Blogs That Make The Most Money Put Content First

If you want to generate more advertising revenue and affiliate income from your blog, this post is just for you!

I visited a blog earlier, which had Google adwords inserted several times into the post I was hoping to read. The sidebar was auto-running video ads, which were extremely distracting. This combined to make the site look cheap and caused me to rethink the quality of the content. 5 seconds after arriving, I was on another site.

Successful content marketing is about putting the content first!

The second site also had ads (affiliate ads this time), but they did not get in the way of the content. The affiliate ads were also directly relevant to the blog’s content. My overall experience of the second blog was positive and it was little wonder that it seemed to be massively more popular than the first blog.

The blogs that make the most money are those that put the content first. As a result, they get more readers and can serve more page impressions and ad clicks.

Content marketing and ad revenue

If your monetization strategy is to generate income from advertising, this does not mean cramming as many ads as you can into every inch of available space. Your strategy needs numbers. It needs people to read, share and link to your blog. And remember, without those links, your blog will get very little search traffic.

People also tend to be very apprehensive about sharing links with their friends, which lead to sites that ate lit up with ads and flashing banners, like a Vegas slot machine on acid!

Put the content first. Keep your blog posts targeted around a theme and then offer ads and products / services that are closely aligned with the content of your blog. It works for the most successful blogs in the world and can work for you too. Great examples of this approach include; Seth Godin’s blog, Danny Brown’s blog, Leo Laporte’s TWiT network and copyblogger.

Many sites would INCREASE their revenues, especially from affiliate ads, by reducing the number of adverts on their blogs; not increasing them.

Originally published on internetmarketingjam.com

There are 5 Comments. Add Yours.

Cuck T
February 10, 2011 at 2:59 pm

Your theory is totally speculative! There’s not one once of fact to back-up your statement.
Guest
February 11, 2011 at 3:48 am

This post is kinda old skool and little bit lame…
Joanna
February 15, 2011 at 10:59 am

I checked the top content marketing blogs I read and hes right, they don’t fill them with ads like the guys at the bottom do. Chrisbrogan.com is the biggest social media blog and he has just 2 or 3 affiliate ads.

Not sure the author isn’t on to something.

@cuckt You say the guys full of shit? I went to the site where the origional post was written, to see if it gets any traction, and its only a month old. But it still has a better alexa traffic score than your site. So, hes just like super lucky or whatever?
Chem
May 29, 2011 at 9:58 am

Far as I know, as long as there is a url listing you’ll get traffic and it will improve the page raking.
Scott Hudson
October 2, 2011 at 2:04 am

Thank you for this nice post

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