Many bloggers and business authors have said that you should start your blog with advertisements, this way your readers will come to expect it and you start generating income immediately.
For many bloggers advertisements are one of the ways that their efforts are translated into monitory value. Advertisements are used so that bloggers and writers can focus on what they do best, writing! The idea is, the more your write, the more viewers will come, and the more viewers you get the more your advertisements will display and entice readers to visit your advertising partner’s web pages. And then…. Mo’ Money, Mo’ Money, Mo’ Money
But, with many of the advertising sites, you don’t get to choose which ads appears on your page. Have you ever wondered where those advertisements that appear on your site go? Is it something that you want your readers to click on? And does it support what I want my site to represent? Well if you set your advertising account up properly, it should. I urge you, once you have your links set up on your site, DO NOT wonder anymore. Just accept it.
Last year my google advertisements account was disabled because I didn’t just accept it. The claim was that I might have been over inflating my clicks. Within 24 hours I noticed that the spaces where advertisements once appeared on my page, now were empty spaces. I received an email one night letting me know the fate of my advertising account and the forfeiture of funds that I’d accumulated over the year of using the service. Oops, My bad!
In my case The money I lost was not significant but, it was income that my blog was generating. I often wondered had my curiosity not gotten the best of me, where I’d be now! I guess I won’t be retiring off of the income from advertisements on my blog 😢.
Don’t fret though! If you are using an advertising service for your blog or website you can learn from my mistake. Know that Google is not the only game in town. If you follow these tips, you will learn from my mistakes and start funding your retirement account with money made from advertisements.
- Don’t be curious! If your service says the links work, don’t click on them to test it out.
- Find a service that will allow you to customize your ad experience in order to eliminate your curiosity. (If you find one let me know!)
- If by chance you receive my warning too late, start looking for another way to monetize your site. In the case of AdSense, they do give you 1 chance to appeal. If that appeal is denied, however, you can do the following:
- Give up on ads altogether
- Write a series of e-books and sell them on your site (Take a look at my books On This Day, Man to Man, and Where is my Koala)
- (If you have the traffic) find another ad service.
As you can see from my site, it won’t be the end of the world and there are other options out there. It just requires a bit of restraint on your part along with some research. The best option though, as I learned, is to not mess up your chances to begin with.
I’d love to hear your thoughts, ideas and comments regarding this post. Please leave me a reply in the comment section below. Are you a blogger? What advertising platform do you use?
Corey Stokes 