In one of my previous articles on how to make money with Google AdSense, I mentioned one of the simplest ways of earning from your blog by configuring ads: Google Adsense. It allows you to launch ads in your blog and manages the ads automatically, so it doesn’t involve any tedious configurations on your end.
However, an even more important question is…
Should you launch ads on your blog at all?
If the answer is yes, when do you start showing ads? Should you first gather an interested audience, or how much traffic do you need to start showing ads? What are the alternatives to showing ads?
Let’s discuss all these questions in this article and I’ll do my best to help you make this decision.
We’ll start by examining how much blogs make from ads, and examine the benefits and drawbacks of monetizing your blog through ads.
Getting Your Blog Ready to Show Ads
Before launching ads on your blog, consider the advantages and disadvantages of this monetization scheme.
Disadvantages of putting ads on your blog/website
We’ll start with the drawbacks that are stopping you from putting ads on your website, k?
1. Poor user experience
If you worked hard on your website, you may be concerned with launching ads. And I totally get you, ads directly influence the overall user experience and may throw off a part of your audience, that’s true.
When I was first launching ads on my blog, I was freaking out. I didn’t want my blog to be overloaded with ads at all. As ads were only a small part of my monetization, and the largest was selling my products and services, I was terrified that no one was going to order my services once they saw ads on my website.
At the same time, I was curious. I could make passive income that would not rely on orders at all.
Soon after that, I discovered that AdSense is very flexible and you can manage the number of ad blocks on your website.
I’ll get back to why you should not be afraid of deteriorating your blog’s user experience in the Advantages section below.
2. Other types of monetization
In real life, there are no 100% positive or negative things, right?
Whether or not to launch ads is directly connected to the monetization of your website and your goals. So to answer whether you should start the ads on your blog or not, you need to ask yourself the right question.
What is it that you’re striving for? What are you trying to achieve?
I’ll show you why this is important.
For instance, your goal is $1,000 passive income. You created a website that gets terrific traffic and found a way to effortlessly update it, either with a scheduler or with an auto-post bot. Have you achieved your goal? Of course, and as a result, you can earn several hundred or thousand dollars passively.
However… (there’s always a ‘however‘).
If your goal is even more traffic, become a leader in your niche, and gain authority, maybe putting ads on your blog is not the best monetization strategy.
This brings us to the next point. Monetization.
AdSense is not the only way to monetize your blog, and quite frankly, it’s one of the least-paying systems. At the same time, it offers a lot of benefits that we’ll discuss in a few paragraphs.
Your monetization strategy will hugely depend on your niche. For instance, if you have a website on printer drivers, another monetization that you’ll have to consider is affiliate income. If you’re a consultant in a certain field and you blog about this topic, maybe you could sell your services instead.
You can hardly find something that will be more lucrative than selling your own product.
Advantages of putting ads on your blog/website
Let’s now briefly discuss the advantages of Adsense or any other ad management system.
1. Passive income
Ok, it might not be passive 100% of the time.
But it’s as close to passive income as you’re gonna get. You literally have to set AdSense up once and then it’ll be bringing you more and more each month provided you’re actively blogging and updating content on your website.
2. No responsibility for your own product
It’s fair to say that creating your own product is more lucrative.
But the flip side of the coin is that you’ll have to own your product, provide support to your buyers, and take responsibility, which might not be your goal.
3. You can configure the volume of ads
Google AdSense is a very flexible platform.
First, Google allows you to exclude as many pages from your website as you wish. Basically, you can only launch ads on a certain part of your site, like a specific article, or only in the blog in general.
Next, you can configure the volume of ads to avoid turning your website into one of those spammy websites with more ads than content.
Additionally, you can enable just the exact ad blocks and turn off the rest.
4. You can scale this approach to get even more traffic
Once you have grasped the basics of SEO, you can scale the system and create as many systems as you want.
5. Launching ads is simple
Getting approved in Google AdSense is easy. Basically, the only thing you need to start is a website with some traffic on it. It may not even be organic traffic from Google.
Summary
Launching ads on your blog offers a lot of advantages, however, there’s a downside to this monetization strategy. Based on your personal and business goals, you can decide whether you want to put ads on your blog or not.
