Monetize WordPress Blog for Better CTR

One of the biggest mistakes that new bloggers make when first starting to monetize their blog is not optimizing the ad placements. I can’t stress this enough; proper ad placement is vitally importantto the success of your monetization strategy.

In a nutshell, you want your ads to appear right in front of your visitors, but not in a “spammy” sort of way. Your ads need to appear natural looking and blend into your site’s design, and yet must stand out and make your visitor want to click through. This is the key to increasing your CTR.

Have a look at the ad placement optimization map provided by Google.

As you can see, the ad “hot spots” are basically the areas surrounding the content of your blog posts or pages. You’d be surprised at how high your CTR jumps just by testing out different ad placements on your site. I recommend you test different ad placements at 30 day intervals and see which ones perform the best. Remember, it’s much better to have fewer ads in optimized ad locations than having ads in every available piece of real estate your blog has to offer – less is often more.

If you find that an ad location isn’t performing well, simply remove the ad. Why have an ad on your site that is doing nothing more than wasting space? Visitors to your site are much more likely to return to your blog if they are not overwhelmed by the amount of advertising at your site.

Focus on the ad spots that are performing well and making your site the most money – eliminate the under-performing ads. It will give your site a cleaner, lighter design – not to mention give it a more reputable look. Case in point: have a look at Yahoo’s home page . It looks extremely clean and only has a couple of noticeable ads. The rest of the page is good, useful content and links. Yahoo is focusing on just a couple of ad spots and maximizing their revenue that way.

On a related note, you should test out various ad color combinations and both text and image ads to see which ones convert better for your blog. This is different for every blog, so it’s tough to pinpoint which type of ad performs better. I have found that a healthy mix of both text and image ads work best.

As far as color combinations go, it’s usually best to blend the ads into your blog’s color scheme. That being said, sometimes it’s best to use the default #0000FF color for links since that’s what most Internet users see as clickable links, and thus they’ll be more likely to click the ad.

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