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There are a variety of ways to make money through your blog, but today we are going to cover advertising and ways to make money through your blog by serving ads from ad networks.

Firstly we’ll cover a little terminology that you may encounter working with ad networks, and secondly we’ll look at some of the more popular ad networks.

Terminology

Publisher – that’s you. As the author of a blog you are a publisher.

Inventory – are the ads that the ad network displays.

Ad units – These refer to the different types of ads which appear online, including banners, interstitials, pop-ups, skyscrapers and text links.

Clicks – The number of click throughs having occurred as a result of a user clicking on a banner and being redirected to an advertiser’s page.

Cost Per Click (CPC) – This term refers to an amount of money paid by advertisers for each click through on their ad. Prices can vary greatly.

Cost Per Thousand (CPM) – CPM is the figure advertisers will pay publishers per thousand impressions (the ‘M’ in this case deriving from ‘Mille’, the Latin word for ‘thousand’ – confusing I know) of an ad.

Click-through rate (CTR) – Click-through rate or CTR refers to the percentage of impressions that results in a click through. For example if an ad was clicked on 64 times out of the  1,000 times it is displayed the CTR would be 6.4%.

eCPM – Effective Cost Per Mille tells a publisher what he or she would have received if they sold advertising inventory on a CPM basis.

Impressions – This refers to the number of times a banner ad has been shown to users. It should be noted that caching and page load errors can lead to inaccurate impression counts.

Remnant space – some ad networks allow you to supply ad code from other ad networks you work with so that in situations where they don’t have ad inventory to display they will display your remnant ad.

Ad networks

There are hundreds, if not thousands of ad networks out there to choose from so it can be a little overwhelming in selecting which ad network to go with. Some are better than others to deal with. So we’ll give you a run down of the more popular ad networks to get you started.

Google Adsense

Google Adsense is probably the first, and most obvious choice when it comes to advertising. Sign up is simple and implementation is easy. While the amount of money you make from Adsense might not be as high as some other networks, it’s a nice supplement, and with effective ad placement and a decent amount of page views you can make a tidy amount. The other benefit of signing up with Google Adsense is that you can use your Adsense ads as remnant ads (backup ads) when other ads you work with don’t have inventory.

One thing to be aware of with Adsense is that you will only receive payment once your revenue reaches the cut off threshold for your currency. For Australia this is $150.

BlogHer

I’m a member of BlogHer, and they’ve worked really well for me. One thing to be aware of is that BlogHer only serves ads to visitors to your site that reside in the US, so if your US readership is small you will mainly be displaying remnant ads, such as Google Adsense.

Federated Media

If you are a reader of  blogs such as Dooce, Boing Boing and Apartment Therapy you might have already seen ads from the Federated Media network. They specialise in three main areas – living, business and technology.

Foodie BlogRoll

Foodie Blog Roll is a specialist ad network in the food arena.

Martha’s Circle

Martha’s Circle specialises in working with food and lifestyle blogs and tend to work with popular bloggers.

SAY Media

If you’re a reader of The Kitchen or 101 Cookbooks you’ve likely seen ads from the SAY Media network. Like Federated Media they specialise in Living, Technology and Style related blogs and only work with bloggers who have over 100,000 unique visitors per months.

Nuffnang

Nuffnang is an ad network that specialises in working with bloggers in Australia and Asia.

Placement is key

I use Google Adsense on my blog, along with BlogHer with some success. Although this didn’t happen until I experimented with placement. Placement of your ads is key to earning money. For me the most successful placements are above my website header, towards the top and middle of my sidebar and below my post before my comment form. This may vary for you so experiment and see what works with your blog design.

Also be aware that your ad revenue earnings will fluctuate from day to day, depending on the time of the year (January being a particularly low period) and on more significantly will depend on your website traffic. So try a placement configuration out for a month before considering whether it works and tweak as necessary.

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