Ads are good especially if they are relevant to your website content. But I do stand by my previous comment about having to many ads is a bad thing. I don’t want to go to a website to be sent to a completely different website. it can be confusing for some people.

I agree 100%. maybe some ads might be good but putting a lot of ads on your site will for one bog down your site as well as usually causes your clients get annoyed with all the pop ups.

I get these questions about Adsense too and also see ’em all over Quora and Warrior.

I feel ad revenue seems the most comfortable, easy to set up stream to blogging newbies. Or to struggling bloggers. No real skill required to paste HTML to your sidebar. Most of these bloggers are in for a hyper rude awakening when they see how incredibly hard it is to earn ad revenue that reaches appreciable levels.

Unless you get thousands and thousands and thousands and more visitors daily to your blog – and even if you do – this money ain’t adding up. At least in the Western World. Or heck, throughout the whole world.

Bloggers think set it up, write, and earn ad revenue. Sounds sweet. But when you are not getting sick sick sick blog traffic, at month’s end your ad revenue usually adds up to about $.04 cents. Or maybe if it’s a good month you make $7 USD. Yikes.

Scrap the ads and get to work. Offer something useful by learning a product or service. Write and self publish audio books. If I post a widget on my sidebar for an audio book – and I should do it again, as I did a little while back – I don’t get paid per click but the 3 bucks I get in Amazon commissions plus the affiliate commissions I get on those sales will add up to something far beyond the pennies per click I got with Adsense on my old Blogger blocks from 5 years ago.

Create something helpful. A course. A live webinar call series. Advertise that in the place of your ads. Brand yourself, earn a ton more money and feel good what the value you are bringing to the table.

Another underrated point; you have little or no control over ads as you said but you are handing over branding too. I am a b*tch about branding LOL. Really a stickler. Everything on my blog has to have the BFP logo plastered all over it, or it ain’t showing up on my blog. No ad network can resonate with my blog and brand, in that regard. So I just toss audio books and eBooks on there and remain true to my brand, and make more money than I ever world with ad revenue.

When you’re generating that Huff Post traffic with either an army of writers or if you get super duper famous and rake in a boatload of visitors, feel free to post those ads. You can rake it in. But until then, offer a useful product or service and place those ads in that space to rock it out, to make more dough and to feel good about rendering helpful service to others.

Thanks for the fab post Ramsay.

Signing off from Thailand.

Ryan

Occasionally when the ads are being pulled it seems to hang. when i check pingdom it shows 404 errors for the adsense destination site. I believe it maybe a missing favicon. Very strange.

Ooops that’s not meant to be there. Contact page in footer.

Yeah, sounds reasonable to me. Thanks for commenting.

What do you mean about the 404s?