One of the things that makes Blogger such a great blogging platform is the ease with which you can add advertising to your Blogspot.com blog and make money from it. In this post I shall be discussing how banner advertisements on your Bloggerblog can create passive income for you. By banner advertising I mean advertising in addition to Google AdSense or AdBriteor other contextual ad services you may have already added to your Blogger blog. For information on adding Google AdSense to your blog please read my articles on Google AdSense.Banner advertising is FREE - And Banners Do Make Money
It is no secret that you can make quite a bit of money by placing banners on your site provided you choose your merchant program(s) carefully and have enough people accessing your site. In my experience, once you reach around 100 unique visitors a day it is high time time to add a few banner ads to your blog.
How to Make Money from Banners on Your Blogger Blog
Affiliate marketing banners are designed to make money for the publisher – in this case: you. In order to place a banner on your blog the affiliate program provides you with a snippet of code to add to your template which makes the banner display and identifies you as the publisher. When a visitor clicks on a banner on your website that click is recorded as originating from your site and you make money as a result of that click. Depending on the merchant program that you have signed up for you will earn a commission for providing a lead, or receive a percentage of the sale.
An Example of How Banners Work
After having placed a banner ad on your Blogger blog your site gets 100 visitors in a day. Out of that 100 people 5 people (hopefully!) click on a banner which takes them through to the merchant's website. From those 5 people one person makes a purchase of around $50.00. Assuming your commission is 10% of the sale you have just earned $5.00. It really is that easy.
Making the Most of Advertising Banners
To make money from banner ads you need a lot of traffic because only a small percentage of your visitors will take any notice of the advertising on your blog and a still smaller percentage of that pool will actually buy anything once they click. Therefore it is really important that you focus your energies on building site traffic. If you need to grow your traffic read my articles on tips to increase traffic to your Blogger blog.
Of course you do need to choose your affiliate banners carefully as obviously some ads will have more appeal than others. To some extent this is a matter of trial and error, as you can never becompletely sure how a banner will perform until you try it. However, you can increase the odds of success by choosing merchant programs that are related to your blog in some way. For instance, if you blog about golfing then advertisers of golfing equipment or golfing vacations would be a good place to start.How to Add Affiliate Banners to Your Blogger Blog
Adding affiliate banners to your blog is pretty easy. In most cases it is just a matter ofcopy and paste, and pretty much anyone should be able to do this. Please read my article providing step by step instructions on how to Add Affiliate Banner Ads to the Blogger Sidebar of your Blogger blog if you are unsure. If you want to place a banner in the header of your blog please refer to Add an Affiliate Banner to Blogger Header.
Disadvantages of Banner Ads
Too many banner ads can give your visitors the impression you are just in it for the money. So make sure you do not go overboard with too much advertising that will overshadow or detract from the content of your blog. Keep in mind that less is more - so place your banners ads strategically on your blog. Very good results can be achieved by
placing a small cluster of about 4 banner ads (usually 125x125) somewhere fairly close to the top in the sidebar and a 468x60 banner in the header. The header is obviously the prime position for an effective banner advertising campaign. Read more about how to place a banner ad in the header of your Blogger blog in my adding banners toBlogger series of posts.The other main problem with banner ads is that they encourage visitors to leave your site - and as everyone knows one of the hardest jobs is to attract the visitor in the first place. Do you really want them to leave your site before they have had a chance to look around? I do not think so. Therefore, only place banner ads on your blog that you are confident will reap you some rewards, otherwise forget it. You might actually lose traffic if you provide too many inducements to leave your site.
Banner Ads Make Money
In this post I have told you about banner advertising on Blogger blogs. You have learned a little about how affiliate programs work and how you might use banner ads on your own blog to make extra money. For tutorials on adding banner ads to your Blogger Blogspot blog please refer to Add Affiliate Banner Ads to a Blogger Sidebar and Add an Affiliate Banner to Blogger Header.
Good luck!