the famous quote says it “Content is King”.

  18. NpXp

    It is not a good idea to display ads if the blog is not receiving atleast 500-700 Uniques a day. It would just be a waste of time..

    1. Lee Ka Hoong

      I believe that it depends on what’s the niche of your blog, my blog has about 200 unique visitors a day but I’m still able to sell a few banners every month.

      Regards,
      Lee

      1. Kurt

        Yes, it depends on the niche. I see that you have a good 500+ rss subs, that also helps in selling private ads.

    2. Kurt

      Yes, PPC or CPM will not be really useful. However I think with 700 uniques.. (Approx over 1000 views daily right?) you can start with private ads such as 125×125 slots starting with 2 little slots and then increasing. But it also depends on the niche.

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