A common mistake made by bloggers and website authors is the rush to make money. Everyone who reads about making money with their blog, gets all excited and tries to hurry deep into the world of making money online, without thinking about the disadvantages of monetizing a site. We all know that a website covered in adverts is not appealing and often results in a snappy decision to try the next website in the queue. There are many things to take into consideration before placing adverts on your website, and I will mention a few below.

Directory Submission - Submitting your blog/website to an online directory is a great way to get inward links, and increase your traffic. The more directories you submit your website to, the higher your page rank will be. This said, many directories have a huge bias against accepting website strewn with adverts. If you start getting denied by directories, you will grow a bad name for your site, and this will influence your traffic heavily.

Reader Base - One of the best times to start monetizing a site, is when you already have a large reader base, of which many of the visitors and returners, which means that these people are interested in the content you are sharing, and will most probably not be put off by a few adverts placed carefully around the website. If you introduce adverts too soon, many readers will not remain loyal to your site, and rather look for another similar site, with less adverts.

Positioning - Before you can start placing adverts around and about on your website, it is important to have a look and see where the best placing will be. People follow trends, and there are certain areas which are signified with certain things. For example, most people recognise the header image of a site at the top left of the page, and similarily, most readers recognise a menu on the left hand side of the page. This is the same for adverts. You do want your adverts to be seen, but don’t want them placed in the same places as all websites, rather have a look at what your readers are most interested in, and place the adverts carefully around these areas, as this will increase your chances of click throughs. Placing adverts inbetween menu areas works really well, or placing adverts inline (within the content) is another successful method.

Colouring - This is an interesting point, as I have seen many sites using Google Adsense to carefully ‘hide’ their adverts by using the same background in the advert as the background of the website, and using the advert titles as the same colours as links on the website - Webtrepreneur practises this method, and it is a successful method. I have, however, seen many websites handling things completely differently, and making the websites stand out - Still matching various colours, to not break the palette of the website, but just a different tactic. iMod is an example of a backward colouring tactic, which has also proved to work fairly well. Personally, I feel that the best approach in this regard is to use trail and error, run one style for a month, and then another style for the next month, baring in mind that your readership will hopefully have grown by the second month, so remember to take that into account when comparing.

To summarize, Webtrepreneur feels that the best approach would be to work on your content, traffic and reader loyalty before introducing and form of advertising on your website. Once you have a bit of a following, and people are returning to your website, this is when you could start introducing something like Google Adsense, and carefully position it, as to not get in the way of your readers.

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