All Things in Moderation!

Unless you have decided that you are running a site purely for par-per-click revenue, you will want to watch your step when it comes to ads on your pages. If you actually have a decent website that you would like to see monetize itself, you don’t want to overshadow it with AdSense or affiliates.

Have you ever visited a website and almost immediately left because it seemed like there were more ads than anything? Have you been searching for something, and floundered through site after site only to run into slow loading and navigational issues at every turn?

If so you know first-hand how annoying it can be. The secret to a good website is to make it first and foremost user friendly. You have about ten to twenty seconds to catch their attention, and maybe another thirty to convince them to stick around.

Make your landing page clean and appealing. Restrict ads on your front page to a few on either side, and keep the page fairly short to improve load time. If you have a longer page, consider sticking some of the les important content below the fold with a few seconds delay so you can load your first screen rapidly.

Avoid flash on your landing pages – the indexing of your home and main entry pages is important, and you can miss out on a lot of SEO by incorporating too much flash into the important areas of your site.

As you get deeper into your site, you can use a little more ads and affiliates – use heavy SEO on these inner pages and your ads will be highly relevant. Make sure not to use so much that you encourage visitors to escape your site! Linking to your inner pages helps keep your visitors engaged. The longer they spend ion your site the better the chances of turning them into paying customers.

Provide an easy sitemap for your visitors. You can adapt the map you presented to Google, or make up one of your own. It never hurts to have a link to a map page – visitors will be able to reorient themselves and always be able to find what they need without becoming frustrated and bouncing away from your site.

Use your links judiciously as well – you don’t want to pull the plug on your landing page juice by detracting too much from its pull. You can always help some of your interior pages with deep links from outside sources.

As you slowly learn how to monetize your site, you will find the proper balance of content and advertising that will return the most revenue. For most sites, a combination approach is best, though some make a full income off of just pay-per-click and others shun outside advertising completely.

Of course, even all AdSense sites do best when populated with enough content to engage and direct customers, so don’t forget your SEO, no matter what kind of campaign you run – no visitors means no profits, however you look at it.