Fancy making an extra $20, $35, $100 or $250 a month in US dollars for each of your blogs? If you have a blog and aren’t making any money or would like to make more money to cover the running costs and increase your overall bank balance - read more about Buy Sell Ads.
My inspiration for this article came from Serradinho.com – a Thesis Theme WordPress blog I reviewed earlier. George has done amazing things with his site since transferring to Thesis Theme and every time I visit I pick up some great ideas. I thoroughly recommend visiting and subscribing to Serradinho.com – as well as Thesis Theme HQ :-)
Monetizing Tastefully
We have all visited sites that are covered in ad boxes and banners. Your eyes are assaulted with animated ugly gifs and flashing colours and it is difficult to relax into reading the articles. If the font is smaller than what you like or wierd colours, you struggle to navigate around the ads to get to the content.
When adding advertising to your site – you want to make sure that your visitors appreciate the ads and don’t ‘switch off’.
Monetize Your Site Sooner Than Later
I read somewhere a while back that you should start advertising on your site from the day you put your electronic shingle up. This way, as you develop a readership of loyal visitors, your ‘ tribe’ is trained to feel comfortable around ads – to prevent the big surprise that will inevitably come when you do put ads on your site.
- Unless you are blogging purely for the fun of it and are happy to pay for your own pleasure.
- Many of us however, need to monetize our site to keep it viable. If you get popular your costs will increase and learning about advertising management in your early days will save you much pain and suffering later when very costly mistakes can be made.
Buy Sell Ads (BSA)
While over at Serradinho.com I noticed some new ad boxes in the sidebar and footer. These boxes were subtle grey boxes with ‘Advertise here’. Like these ones on my site taken in the screenshots below (I’m planning to have them filled by ads soon enough).
I could not help but click and find out what web application it was.
I arrived at Buy Sell Ads (BSA) and immediately found out what advertising was available, what size and shape the banners needed to be, the locations to choose from, how many ad units were available and most importantly how much it will cost each month in USD and how simple it was to buy advertising and sell advertising!
- I spent no more than 2 minutes signing up and was approved overnight.
- It took no more than 10 minutes to set up my ads on BSA and paste the code onto my site.
All you have to do to add the grey box to your sidebar is paste the code into a text widget. With the footer, paste the code into the WP Footer box using the Thesis OpenHook plugin.
- So – for a total of 15 minutes I now have the opportunity to make some extra cash via some ad boxes.
Check out BSA . They don’t have an affiliate program – they just do what they do well so bloggers can blog.
{ 3 comments… read them below or add one }
Thanks for mentioning Serradinho.com. I try my best to keep my site simple, but yet still effective. I actually got told about BSA’s by another blogger and I’m trying it out.
I have not yet made any sales, so this is still in testing phase. Have you made any sales? Your prices are very reasonable.
.-= George Serradinho´s last blog ..Serious Monday Roundup #2 =-.
Thanks for the BSA tip for monetizing our blogs!
Thanks for the info, i am currently using BSA plugin for wordpress, that lets me have control on placement and number of blocks irrespective to the wordpress theme used.