How Do I Put Ads On My Blog?

As advertisers looking to target blog readers, we were often asked by bloggers, “How do I  put ads on my blog?”  We’ll, that’s why we created AdPlugg.

As the founder or co-founder of several different sites, I’ve found that almost always there comes a time when you start looking into advertising.  Advertising online comes in a variety of different forms and is available through a number of different sources.  As a co-founder of Seven Hopes United, we were on the advertiser end (rather than the publisher/blogger end).  We started out trying mainstream online advertising solutions from Google AdWords (lots of $) to Facebook ads (a little less $).  We ran these ads for quite a while with mostly unknown results.  After dropping thousands of dollars, we decided to put time and money into setting up tracking for these ads.  What we discovered was, the ads weren’t working.

As avid blog readers, we realized that we were regularly reading blogs that were relevant to us and what we are interested in.  What if we could put ads on blogs that had readers that would be interested in our site and our products?  We set out to find blogs like this and were amazed at the number of potential blogs that we thought might work.  There was everything from green wedding blogs to green shopping blogs to fair trade blogs.  All of these blogs had already captured what we were looking for: people who might be interested in buying what our store sold, fair trade gifts!

What we were disappointed to find out was how few of these blogs had a reasonable system for us to use to advertise on their blog.  Some sites would sell us an ad spot on their blog but couldn’t offer us any easy way to update it.  None of them had any way to schedule ads to run at certain times.  It took forever to set up an ad on a blog and then they provided no way to track whether or not it was working.  This was incredible to us as for most blogs, advertising is their primary and often only way of supporting their blog.

While poor management capabilities and total lack of tracking was certainly a common theme, it was still better than the response of some blogs: “how do I put ads on my blog?”.  Any time we heard this, it would certainly be discouraging, but many of these blogs had a high readership and were our perfect target market!  Myself having a background in software development thought it would be easy enough for me to get into their site and put up an ad but how could this work on an ongoing basis?  There still would be no tracking and I would need to retain access in order to update the ad!

In addition, we scoured the internet but were unable to find any easy (non-technical) solutions for blog advertising.

However, we found that when we were able to get an ad placed on a blog, it was extremely effective (though this was tough to track, more on how we did it in another post).  With the knowledge that our blog ads were outperforming everything else, we of course ramped up our spending on blog advertising.  What we struggled to do was to ramp up our reach.  There were just two many obstacles in the way of creating a broad reaching blog advertising campaign.

That’s why we decided to create AdPlugg.  After a large amount of development, we now have a simple answer when someone asks us, “how do i put ads on my blog?” Well, use AdPlugg of course!

We hope that adplugg will create a win-win for bloggers and advertisers.  Bloggers can make money to support their blog and advertisers can get effective advertising that is easy to manage and track.

We plan on continuing to add features to make the entire vision a reality.  Please try out our blog advertising solution and let us know what you think!

If your site runs on WordPress, you can get started even faster by using our new Ad Plugin for WordPress.