I have come to realise that I cannot do without an ad server. I recently understood what an ad server is. Wikipedia, the ever-handy online encyclopedia, tells me it is a "...technology and service that places advertisements on web sites." Simple! That is all it is.
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| One of the many ads on my site |
Well, the answer is that as I delved more and more into blogging; I came to subscribe to several ad networks for placement on my blogs. In the end, I got subscribed to several.
The thing is I wanted to maximise my earnings - please don't get me wrong here, I am not greedy. Certainly not! Like I pointed out before, I simply wanted to convert as many of my traffic I possibly can into earnings.
Anyways, because of the many number of ads I have to place from the many ad networks, I realised they would all look crammed up together. So I started to look for a solution to this peculiar problem of mine. Lo and behold, I stumbled unto the 'ad server.'
FACT
Over time, I have come to understand that in order to make an appreciable online income, I need thousands of page views and/or impressions. With such, I realised that even networks (names withheld) I did not want on my site because they offered 'pittance' turned profitable.
The big names like the facebooks, the mashables and others like them make millions and millions of page views and impressions daily. Not so with small time publishers like me. I had initially struggled with tens, and much later with a few hundreds of impressions on my most successful blog. Now, I have to publish daily to keep the page views around two thousand daily views/impressions. This has not been easy for me.
In summary, with increasing page views, the daily average earnings increase.
Caveat:
It is important not to use artificial means to inflate your page views, whether manually or by use of bots or any other automated means. Any of these ways is criminal as it 'literally' robs advertisers of their hard-earned money.
FACT
Of all the ad networks, Google adsense is the best to work with. You are probably wondering why I don't simply apply to adsense instead of to many other ad networks. Well, it takes me back to my reason above - maximising my earnings.
Besides, being accepted into the adsense family is no ordinary feat. For starters, your blog must be at least 6 months old. And your content cannot even have the semblance of having been copied from somewhere else. If it does, then you will be having issues with the adsense team.
Caveat:
To be accepted as an adsense publisher, carefully go through these documents (see links below), and do NOT traverse any of them:
Getting kicked out of adsense is really easy (and I get the feeling the adsense team enjoys getting publishers picked out but I may be wrong here - it's just a feeling, right?), but getting back into adsense is quite an extremely tedious process. So do not even tempt the team to kick you out in the first place.
Back to our topic
Coming back to our topic, I really think I need an ad server to simplify things up for me. From the little I have learned so far, Google's DoubleClick for Publishers, DFP; appears to stand out although there are many others out there.
Over the next few weeks, I will be surfing the Internet a lot to get some good information on 'which', 'what' and 'where' the best ad servers can be found. Armed with this, I hope to subscribe and start serving ads via that server on my blogs. I promise to share all the knowledge here.
Notice that I did not add 'how much' above, because I am intent on using a good but FREE ad server. If you know any, please leave me a word below.
Thanks for stopping by!
Good write-up. I agree that the adsense team seems to delight in kicking publishers out of the adsense program.
ReplyDeleteI was just recently kicked out for no apparent reason last week despite having tried all my best to keep up with their Webmaster Guidelines and Best Practices