Should I Run Adsense on My Blog?
Just this week, I was invite to attend an Adsense in Your City Event. One of the biggest complaints that bloggers make about Adsense is their inability to interact with the team at Google. Since last year, Google has sent out an Adsense Optimization Team around the country holding small events that their publishers (bloggers) can attend.
The event includes a 90 minute training session in which I took a ton of notes. After the training, you get to sit down 1-on-1 with an Adsense Optimization Expert and watch as they review your sites.
I am going to run a mini-series on this blog discussing some of what I learned at the event. I am assuming you know what Adsense is. Before I dive into the technical and practical tips that I learned, I thought it would be good to lay a foundation first. Here is a big question that most people ask:
Should I Run Adsense on My Blog?
First of all, I know the struggle you are facing. You want to earn money, but you do not want your blog to appear “spammy” or cluttered. I felt the same way when I first got started. In fact, I resisted placing Adsense ads on my career coaching blog for the first 6-9 months.
I finally decided that I should experiment with different sources of revenue and so I gave it a 30 day trial. I made $40 that first month and got zero complaints so I decided to leave it. As I have added more articles and achieved higher rankings, my Adsense income has grown ever sense. It is now a monthly check that I can depend on.
If you are still struggling with whether or not run Adsense on your blog, here are some helpful tips.
Decide what the purpose of your blog will be. What is your niche all about? What are you trying to accomplish with your audience? If your goal is to provide answers, review products, and discuss the latest news, then Adsense might work well for you. At the same time, if your goal is to build revenue from direct advertisers, then take the approach that Michael Hyatt has taken with his blog.
Adsense can add value to your readers. The goal of Adsense is to display relevant ads according to what the page is all about. For example, if you are reviewing the latest electronic fireplace model, having ads that show sales and discounts on electronic fireplaces is actually beneficial to the end user.
Start small and work into it gradually. Why not choose to display one Adsense ad block strategically on your site and see how it works for you and your readers? This was the advice that I recently gave to my wife. As I have mentioned before, my wife recently started a blog, and she did not want to clutter her blog with ads.
She strategically placed an single ad in the right sidebar. Yesterday she received a click for $1.15 and has already received other clicks as well. While it may seem small to you, she became extremely excited about the potential that Adsense could offer her over time.
You can control what ads are displayed on your site. There are some things you can do to control what ads are displayed on your site. Google Adsense has an Ad Filtering Option in your settings. You can turn off certain categories if you want to. You can even block certain domain names from showing ads on your site as well.
Advertisements is an acceptable practice on blogs. The last convincing reason I have for you is that ads are still an acceptable practice on blogs. It is not uncommon at all to see advertisements on almost any site you visit. Even the major news outlets have advertisements strategically placed on their site.
My final challenge to you is to just experiment. It is worth looking into because of the low maintenance aspect of it. There are often days that go by before I check my Adsense earnings. It is always encouraging to see that you are making passive money on articles that you have written months or even years ago.
