Are banners and ads on your site generating no clicks or in other words your click through rate is too low?
There was a time when you could monetize a blog with adsense even it has not much traffic but now because of immense competition in almost all niches it is hard to start monetizing a blog through ads without thousands of unique visitors to your blog.
Bloggers have turned themselves to affiliate marketing and started to monetize their blogs with affiliate offers and promotions.this has worked great and to this day it is a great way to make money through blogging.
The typical approach to affiliate marketing for bloggers is to fill their blog’s sidebars down to the throat with affiliate ads and banners.Inserting ads inside blog posts,making it hard for your readers to read your content which in these cases content itself is also not good.
Now in 2022 these tactics don’t work and if you look at your own stats you will find that banners are the lowest drivers of clicks and if they are driving some clicks then those blogs are high trafficked blogs receiving hundreds of thousands visits per month.
This phenomena is known as the banner blindness and if you are using banners on your blog then chances are that instead of benefiting you they may be hurting you.
Let me ask you a question. When did you clicked a banner image on a blog’s sidebar?
I know that i haven’t for a long time because they don’t attract me anymore. They are common now and if a blog’s sidebar is full of banners i feel frustrated. Having 2 to 3 banners is reasonable and that makes sense but cluttering a sidebar with banners is not a good practice and that throws your hard earned visitors away from your blog. Doesn’t it?
So as an alternative to the banner blindness,i present you with these 6 tips on avoiding banners and increase your blog revenue at the same time.
1. Implement Hello Bar increase blog revenue
Hello bar is being used by top internet marketing blogs these days including Quicksprout (Neil patel is the founder of Quicksprout and Hello bar as well), Mixergy, Ramit Sethi and lots of other blogs.
With the Hello bar you can add a notification bar at the top of every page on your site featuring your most important part of the site.You may have a landing page for a product that you are trying to sell then you can drive traffic to that page using Hello bar.
The reason hello bar works great is that it looks beautiful and catches the attention of the visitor on your blog without annoying them,notice i wrote annoying bold?It’s because that is exactly what we are trying not to do.
We are trying to keep our hard earned visitors and using those visitors for our best interests.
We cannot do this by cluttering sidebar with banners and ads.
2. Sticky Custom Widgets
This also is a great way to increase the odds of getting more clicks to a page you want.
You may have seen these on many blogs. You set 2 to 3 widgets on your sidebar and make them sticky so when someone scrolls down the page the widget also goes down along the page.
This is a screenshot of problogger using this technique. As i said, you can use 1 or 2 banners but don’t just fill your sidebar with banners.
You can easily create sticky widgets using a plugin called Fixed Widget and Sticky Elements which you can download for free from WordPress plugin repository. Stick your 2 or 3 most important sidebar elements so they will be visible to every one at any place even your visitor is in the comments area.
3. After Post Call To Actions
This one is yet another very powerful way to drive traffic to your important pages like Landing pages etc.
Most bloggers throw some affiliate banners at the end of their posts and only a handful of bloggers put attracting option forms for the reader to subscribe to their mailing list.
According to me the second option is the best but bloggers can use both as you can put a nice call to action and an optin form both to increase your exposure.
You can see an example of after post option form at the end of this post (and subscribe for blog updates as well). I am not using any other form of call to action right now but i am planning to do so.
That kind of banner does not annoys anyone and ultimately drives more clicks then a sidebar banner.
So consider using a banner or an option form after your posts or may be both.
4. Drop Links In Content
This one shouldn’t come as surprise to you because you would already be doing it.
Whenever appropriate, drop a link or two inside your articles and eventually overtime these links will benefit you.If these are affiliate links they will bring you affiliate sales and in case you have your own products you will be making your own sales.
Be careful though,Inserting dozens of links in your posts can actually hurt the on-page SEO of your site and Google may consider the page as a spam so don’t overuse affiliate links. MAX 2 or 3 are good.
5 . Create Your Own Custom Banners
If you are an affiliate who sell other peoples products then the banners you use on your site probably created by the owner of the product.
There is nothing wrong in using those banners except the fact that those same banners are being used by all affiliates of that particular product. Think about it,when someone sees a banner on dozens of places then they already know about that and if they will see it again they won’t click on it.
A simple solution is that you should create your own banners for your affiliate offers. A simple banner would do the work and you can easily create a simple banner in Photoshop or Gimp (a free alternative to Photoshop).
This way you can easily be different than the rest.
6. Did You Know (Bonus Tip)
I have seen it many times and i am sure you would have seen it too.
Banners or headlines that contain the word “Did You Know” attract our eyes and we immediately want to know that what is that we don’t know. I have discovered that using this word in your call to actions and your own banners will increase the click through rate and ultimately increase your blog’s revenue.
Conclusion
Even though banners are still working but as i said above that the click through rate of banners is so low especially those which everyone is using e.g. affiliate banners which everyone uses. Some banners perform better than others but one thing is for sure that you should never clutter your blog with banners.
So what do you think about banner blindness and how it can affect your blog? Let’s talk about it in the comments below. Also share it on Facebook, tweet it, and anywhere else you want to share.
What other ways do you know to increase your blog’s revenue?
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