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