When is the Good Time to Place Ads on Your Blog?

[watdawat]

Is there a right time to put ads on your blog? How would you handle the transition from no ads to with ads?

Thanks
Wat da Wat

[Inhibitor]

Ask any five bloggers this question, and you'll probably get a minimum of seventeen answers.

There are two main schools of thought on this:

1. When you blog becomes "established". This means once your blog has been active for a reasonable length of time, and your daily uniques and feed subscriber numbers reach a decent level. What's "decent"? That's the biggest part that's up for debate, and there is no hard and fast rule of thumb to use.

2. When you launch your blog. This school of thought believes that, if you start your blog with ads, you then avoid the "jarring" sudden addition of ads at a later date. My thought on this is, if you've built regular readers by posting consistent, frequent quality content (i.e., they're coming for the content), then the addition of ads won't run anyone off.

Personally, on LagORama, I started with no ads whatsoever, then started adding them about three months later. There was no number of uniques or subscribers I used as a benchmark, I did it when it "felt right".

[thenetfool]

When you feel your blog site is sufficient enough that users would consider offering a toll before viewing... that is when you should be putting ads on.

Hope this helped, its really a judgement call

[Katalina]

I think the best time to put ads on your site is when you have more content than ads!
I put ads on my blogs as soon as I had a few posts. I wanted to make sure I had a blog with ads, not ads with blog posts! (If you know what I mean!)

[infodoorway]

I think it also depends on what type of "ads" as well. Banner advertisers, text links and such should be fine as soon as you receive traffic. I also wouldn't be against putting up mostly image based ads to start. I wouldn't overwhelm a new site with contextual ads though as many might see it as a "made for adsense" style page and leave too quickly.

[watdawat]

Interesting suggestions infodoorway, I thought contextual ads or text link ads were less conspicuous than banner ads...

Wat da Wat

[infodoorway]

Originally Posted by watdawat

Interesting suggestions infodoorway, I thought contextual ads or text link ads were less conspicuous than banner ads...

Wat da Wat

Well, I'm just looking at it from my view of being a reader when I visit other blogs. If I see words underlined, adbrite, YPN or Adsense - I get sort of blinded to them. I might not notice as much if it were an image based advertisement blending into the site. Maybe I'm jaded as a webmaster and it's different for an "everyday user". I do think text link ads are fine from the get go though.

[BookCalendar]

When the items you are selling are related to what you are blogging about. If you are blogging about knitting selling yarn and hooks might work, or if you are blogging about art, an etsy store might work. Or if you are reviewing a book, an embedded image from the book from Amazon might work. Please sell stuff related to what you are talking about.:lurk-2:

[watdawat]

Targeted ads are definitely the way to go.

[Bloggeries]

To add on what others have said a good rule of thumb is in the beginning if you've spent more time on your ads then you have on your content then you definitely should reconsider your ads and spend some time on your content...