Seth Godin brings up some excellent points to ponder when it comes to monetizing blogs.
- How many ads should you run per page?
- What is most effective?
- Do my visitors love or hate my ads?
Seth says, in a post entitled “Promotion, self-promotion and [insert ad here]”
“…the nature of promotion is that “10” is never enough. You always need to be at “11”. And when the competition hits 11, that becomes the new 10.”
I love it. The man always has a way of speaking the truth more clearly than most.
The idea is to test, of course, in order to know how much advertising your visitors will tolerate before starting to bounce right off your site.
Another consideration is that too much advertising gets in the way of others things, like list building, relationship building, and a search engine optimization tactic that is just coming into its own: [tag]visitor duration[/tag].
Got no visitor duration over 30 seconds showing in your log files? You got a problem.
It could be you are in too much of a hurry to scoot people off your site because you are monetizing too heavily with ads and not enough with reader relationship building.