No I’m not asking you to leave your life partner or change job, just to put some effort into the most important part of your make money website, your ads and banners!
Change Is Good
Some of the regular readers here might have noticed that I’ve changed the Text-Link-Ads banner that was at the top of the page. That one advert made me $50 last month so you might be wondering why change it? The truth is that this month has been poor, it’s showing a much lower CTR and has only made me $25 and that was right at the beginning of the month. The problem as I see it is that all the people interested in Text-Link-Ads are already signed up and if like me you’re here every day you will eventually become blind to that advert. Without huge amounts of fresh traffic I know my current visitors are 75% the same faces each day. From my own experiences that blindness can happen after as little as 3 or 4 weeks and at the point you ads become nothing more than page filler. Now I know that some people put adverts up and just leave them forever, I’ve been guilty of exactly the same thing in the past and that’s why I know how important it is to vary things. If you want to make money you are going to have to put the effort in, try different banners in different positions for different products. Always remember to use some sort of analysis tool so that you can track results. Even when you have something which is working for you DO NOT BE AFRAID TO CHANGE, remember that you can always go back to what was working later and it might be even better now that it is fresh again. In changing my banner I’ve already made 1 sale so perhaps it wasn’t that stupid an idea!
What About Adsense?
I’m glad you asked. Google has a sort of “hot spot” map of where you should put your Adsense blocks. The simple version of this is above the fold, in your content and to the left. However what they don’t tell you is that varying your ad positions, size and colours can really help you make more money. Once again it’s a simple case of monitoring your results, it’s easy to be lazy and content with how you are doing but if you don’t try different things how will you ever know? One of my favourite Adsense tricks is to find the 2 Adsense combinations (format, position, colour) that work best for a given page and rotate them every month. It keeps the page fresh and helps to prevent the inevitable lag in Adsense earnings that people experience as a page is left with exactly the same Adsense on it for months if not years.
3 Responses to “Don’t Be Afraid Of Change”
Michelle
September 28, 2007
Hi,
So you’re saying that your regular readers may get ‘ad blind’ – and ignore the ads (particularly after they have signed up for the text link ads)? Makes sense, I guess.
Could I ask – what three advert types have you found most effective? (ie banners? skyscrapers?) and do you consider the embedded advserts work best – or should you make them stand out (or a bit of both?)
Ta!
|Donald Mckenzie Jr
September 29, 2007
Great post. I agree that is you spoil your page with too many ads, visitors will get bored and leave. Ad blindness is a severly contaigous disease. lol…
|Paul B
October 1, 2007
@ Michelle – Square or wide always works for me, I’ve never had any luck with sky-scrapers but then again that is probably down to the page layout I tend to go for. Colour, alternate, it does work!
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