Is it possible to add banner advertising to your blog? Is it worth it? Should you or are they a waste of resources? I take a look at the possibilities and the effects.

Can you use a banner advertisement on your blog to generate an income? By that we mean can you use one to increase your income? There’s a big difference between something that adds to the total income you make and something that makes an income itself, but costs you more visitors and income from elsewhere.

Free blogs
So, can you add a banner advertisement to your blog? Of course you can, usually! If you are some free services, such as WordPress.com (but not the WordPress.org that you host for yourself) then such forms of advertising are banned, so the answer is “No” and the debate ends here!

Other blogs
But for other systems you are allowed to add banners, either in the sidebar, the footer or within the actual post. However, do you really want to?

At first the answer must be “Yes!” and there is a chance of earning an income, whether from an advertiser’s payments of from affiliate payments. But now look deeper into this and whether they are actually effective. That is, whether you are actually making a profit. If you use that space for a banner advert, what are the effects?

Too much is never good!
Well for a start, too much advertising around the page is going to put people off reading your blog. It makes the blog look like you are just interested in your readers for what they can do for you – earn you money. This makes them less likely to subscribe to your RSS feeds and newsletters and less likely to trust your writing and come back.

Using valuable space.
It is also taking up valuable space. To get the best from a banner advert you want it high up on the side bar – so that plenty of people can see it and click on it. But this will mean that you have to shove the important pieces of navigation further down the page. These are the navigation elements that will be used by readers to come back again or find more to read now, such as most popular posts lists, RSS feeds, ebooks as incentives to subscribe and so on. By having the banner advert above these elements, your readers are likely to explore your blog less now and in the future.

Reducing the value of other advertising
Lastly, if you are wanting to take part in sponsored posting then the value of these is reduced because of the other advertising on the page. An advertiser is less likely to pay you for an advert if you are also showing competing adverts on the same page.

The answer?
For my own blogs, I prefer to just include any banner adverts where they are relevant in key posts. For an affiliate product, if I want site wide coverage I will create a key post, link to that from the navigation and put the banner link into the post itself.

But yes, you can quite easily use a banner advertisement on your blog, at potentially the cost of reducing your readership and advertising from other sources. It is up to you what works best.

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