How to generate income from blog through advertisement

Advertisements are the quickest way to start making some money from your blog. Usually, you just need to integrate into your site a snippet from an AD network, pass for a simple review process and you are good to go. Most of the AD networks also have some sort of dashboard where you can check your earnings and strategies about how to increase your income. But as Rocky already told us, The world ain't all sunshine and rainbows, so let’s dive into the pros and cons of using advertisements on your blog.

Lack of control

I think one of the most concerning things regarding advertisement platforms like Google AD Sense or, Yahoo and Outbrain is the fact that you have little to no control over what’s been shown to your audience. One of the most important things that you are building is your brand, and when an AD is displayed in your blog, users will associate your brand with the product that’s being sold in that AD. It could be from a trusted brand like Apple or Microsoft, or it also can be some sort of scam or low-quality product promoted by anyone.

Readers are distracted by ADs

ADS also can use a good space in your blog and can make your content fight for the user's attention, which should be the main reason why your readers are in your blog. Well, you need to pay the bills, so it should not be a major problem, but you need to consider if the amount of money you are receiving is enough to compensate for this possible reduction in user engagement due to the amount of AD on the page

Readers are leaving your blog

One harsh truth about ADs on your site is that users are not clicking in your ads, which doesn’t generate much money, besides the impressions, or they are clicking on it, and leaving your blog. Some blogs, like *Dailyblogtips* argues that good money comes from the email marketing list, so the argument is that if your reader is clicking in the AD, it’s not clicking in button to subscribe to your mail list, which makes sense, but what if the user is already subscribed in your email list? Donny from Dailyblogtips also uses some successful cases to base your theory, but even some of the blogs listed have AdSense on their pages, but for sure this is something to consider the trade-off.

Need to have a lot of traffic to make it work

Another drawback of this kind of advertisement is that you will need a lot of traffic to make it work because it is paid on what is called CPI/CPC, or cost per impression/cost per clicks, which is basically a value that you will earn for every 1,000 thousand clicks or impressions. Usually, this is just a few cents, so you are going to need a lot of impressions to make it work. Naturally, if you are just starting your blog, you don’t have this amount of traffic, so some bloggers say that this is not the best option for blogs that are just starting, it’s just a little disadvantage to bother readers.

AD Networks

Now that we already know some of the main issues and pitfalls regarding ADNetworks, let’s take a quick look at the main AD Networks available in 2023:

Google AdSense

The most famous AD network is Google AD Sense. You most likely stumble on an ad from Google, it can track your presence on the internet, based on what you search, visit, or watch on YouTube, and based on that information, it will try to display the most relevant ads for you.

To join Google AdSense, you need to go to its website, add your site there, go through a review process made by the Google team, fix what they told you are wrong, and after that, you are ready to go.

AdsTerra

AdsTerra is a concurrent from Google AdSense, which has been on the market since 2013. On their website, we can see they which is pretty well-rated in 2023.

To start to monetize your blog using ads from AdsTerra, all you need to do is create an account in their website, pretty simple, just need to provide your name, email, and some basic information.

After confirming your email, you should be able to check your dashboard, which should be basically the same as mine.

To create a new ad, you need to press the button Add Website, fill in some fields shown in the image below, and after that, your site will go through a review process, very similar to Google AdSense.

After one day, you site is already reviewed and they provide you the scripts that you need to put in your page, and ADs begin to display there.

Buyandsellads.com

This is a little bit different from Google AdSense and AdTerra, Buyandseelsads acts as a broker between you and direct advertisers. You can have more control over what is advertised on your site, but there could be moments when you don’t have a contract signed, so in this case, no ads will be shown on your site, and you are not going to get any money from it. But if you want to keep showing ads even if you don’t have an advertiser from this service, you can write a JS script to fill it with other AD networks, like AdSense or AdsTerra

Other forms of advertisement

But advertisement has other flavors that can be more interesting than joining this AD Networks, but also they require a larger amount of work in order to make it work, here they are:

Sponsored content

This is especially popular on YouTube but can work as well for blogs and podcasts. In this form of advertisement, you should make a contract with a specific brand to talk about their product or service in a blog post or perhaps a series of posts. So, just to give you an example, you can create a post about time management systems and how to organize your work, and in that post, you can say how Notion.so (a content management service) can help you to do it. So, you can approach guys from Notion to sponsor this blog post.

Of course, this is not going to be easy, given you need to find the brands, make contact, deal with all the paperwork involved, and of course, should have some relevance to impress brands. Also, after signing the contract, you need to maintain the relationship with the marketing team of this brand by yourself, so if do something that is not aligned with your sponsor's values, they can break the contract with you, or if they feel you are not generating the expected return, they can finish the contract, so it’s up to you keep your blog valuable to them as well.

The bright side of this is, of course, you can negotiate better rates than you usually get from advertisers like Google, some YouTubers say that can earn something around 10 to 50 dollars per thousand views, but of course, this is from YouTube, there are many variables involved, like relevance of the channel, what’s your niche and much more, but the important message here, this pay way more than average AD networks.

Paid Sponsor - Directly Advertiser

Another form of advertisement is when you have a more constant sponsor for your blog, so this is a bit different from the sponsored content, given the sponsor will not sponsor you for a particular piece of content, but will have their brand on your blog, like a outdoor, but in the digital version of it. This form has some drawbacks of the AD networks, but in this case, you have total control of what you are going to put on your website, usually, the sponsor sends you the art of the ad, so you can review it beforehand. Also, you can still negotiate better rates for thousands of impressions, so it’s way more appealing financially.