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Monetization as part of Blog Design

Posted on December 4th, 2008. Written by mobiledummy.

If you have your own blog then you probably know that good blog design draws a reader in instead of repelling them. Good design makes your blog appear more credible. Design is secondary to content, but it’s an important cornerstone of your blog foundation.

Along with mastering design comes blog monetization which becomes part of your blog design. Advertisements should be integrated into blog design in a way that blog visitors easily commute them with blog content.

Bad monetization can set back the hard work you’ve put into the rest of your design and keep your web site from generating the income it is capable of producing.

Your blog should be designed with monetization in mind, so that you can produce some income from your pages without your readers feeling like you are cramming ads down their throats.

Make an effort to have the ads you place on your blog be relevant to whatever your content is, if possible. Some niches are harder to pair with products, some are easy. Nobody is going to click ads for nutritional supplements on your Make Money blog.

Pursue private sponsors that are perfect for your blog. Your web site is perfect for their targeted traffic. Private ads usually look an order of magnitude better than pay per click ads. Private ads mean guaranteed money every month.

Don’t overmonetize! We have different opinions on what “too much” means. Just don’t let your content or your design suffer because of your monetization.

Where to place ads?

Some locations pay, some don’t. In my experience the sidebars don’t get too many clicks, which is too bad because it’s a nice place to put ads that doesn’t interfere with your content. Same goes for the footer. Above the content is by far the best. Immediately below the content is good (It gives the reader somewhere to go). As far as ads within content goes, this can be the most successful strategy of all.

Since more often than not you are not the one designing the ads you will place, in many instances you will still have some degree of control over how they display on your page. A good rule of thumb with pay-per-click ads is to either

1. make them blend into your pages (I always use this strategy)
2. really make them stand out

I am not a fan of text link ads. They offer very good money for very little space, but at the end they will hurt your blog. Google doesn’t approve any kind of paid link on blog and if you will use them anyway expect that your pagerank will drop to 0 and location in search results will also suffer.

Following these tenets of good design will help you monetize your blog in a way that will complement your design and content, allow you to make some money, and not have your readers think you are more concerned with the lucre than you are them.

Content is king, but that doesn’t mean you have to wrap it in a brown paper bag. Whether the thought has crossed your mind before or not, your monetization is part of your design.