Don’t place unrelated advertisements on your blog

One of the most common mistakes i see in blogs is unrelated advertisements in the sidebar or banner areas. This mistake is causing bloggers to lose out on thousands of dollars in commissions.

The first thing you need to remember about affiliate marketing and making money on the web in general is that advertisements which are targeted perform infinitely better than ones which are not.

What is an unrelated Advertisement?

An unrelated advertisement is simply a text or banner ad which is placed on your blog which has nothing to do with your blogs core subject.

The best example i can give you is banner ads promoting Text Link Ads. As im sure most of you know, if you refer a new advertiser to Text Link Ads you get $25. Twenty five dollars is pretty poor in CPA (Cost Per Action) terms but since Text Link Ads performs so well it has been promoted by thousands of bloggers and webmasters, including myself. However, i have seen a ridiculous amount of unrelated blogs placing huge banner ads for TLA including music blogs, dating blogs, movie blogs and gaming blogs. In these instances TLA is an unrelated advertisement because it has nothing to do with the core subject of the blog.

I’ve used Text Link Ads as an example as most readers here know about the site. Here are some more examples to illustrate what exactly an unrelated advertisement is :

• A banner for shoes on a gaming blog
• An advertisement for gadgets on a dating blog
• A text link for lingerie on a political blog

You may think that i’m using some obscure examples above but i’ve personally came across some strange choices for sponsors on blogs in the past. Now that you are aware of it,i’m sure you will notice it a bit more too.

Understand your Core Readers

Some blogs talk about a wide range of subjects but in my opinion most successful blogs have a core subject or topic. For example, i may sometimes post about my personal life here or something funny that happened or whatever but my core subject is blogging advice. Similarly, John Chow posts a lot about eating out but his core subject is making money on the web.

Once you know what your core subject is, you should have a better understanding of who your core readers are. By core readers i mean the reason why the majority of people visit your blog. For example, say you own a music blog which talks specifically about guitars and tablature. You may get some unrelated traffic through search engines and you may get some traffic from commentating on blogs like Blogging Tips or Pro Blogger but 80% or more of your traffic should hopefully be people who are interested in guitars and tablature. Therefore, your core readers are clearly guitar players and you should target your ads accordingly.

Targered ads perform much better than untargeted and unrelated advertisements. Think about it - the majority of your readers are guitar players, do they want to know about an advertising network like Text Link Ads or do they want to know about the latest guitar pedal that has been just been released?

Don’t expect high paying affiliate sites to make you more than others

Allow me to use the guitar blog again as an example. Say you have to decide whether to display TLA ads which makes you $25 per new advertiser referral or a banner for the latest guitar pedal which retails for $50 and only makes you $8 per sale. Which do you think would make you more money? I’m sure you all realise that with 80-90% or more of your traffic coming to your blog to read about guitars, the guitar pedal banner will make you much more cash than the Text Link Ads banner because very few of your readers will be interested in it.

I’ll like to state at this point that unrelated and untargeted advertisements can and do still make money however the commissions they make on the whole will be lower than targeted ads. Your readers will obviously have a wide range of interests other than the topic they are reading on your blog.

I spoke previously about how 80-90% of your traffic should be reading your blog for it’s core subject. Due to the nature of the internet there will always be someone coming across your blog who didn’t mean to or whatever which is why the real figure is never 100% but to make things simple for the example i am going to use, let’s assume that 100% of your readers are interested in your core subject - eg guitars and tablature. If you asked your readers to fill in a survey for you you might find that :

• 70% of your core readers are interested in tablature
• 60% are interested in guitar pedals
• 50% are interested in mp3 players
• 35% are interested in your bass guitar topics
• 15% are interested in video games
• 12% are interested in movies
• 4% are interested in politics

What do all these figures mean? Well put simply it means that whilst 70% of your core readers like reading about tablature and will be interested in tablature books etc, 30% will not. It also means thats 60% of your readers are interested in guitar pedals whilst 40% are not and so on and so on.

What i am trying to illustrate above is that there will always be some topics you cover that some of your readers don’t have any interest in however you should always target your advertisements towards what your core readers like. You may think that placing an ad for the new playstation 3 is a smart move because 15% of your readers are video game fans but you need to remember that 85% of your readers have no interest in video games.

The main point im trying to convey here is that whilst your readers are interested in various subjects, they visit your blog to read about your core subject and you should target your ads accordingly.

If your still unsure about what advertisements to place on your blog then check out rival blogs and see what they advertise or even just ask your readers directly what kind of ads they want on your blog. You’ll be surprised at how loyal readers are when they enjoy your content - 99% won’t grudge you earning a living!

OverView

I hope you all now have a basic understanding about what an unrelated advertisement is and more importantly, what kind of ads you should be using on your blog. Keep your blog sponsors related to your blog’s content and you should see a better return on all your hard work

If you have any questions though please let me know.

Kevin