I would like to start my short blog entry by mentioning I HAVE NOTHING AGAINST ads on a site. As many of you I have invested thousands of dollars worth of money and work and I would really like to see some of my investment covered.

Still .. from having some ads to bring in revenue to not being able to read anything from all the banners, links, widgets etc. is already another story.

I go to some of the big blogs and forums .. some have few ads that pay awfully well, others rely on tens of advertising resources to earn some bucks. Some do earn a lot of money too, but really endanger the entire site with all these ads.

Do you have many ads on your site? Do you know what this means? Does it mean you are successful .. well, not. It’s a sign of success to be able to earn revenue, but it’s also a sign for me that you still cannot stick to some best paying options and kick the others out of your layouts.

Too many ads mean you need to declutter.

Try to use few advertising systems and track your results. Write down the revenue you get in a month and compare this. See in few months which systems do bring in the BEST revenue and try to use them and leave the others behind. I think it would be better to lose 20 bucks you’d make on a bad campaign than lose many visitors who just get sick trying to find some content among all those ads.

As an example:

I have some Adsense banners on few of my sites. The good thing about them is they are not that intrusive, they are mostly text ads and they don’t ruin my layouts that much. I have also started running Text Link Ads campaigns and I make in a month what Adsense would give me in 5. As you can imagine, I have started being more interested in this kind of advertising since the links are even less intrusive.

I plan on using Adsense for some time, but with smaller ands and less intrusive. And if in the following months they won’t convince me, it’s time to declutter again.

Filed under: Web development by ramona