How not to?

Intelligent placement of ads is an art and you should learn this art fast if you want to monetise your blog. You have read numerous articles about placing ads intelligently but have you ever read before about placing ads badly? No! Then, are you interested? Read on.

Content between Ads!
Place the content between lot of ads. This is the most common mistake people do. Consider a new blogger, excited about some money from his blog, he places ads all over the blog to discover that instead of any earnings, his traffic has gone down. People will never come back again if they do not find some useful content. Ads can prove a content killer if there are more ads than the content. Placement of content should be clear before you place ads. The content should be in " the first fold " that is above the half part of screen. Never make people scroll to read the title. However, this is not a thumb rule. If the page title/header is something big with a picture, content may go down as on this blog. Its not like I have not learnt this lesson. At the start, I had placed a lot of ads. The result was very less average time on site. Now it has increased by 200% after removing the excess ads.

No Ads on top
An ad top can get some good click through rate to you. If you are thinking this, shame on you. Ads like are 760 X 90 and 480 X 60 are not OK. Go ahead and place a big rectangle ad on the top. It will drive people away from site for sure. Try to place a small ad or adsense for search if you are registered with adsense at top. Link units are best for top. They do not take much space and as they present a page full of related ads, probability of a reader clicking there is pretty good.

Place one at bottom of a long page
It consists of two steps. First prepare a long web page. Second, place a contextual ad at the bottom. Remember, an ad the end of a long page is equal to no ad at all. Try to keep the page short. First, it will decrease the load time for your page although that does not matter much in this Broadband age, and second, it will give you some extra ad space at the bottom and this can increase the click through rate as reader will see the ad after the content and if he finds something interesting about the content there, he will click.