31 Days to Building a Better Blog—Day 9
May 30th, 2008 by Nut
Well, I’m back from getting married so it’s time for Day 9 of Building a Better Blog. This tip is essential for your blog if you have decided to run ads on it: Run an Ad Audit.
The idea here is to take a look at your existing ads and play with their placement, color, and so on to make it more “ad efficient.” The problem I have with some of the tips is that I don’t want to make the user experience a horrible one just to make some coin. Cheesy, I know, but still. I tried putting an inset ad along every blog post back in the day and while it would follow all the “rules” of an efficient ad, it looked horrible and I hated the way it made the blog look.
The challenge is to put together a blog that looks and reads great while getting as many ad dollars as possible from that great look. No compromises on that — you’ll never see a Kontera ad on this site, ever. This means that some of the tips here don’t apply to me, but that still leaves plenty of others I can use. And it’s nice to see that I’m already following some of them, like having content sandwiched between ads and blending the color in the ads to fit the site’s look.
One thing I haven’t tried (probably because it involves a fair amount of regular work) is rotating the colors regularly to combat blindness. That’s a really good idea because I’ve seen the site a ton and it’s true, you stop seeing these things. It also helps that I have my notes from my new reader audit, which lets me play with ads without interfering with that experience. I’ve changed to colors in my Google ads to orange,simply because it’s different, catchy, and I have a fair bit of it already on the site (ING link, duck’s feet, Feeds, etc.). It looks a little funky but I don’t know — does it work?
Either way, this is something that can only be improved by obsessive tracking, which I do with a lot of things but haven’t applied to the ads on the site. I need get a little crazy with how often I check these things instead of being excited every month that I earn over $2.
31 Days to a Better Blog Update: So I am almost a third of the way through and while I haven’t seen a huge influx of dollars, I can say that I had been at around 30 registered users with Feedburner and I now have jumped ten readers to around 40. This is awesome because I stalled at 30 for a LONG time so I think that all these tips are definitely having an effect. So far so good but I won’t take a look at the final numbers until I’m done!
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