Yes! Ads have been removed completely. Everybody wants to earn money, and who doesn’t? But do you think blogging is one of the easiest methods to make money online by selling ads? I don’t think so. In fact, it is the toughest thing to do. It requires a lot of hard work, dedication, original content, a large number of articles, a huge number of readers or email subscribers. You have to spend time, energy and money just like an investment for your first business.
Your blog won’t work if you just register a good domain name, write 10-20 posts on different topics, get the approval from Adsense or any other ad networks and inject ad slots next to your article content, sidebar, top of your page or even in the footer section. It’s a big no and it doesn’t work like this way.
That’s why it only works with 10% bloggers around the world. I will talk about some of the important factors about “what to do” & “what not to” in blogging later on. Today, I am going to share why I have removed all ad units, related plugins and script files from my blog.
Good knowledge about affiliate marketing, but this is not the time.
I wanted to try out various ad modules after seeing the message “Ads by Google” on most of the popular blogs. It was not because of the minimization standpoint than curiosity. Though it was nothing to do with design strategy or thinking either. The only thing I wanted to figure out was…
- How does one go about ad insertion solutions?
- What is an affiliate program that works with referral marketing & how does it function?
- What is an ad network?
- What are publishers & advertisers?
I tried some of the ad networks including AdSmart, BurstMedia, AdSense, Commision Junction, AmazonAssociates to Flipkart affiliate programs on my blog just to experiment. Thanks to Amit Agarwal‘s article via Labnol where he explained how to integrate Adsense on responsive website as my site was upgraded from TwentyEleven WordPress Theme having fixed dimension to TwentyThirteen having responsive layout. It solved one of the problems when it comes to the overall experience for smartphone users. However, “It’s a good learning curve but this is not the right time to incorporate rather than writing quality articles,” I concluded.
Reading Content than Viewing Ads?
It was one of the remaining 4 reasons for hiding ad slots. Why most of the engagements are now on both Twitter and Google+? Yes, ad free network. Less ads, Less distraction. Our mind gets distracted with so many activities those are completely useless. For example, when you search for “publishers,” the Google results would bring up a list of valuable suggestions related to this keyword such as
- Publishers in local business
- Publishing houses within 2 miles
- Companies having this keyword as part of their website title.
- or else you will see News for Publishers
So basically “you look for something and land up somewhere else” is what I am talking about here. Similarly, visitors come to blog to read. It’s quite annoying for my friends and regular readers when they get distracted by looking at those ads, which are out of context.
Focus on writing rather than Ad Selling
Writing design articles was my major intention behind making this blog. In fact, as you know that keeping a journal about personal stuff is much easier than substantial content that is more useful. I spent a lot of time after implementing these ads. “I could have spent the same time on writing or editing my upcoming posts which are still lying on Evernote,” I realized my priority.
Site Speed is More important than Advertisements
If content is the king then speed is one of key ingredients when it comes to display content much quicker. Rather than switching to a premium and faster WordPress framework like Genesis, I thought of adding relevant plugins to secure & optimize all the pages for the time being.
As you know writing is easy but not when it comes to editing a copy for multiple times. Similarly, creating a WordPress site is easy but not in case of managing & monitoring. I came to know that some of the plugins are taking longer time to load via the wonderful P3 WordPress plugin. To maintain an optimum speed, I got rid of those unnecessary plugins including those java scripts, which were associated with different Ad Networks.
Thanks to QuickSprout, Pingdom, GTmetrix & Page Speed to view my website statistics in realtime and also showed me how to increase the site performance.
Finally, It doesn’t go with my Blog
I am a designer and I do care when it comes to the overall design consistency of my blog. I spent a lot of time tweaking the existing theme including the title tag, font size, colors, forms, column width to other elements on my page via css style sheet.
However, the entire look of my site was a disaster after having no control over such Ad blocks. For instance, you can’t just customize your Google Adsense slot rather than use one of the performing ad sizes such as 200×250, 336×280, 728×90, etc. Even if you can manage the sizes, you have no control over the image/ text ads when it comes to the quality & consistency.
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