Good design draws a reader in instead of repelling them. Good design makes your web site appear more credible. Design is secondary to content, but it’s an important cornerstone of your web site’s foundation. Since design is subjective, mastering the design that works for your web site is a task you will never really consider completed. There is always room for improvement, and experimenting is the only way to wade through the hits and misses to arrive at the elements you want to keep.
Think of your website’s monetization as being part of your design. You should. Those ads are eating up real estate on your pages. People see them. Thinking of your web site’s monetization as an aspect of your design is important, regardless of whether the herd has already hit your site or whether you are still building traffic. 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 web site 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. On Wordpress this means having headers, footers and sidebars that are optimized for placing ad content. On one of the popular CMS solutions this means having enough module positions in your template for flexibility in ad placement and display.
Make an effort to have the ads you place on your web site 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 World of Warcraft blog.
Pursue private sponsors that are perfect for your web site. The ads are perfect for your reader. 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. You may end up developing important relationships with your sponsors that will benefit you down the road. They may give you a crack at reviewing their hot new product, or better yet, may send you one gratis.
Don’t monetize too early? Look, if you have a design and more than a page or two of content, go ahead. It may not produce, but it won’t kill you to try. You won’t make much money, but you’ll get some experience with placement, design and different ad providers.
Don’t overmonetize? Boy, this is really subjective. We have different opinions on what “too much” means. Just don’t let your content or your design suffer because of your monetization. I’ll use the example of the blog I found who had a PayPerPost affiliate banner in between every_single_piece_of_content on his site. Too much.
Ad positioning. 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. The caveats are A) don’t annoy your readers and B) don’t pursue monetization at the expense of your content. Undermine that and the ad revenue will surely go south. Your article should still flow, and if you place your ads the same way you place images, it will. Don’t let your content be overtaken by your attempt to produce some income.
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 A) make them blend into your pages or B) really make them stand out. I have always gone with strategy A and felt that my ppc ads performed as well as can be expected.
Advertisers don’t care if your web site validates or not. If you do, you better check your XHTML validation on the pages you have placed ads on. Many advertisers have sloppy code in their ads that will break your XHTML. A common culprit is use of a ‘language’ declaration in javascript. XHTML doesn’t allow it. Remove the offending snippet from the code and replace with type=”text/javascript” and you’ll be alright. Generally you can make someone else’s ad code validate, but there are cases where it’s just plain broken. If someone can’t be bothered to make ads that will validate, I can’t be bothered to publish them on my web site.
If you’ve read any of my articles on Connected Internet, then you know that I am not a fan of text link ads. They offer very good money for very little space. They will almost never give you something that is relevant to your niche, which is my first issue with them. My second and overwhelmingly strong issue with text link ads is that they will hurt your web site. That good text link income comes at the expense of your web site’s relationship with Google. If you do not care about that relationship, by all means, take the money and run. If you do care, then be advised that your pagerank and location in search results will suffer from having any kind of paid link on your web site. This is your decision. I am absolutely not anti-text link ad, but I have made the decision that using them is contrary to the goals I have for my web site. If using them is not going to set back your web site as far as what your goals for the site are, then you’d almost be stupid for not using them. They represent a fantastic, guaranteed source of income if you can get them. Just be aware of the issues surrounding Google’s stance on paid links.
Following these tenets of good design will help you monetize your web site 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. Give it the same consideration you would the other aspects of your site’s design.
