SEO and Blog Advertisements, Annoying or Essential?

So, I've been kind of obsessing about learning all I can about SEO (Search Engine Optimization), AdSense and web / blog advertisement companies lately. I've found some great ones and some not so great ones and I've been playing around with ad placement, size and color to see what works best for me.


(Jeremy Schoemaker of Shoemoney.com, an ultra successful SEO marketing guru and his little AdSense check back in 2005)

I know some of your may find ads annoying, but they are an essential tool for any working blogger or webmaster to have in their toolbox. They allow us to continue to provide you with great content that you can use and relate to and helps compensate us financially for the money and time we put into creating our blogs / websites in order to keep our readers up to date with new and interesting content. And that's all I'm going to say about that (before I wander too close to the Google AdSense TOS electric fence ;-)...

So, for all you webmasters, if you are not using an advertisement network on your self hosted website / blog or Blogger blog you should definitely check it out. I think the best thing that implementing an ad network does for bloggers is motivate them to pump out good content and think about keywords (writing interesting / popular articles about topics that they love).

Here are some great ad networks to start you out:

• Google AdSense / Adwords: By far the most popular and most widely used, Google pretty much started the modern ad network and is still the biggest player today. If you've got subscribers, you WILL make some money... and another bonus is the amazing integrated Google Analytics that tells you everything about your website.
  
• AdBrite: Smaller network but high payoffs so far for me. I've been seeing some encouraging numbers from AdBrite lately
• Netklix: They claim to have ads on sites like Photobucket and Drudge Report. I just started with these guys this week so we'll see how they are. I'll report back later.
• WidgetBucks / Yieldsense: This looks like a great affiliate style ad network. (I haven't tried it yet but it might be next and definitely in my new blog.)
• Infolinks: An "In-Text" linking style ad network. This is one of those double underlined mini pop up bubble style ad systems. To keep your readers on your page. Paid as CPC (Cost Per Click)
• Clicksor: Both an "in-text" and full featured text and graphical banners as well as full pages and pop-unders.

So, check those out on your own time (after you get done reading The Horse... of course!) and leave me a comment if you think these suck or you find any new ones that I might be interested in.

Next time: SEO (Search Engine Optimization) and why you should care...