Might you use a banner advertisement on your site to generate an income? By that we mean could you use one to increase your takings? There’s a big difference between something that adds to the total takings you make and something that makes an takings itself, but costs you more traffic and takings from elsewhere.

Free sites
So, can you add a banner advertisement to your website? Of course you can, typically! If you are some free services, for instance WordPress.com (but not the WordPress.org that you host for yourself) then such forms of advertising are banned, so the answer is “No” and the debate ends here!

Other blogs
But for other systems you are allowed to add banners, either in the sidebar, the footer or within the actual post. However, do you really want to?

At first the answer must be “Yes!” and there is a chance of earning an revenue, whether from an advertiser’s payments of from affiliate payments. But now look deeper into this and whether they are actually effective. That is, whether you are actually making a profit. If you use that space for a banner advert, what are the effects?

Too much is never good!
Well for a start, too much advertising round the page is going to put people off reading your site. It makes the site look like you are just interested in your readers for what they might do for you – earn you money. This makes them less budding to subscribe to your RSS feeds and newsletters and less impending to trust your writing and come back.

Using valuable space.
It is also taking up valuable space. To get the best from a banner advert you want it high up on the side bar – so that lots of people might see it and click on it. But this will mean that you have to shove the important pieces of navigation further down the page. These are the navigation elements that will be used by readers to come back again or find more to read now, as for instance most popular posts lists,RSS feeds , ebooks as incentives to subscribe and so on. By having the banner advert above these elements, your readers are prospective to explore your weblog less now and in the future.

Reducing the value of other advertising
Lastly, if you are wanting to take part in sponsored posting then the value of these is decreased because of the other advertising on the page. An advertiser is less prospective to pay you for an advert if you are also showing competing adverts on the same page.

The answer?
For my own blogs, I prefer to only include any banner advertisements where they are relevant in key posts. For an affiliate product, if I want site wide coverage I will create a key post, link to that from the navigation and put the banner link into the post itself.

But yes, you could quite easily use a banner advert on your website, at potentially the price of reducing your readership and advertising from other sources. It is up to you what works best.

Written by Keith Lunt of How TO Start A Blog. Call in if you need any help or advice with earn money blogging.

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