Many bloggers make a living with their blogs. Making money off ones blog is a great way to bring in extra dollars and to get paid to do what you love. If you are monetizing site please be smart about how your ads display. I worked for a newspaper in their classified advertising department and I understand about advertising being the life blood of many sites. Most blogs need a lot of ads to make money after expenses. Layout of your site and template selection is important. The important question is, what do you do to get all your sponsors on your site?

Some ads are well placed and do not interfere with the content of the site which is why you go to a site in the first place. However some blogs make you wade through a maze of ads to get to the good stuff, don’t do that. User experience is important. Never use a pop-up ad or a banner ad because those are so 2000. Ads that overlay on ones content can be nuisance too. Sidebar ads or perhaps one smallish ad at the top would work best.

Some computers have a hard time with lots of ads especially animated ones and video embedded. There is also connectivity and speed issues too. Users in some areas have a bandwidth cap so keeping that in mind is a best practice.

I don’t know everything about web advertising however I do know about using a site and as a end user its important to get to the content quickly and get on with the other things I need to do. There are some ads that inform me of new things I didn’t know about. Other ads just lead to other sites with more ads and that isn’t fun.

(This post was an exercise for me to write something different. Your feedback is appreciated.)