If you’re a blogger, chances are you’re interested in monetizing your blog. One of the most popular ways to do so is advertising. There are many different forms of advertising out there for bloggers – from ad networks like Google Ad Sense, to direct advertisements, to affiliate marketing and sponsorships.

 When using advertising to monetize your blog, there’s a few principles to keep in mind. Firstly, crowding your blog with a lot of adverts will only irritate your readers. It is much better to keep ads to a minimum – having one high paying ad is infinitely more useful than several low paying ads. Moreover, ads should be relevant to your site – that is, if you’re a blog about language learning, your ads might be promoting language learning apps, websites, textbooks or other useful resources for your readers. Similarly, if you are a blog about swimming, you’ll want to be advertising appropriate equipment like flippers and goggles – not skiwear!

 The more traffic your website receives, the higher value your blog boasts for the advertiser. Moreover, if you have a loyal, engaged readership who will actively click through adverts, advertisers will pay more to advertise on your site.

 As noted, there are tons of ways to use adverts to monetize your blog – the aforementioned list is by no means exhaustive, so you can get creative and explore the many different types of advertising out there. This post will focus exclusively on Ad Networks, and how to leverage them to your advantage to start making money from your blog today!

 Google Ad Sense

Google AdSense is probably the easiest way to start making money from your blog. You simply add a script provided by Google to your blog, and ads will begin displaying automatically. You’ll be paid every time a reader clicks on an advert, and the pay out is set by the advertiser and moderated by Google.

 Adverts from Google Ad Sense can be text, images, videos or other interactive media formats, and they’re great because they’re targeted to the sites content and audience! Ads are decided by Google, meaning their quality will always be sound.

 There are two models used by Google Ad Sense – Cost Per Click (CPC) advertising, which means the blogger is paid for how many people click on the advert, or Cost Per Impression (CPM) which means the number of people seeing the advert decides the bloggers pay out. CPM stands for cost per thousand impressions (M is the roman numeral for a thousand) and so the price is decided by the estimated viewership of the advert.

 What’s also cool about Google Ad Sense is that they use the Ad Choices program – viewers to your blog can decide if they want to see this particular advert, if it’s been useful, or if it is offensive in anyway. If the advert covers content of your blog, viewers can also report it. Making your blog readers feel more involved in their viewing of ads is invaluable to any blog, as your readers can choose if an ad is irritating them and explain why.

 Google makes an incredible 22% of their total revenue from Google Ad Sense, and around 1.1 million websites use Google Ad Sense already.

The only catch is that your blog needs to have more than 300 views per day to qualify to join Google Ad Sense – if you have a high volume of traffic to your site, you simply request to be approved by Google, and then once approved, you start earning money right away!